The NAACP sought an injunction in federal district court preventing the Topeka school district from enforcing any school assignment program based on skin color. The case was heard in June 1951. NAACP witnesses argued that segregation in and of itself tacitly implied racial inferiority and, furthermore, that such systems could never be equal in any realistic way. The school board argued otherwise. "The request for an injunction put the court in a difficult decision. On the one hand, the judges agreed with the expert witnesses; in their decision, they wrote: "Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children.A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn." On the other hand, the precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson allowed separate but equal school systems for blacks and whites, and no Supreme Court ruling had overturned Plessy yet. Because of the precedent of Plessy, the court felt "compelled" to rule in favor of the Board of Education." [Cozzens, Brown v. Board].
Brown appealed to the Supreme Court which, after combining the case with other, similar ones, agreed to hear arguments in December 1952. After failing to come to a decision, they heard re-arguments in December 1953, requesting that both sides discuss circumstances surrounding the adoption of the 14th amendment, since that was the constitutional point at issue. "The re-argument shed very little additional light on the issue. The Court had to make its decision based not on whether or not the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment had desegregated schools in mind when they wrote the amendment in 1868, but based on whether or not desegregated schools deprived black children of equal protection of the law when the case was decided, in 1954." [ibid.] The court found for Brown. The court's decision reads, in part, "we conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place.
