Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Making Segregation Illegal
The dramatic civil rights and segregation battles that set the
tone for much of the 1960s didn’t just happen. Several events
preceded those battles, perhaps none more important than the
1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education. That
decision overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson edict, which set
the precedent for legalized segregation. Segregation precedent
prior to Brown v. Board of Education Before the 1950s, most
court cases challenging segregated schooling targeted higher
education. Longtime Howard Law School dean Charles Hamilton
Houston, the first African American editor of the Harvard Law
Review, crafted the brilliant strategy to challenge Jim Crow’s
separate but equal mandate in graduate education in the 1930s
when he led the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Consequently, the
NAACP legal team, which had tried many of the key segregation
cases since 1935, gained momentum with these 1950 landmark
decisions: Sweatt v. Painter: Den