# data[].attributes.body
On Monday, we will be starting our group project over the Civil Rights Movement. Group members will be posted on the projector when you come into class. There will be four groups, each assigned a different topic as follows:

Group 1 - Landmark Court Cases
Group 2 - Important People
Group 3 - Important Groups
Group 4 - Important Events

Each group will be tasked with creating a presentation that thoroughly covers the various court cases, people, groups, and events that will be given to you. For each, you will need to provide when, where, who, and the significance to the Civil Rights Movement. Visuals such as photographs, videos, maps, and charts will need to be included as well. All members must participate in the creation of and presentation of your project. You will have the entire class period to complete your presentation and will present them on Wednesday 3/29 to the rest of the class.

# data[].attributes.headline
Opinion: What was the most significant victory of the Civil Rights Movement?

# data[].attributes.subject
Opinion: What was the most significant victory of the Civil Rights Movement?

# data[].attributes.body
Read the article and discuss what you believe to be the most important victory of the Civil Rights Movement.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Peter Pettus/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ppmsca-08102)

On May 4, 1961, a group of seven African Americans and six whites left Washington, D.C., on the first Freedom Ride in two buses bound for New Orleans. They were hoping to provoke the federal government into enforcing the 1960 Supreme Court ruling in Boynton v. Virginia, which forbade "unjust discrimination," including in bus terminals, restrooms, and other facilities associated with interstate travel.

As the Freedom Riders traveled into the Deep South, the white riders would use facilities designated for Blacks and vice versa. On May 14, in Alabama, one bus was firebombed and the riders were beaten. The second bus, as it arrived in Birmingham, was also attacked. Although law enforcement was late in responding, another set of Freedom Riders were undeterred and set out from Nashville to Birmingham, where, at the behest of Robert F. Kennedy, then the U.S. attorney general, they were able to secure a new bus and protection from the State Highway Patrol to Montgomery, where the riders were again beaten. National Guard support was provided when 27 Freedom Riders continued on to Jackson, Mississippi, only to be arrested and jailed. On May 29 President John F. Kennedy ordered the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce even stricter guidelines banning segregation in interstate travel. Still, Freedom Riders continued to travel by public transportation in the South until the dictate took effect in September.

The history of the American civil rights movement is full of stories of such perseverance in the face of violence and stiff odds and successes coming at the end of long struggles. The following are 10 other defining moments in American civil rights.
This list was adapted from a post that originally appeared on the Britannica Blog.

Freeing the Slaves

While some continue to debate whether the Civil War was fought over slavery, slavery was central to the war, and the fate of the millions of enslaved people was in the balance throughout the war. On January 1, 1863, however, the future became clear, as President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves in the Confederate states in rebellion against the Union.

The Emancipation Proclamation did more than lift the war to the level of a crusade for human freedom. It brought some substantial practical results, because it allowed the Union to recruit Black soldiers. To this invitation to join the army, Blacks responded in considerable numbers, nearly 180,000 of them enlisting during the remainder of the war. By August 26, 1863, Lincoln could report, in a letter to James C. Conkling, that "the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion." Two months before the war ended-in February 1865-Lincoln told portrait painter Francis B. Carpenter that the Emancipation Proclamation was "the central act of my administration, and the greatest event of the nineteenth century."

13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments Ratified

Although full political freedom for African Americans would not come until the 1960s, in the 1860s the Constitution was fundamentally altered to eliminate discrimination that had been enshrined in the founding document. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) officially abolished slavery, the Fourteenth (1868) granted citizenship rights to former slaves, and the Fifteenth (1870) bestowed voting rights. With their newfound rights, several African Americans were elected to political office at the national level. Hiram Revels of Mississippi even took the former seat of Confederate president Jefferson Davis in the U.S. Senate. Soon, however, particularly in Southern states, a Jim Crow system would be implemented that undermined these rights.

Breaking Baseball's Color Barrier

Although Blacks had long excelled at baseball in the Negro leagues, no Major League Baseball team had ever signed a Black player to play professional ball with white players. That changed in the mid-1940s, when Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, hatched a plan to sign an African American player. In October 1945 Rickey signed Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs, and Robinson played a season with the minor league Montreal Royals. Then, in 1947, Robinson was promoted to the major league club, becoming the first Black player in the major leagues in 63 years. Robinson won the National League Rookie of the Year award in 1947 and became, in 1949, the league's MVP. Still, he endured invectives and even had bottles hurled at him, and some of his teammates openly protested having to play with him. In some cities, Robinson couldn't even stay in the same hotel as his teammates or eat in the same restaurant. As he later recalled: "Plenty of times I wanted to haul off when somebody insulted me for the color of my skin, but I had to hold to myself. I knew I was kind of an experiment. The whole thing was bigger than me."

Integrating the Military

Blacks had always served in the American armed forces from the time of the American Revolution, and at that time Blacks and whites fought alongside one another. However, the integration of the 1770s was not repeated until the mid-20th century. In June 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt ended discrimination in the defense industry, but the armed services remained segregated. In October 1947 the President's Committee on Civil Rights proposed to end segregation in the armed services. Facing resistance from Southern senators and a potential filibuster, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, abolishing once and for all racial segregation in the U.S. military.

Integrating the Schools ("With All Deliberate Speed")

No story of the civil rights movement can be told without Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. In 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court had issued its "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which stipulated that segregation was permissible (in practice, separate was emphasized rather than equal). Particularly in the South (but not only), schools were racially segregated, and schools catering to African American students were generally inferior. On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously (9-0) that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Arguing for the plaintiffs (the suits were filed by the NAACP on behalf of African American students) was Thurgood Marshall, who would go on to become the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. In a subsequent opinion on the question of relief, commonly referred to as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (II), argued April 11-14, 1955, and decided on May 31 of that year, Chief Justice Earl Warren ordered the district courts and local school authorities to take appropriate steps to integrate public schools in their jurisdictions "with all deliberate speed." Public schools in Southern states, however, remained almost completely segregated until the late 1960s.

Standing Up by Sitting Down (Part I)

Rosa Parks is often called the "mother of the civil rights movement" for her role in sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56. On December 1, 1955, she was arrested for refusing to give her bus seat to a white man, a violation of the city's racial segregation ordinances. Under the aegis of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the leadership of the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr., a boycott of the municipal bus company was begun on December 5. The boycott would last until December 21, 1956, with total victory for the protesters, following the Supreme Court's upholding (in November) of a lower court's decision declaring Montgomery's segregated seating unconstitutional. Parks went on to receive numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1996) and the Congressional Gold Medal (1999).

Standing Up by Sitting Down (Part II)

Although victories came in Supreme Court rulings on education and in seating on buses, not all segregation was wiped away easily, so on February 1, 1960, the " Greensboro Four," all students at North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, North Carolina, entered a Woolworth's store that had a dining area. They purchased items and then sat at the lunch counter-which was reserved for "whites only." The Greensboro Four politely requested service at the counter, remaining seated while their orders were refused by the waitstaff. The lunch counter manager contacted the police, but the local media had already been alerted. The police arrived, only to declare that they could do nothing because the four men were paying customers of the store and had not taken any provocative actions. The media response, however, was immediate. A photo of the Greensboro Four appeared in local newspapers, and the protest quickly expanded. The next day they returned to Woolworth's, this time with 20 other students, and the scene played out again over the following days, students sitting-in even on the sidewalk outside. The sit-ins spread throughout the country, and dining facilities throughout the South began to be integrated. Finally, in July 1960 the lunch counter at the Greensboro Woolworth's was serving Black patrons, providing a template for nonviolent resistance.

Marching for Jobs and Freedom

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., led an interracial peaceful assembly of more than 200,000 in the shadows of the Lincoln Memorial to demand equal justice for all citizens. The culmination of the March on Washington was King's inspiring "I Have a Dream" speech, in which he emphasized his faith that all men, someday, would be brothers. As King historian Clayborne Carson argues in his article on the civil rights movement for Britannica, King used the speech as "an opportunity to link black civil rights aspirations with traditional American political values. He insisted that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution comprised 'a promissory note' guaranteeing all Americans 'the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'"

Civil Rights, Finally

The trajectory since the 1940s had been toward full political equality for African Americans, but along the way there were setbacks as well as successes. Finally, on July 2, 1964, that goal was realized, as President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The law was intended to end discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin and has often been called the most important U.S. law on civil rights since Reconstruction (1865-77). Though near-universally supported today, the Civil Rights Act was a highly controversial issue in the United States as soon as it was proposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Although Kennedy was unable to secure passage of the bill in Congress, a stronger version was eventually passed with the urging of his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the bill into law on July 2, 1964, following one of the longest debates in Senate history. White groups opposed to integration with Blacks responded to the act with a significant backlash that took the form of protests, increased support for pro-segregation candidates for public office, and some racial violence. The constitutionality of the act was immediately challenged and was upheld by the Supreme Court in the test case Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S. (1964). The act gave federal law enforcement agencies the power to prevent racial discrimination in employment, voting, and the use of public facilities. The act was followed the next year by the Voting Rights Act, which aimed to ensure that African Americans could exercise their right to vote under the Fifteenth Amendment.

The Million Man March

Doug Mills/AP

Thirty-two years after King's March on Washington, Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, organized the Million Man March for Washington, D.C., to promote African American unity and values and to bring about a spiritual renewal that would instill a sense of personal responsibility in African American men for improving the condition of African Americans. Estimates of the number of marchers, most of whom were African American men, ranged from 400,000 to nearly 1.1 million, ranking it among the largest gatherings of its kind in American history. The event was directed by Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., the former head of the NAACP, and attracted many prominent African Americans, including Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, Cornel West, and Maya Angelou, though a number of African American leaders did not attend, including Mary Frances Berry, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and Representative John Lewis, the latter of whom saw Farrakhan's message as an effort to "resegregate America." It was reported that in response to the march some 1.7 million African American men registered to vote.

Peter Pettus/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ppmsca-08102)

On May 4, 1961, a group of seven African Americans and six whites left Washington, D.C., on the first Freedom Ride in two buses bound for New Orleans. They were hoping to provoke the federal government into enforcing the 1960 Supreme Court ruling in Boynton v. Virginia, which forbade "unjust discrimination," including in bus terminals, restrooms, and other facilities associated with interstate travel.

As the Freedom Riders traveled into the Deep South, the white riders would use facilities designated for Blacks and vice versa. On May 14, in Alabama, one bus was firebombed and the riders were beaten. The second bus, as it arrived in Birmingham, was also attacked. Although law enforcement was late in responding, another set of Freedom Riders were undeterred and set out from Nashville to Birmingham, where, at the behest of Robert F. Kennedy, then the U.S. attorney general, they were able to secure a new bus and protection from the State Highway Patrol to Montgomery, where the riders were again beaten. National Guard support was provided when 27 Freedom Riders continued on to Jackson, Mississippi, only to be arrested and jailed. On May 29 President John F. Kennedy ordered the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce even stricter guidelines banning segregation in interstate travel. Still, Freedom Riders continued to travel by public transportation in the South until the dictate took effect in September.

The history of the American civil rights movement is full of stories of such perseverance in the face of violence and stiff odds and successes coming at the end of long struggles. The following are 10 other defining moments in American civil rights.
This list was adapted from a post that originally appeared on the Britannica Blog.

Freeing the Slaves

While some continue to debate whether the Civil War was fought over slavery, slavery was central to the war, and the fate of the millions of enslaved people was in the balance throughout the war. On January 1, 1863, however, the future became clear, as President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves in the Confederate states in rebellion against the Union.

The Emancipation Proclamation did more than lift the war to the level of a crusade for human freedom. It brought some substantial practical results, because it allowed the Union to recruit Black soldiers. To this invitation to join the army, Blacks responded in considerable numbers, nearly 180,000 of them enlisting during the remainder of the war. By August 26, 1863, Lincoln could report, in a letter to James C. Conkling, that "the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion." Two months before the war ended-in February 1865-Lincoln told portrait painter Francis B. Carpenter that the Emancipation Proclamation was "the central act of my administration, and the greatest event of the nineteenth century."

13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments Ratified

Although full political freedom for African Americans would not come until the 1960s, in the 1860s the Constitution was fundamentally altered to eliminate discrimination that had been enshrined in the founding document. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) officially abolished slavery, the Fourteenth (1868) granted citizenship rights to former slaves, and the Fifteenth (1870) bestowed voting rights. With their newfound rights, several African Americans were elected to political office at the national level. Hiram Revels of Mississippi even took the former seat of Confederate president Jefferson Davis in the U.S. Senate. Soon, however, particularly in Southern states, a Jim Crow system would be implemented that undermined these rights.

Breaking Baseball's Color Barrier

Although Blacks had long excelled at baseball in the Negro leagues, no Major League Baseball team had ever signed a Black player to play professional ball with white players. That changed in the mid-1940s, when Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, hatched a plan to sign an African American player. In October 1945 Rickey signed Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs, and Robinson played a season with the minor league Montreal Royals. Then, in 1947, Robinson was promoted to the major league club, becoming the first Black player in the major leagues in 63 years. Robinson won the National League Rookie of the Year award in 1947 and became, in 1949, the league's MVP. Still, he endured invectives and even had bottles hurled at him, and some of his teammates openly protested having to play with him. In some cities, Robinson couldn't even stay in the same hotel as his teammates or eat in the same restaurant. As he later recalled: "Plenty of times I wanted to haul off when somebody insulted me for the color of my skin, but I had to hold to myself. I knew I was kind of an experiment. The whole thing was bigger than me."

Integrating the Military

Blacks had always served in the American armed forces from the time of the American Revolution, and at that time Blacks and whites fought alongside one another. However, the integration of the 1770s was not repeated until the mid-20th century. In June 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt ended discrimination in the defense industry, but the armed services remained segregated. In October 1947 the President's Committee on Civil Rights proposed to end segregation in the armed services. Facing resistance from Southern senators and a potential filibuster, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, abolishing once and for all racial segregation in the U.S. military.

Integrating the Schools ("With All Deliberate Speed")

No story of the civil rights movement can be told without Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. In 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court had issued its "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which stipulated that segregation was permissible (in practice, separate was emphasized rather than equal). Particularly in the South (but not only), schools were racially segregated, and schools catering to African American students were generally inferior. On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously (9-0) that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Arguing for the plaintiffs (the suits were filed by the NAACP on behalf of African American students) was Thurgood Marshall, who would go on to become the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. In a subsequent opinion on the question of relief, commonly referred to as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (II), argued April 11-14, 1955, and decided on May 31 of that year, Chief Justice Earl Warren ordered the district courts and local school authorities to take appropriate steps to integrate public schools in their jurisdictions "with all deliberate speed." Public schools in Southern states, however, remained almost completely segregated until the late 1960s.

Standing Up by Sitting Down (Part I)

Rosa Parks is often called the "mother of the civil rights movement" for her role in sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56. On December 1, 1955, she was arrested for refusing to give her bus seat to a white man, a violation of the city's racial segregation ordinances. Under the aegis of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the leadership of the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr., a boycott of the municipal bus company was begun on December 5. The boycott would last until December 21, 1956, with total victory for the protesters, following the Supreme Court's upholding (in November) of a lower court's decision declaring Montgomery's segregated seating unconstitutional. Parks went on to receive numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1996) and the Congressional Gold Medal (1999).

Standing Up by Sitting Down (Part II)

Although victories came in Supreme Court rulings on education and in seating on buses, not all segregation was wiped away easily, so on February 1, 1960, the " Greensboro Four," all students at North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, North Carolina, entered a Woolworth's store that had a dining area. They purchased items and then sat at the lunch counter-which was reserved for "whites only." The Greensboro Four politely requested service at the counter, remaining seated while their orders were refused by the waitstaff. The lunch counter manager contacted the police, but the local media had already been alerted. The police arrived, only to declare that they could do nothing because the four men were paying customers of the store and had not taken any provocative actions. The media response, however, was immediate. A photo of the Greensboro Four appeared in local newspapers, and the protest quickly expanded. The next day they returned to Woolworth's, this time with 20 other students, and the scene played out again over the following days, students sitting-in even on the sidewalk outside. The sit-ins spread throughout the country, and dining facilities throughout the South began to be integrated. Finally, in July 1960 the lunch counter at the Greensboro Woolworth's was serving Black patrons, providing a template for nonviolent resistance.

Marching for Jobs and Freedom

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., led an interracial peaceful assembly of more than 200,000 in the shadows of the Lincoln Memorial to demand equal justice for all citizens. The culmination of the March on Washington was King's inspiring "I Have a Dream" speech, in which he emphasized his faith that all men, someday, would be brothers. As King historian Clayborne Carson argues in his article on the civil rights movement for Britannica, King used the speech as "an opportunity to link black civil rights aspirations with traditional American political values. He insisted that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution comprised 'a promissory note' guaranteeing all Americans 'the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'"

Civil Rights, Finally

The trajectory since the 1940s had been toward full political equality for African Americans, but along the way there were setbacks as well as successes. Finally, on July 2, 1964, that goal was realized, as President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The law was intended to end discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin and has often been called the most important U.S. law on civil rights since Reconstruction (1865-77). Though near-universally supported today, the Civil Rights Act was a highly controversial issue in the United States as soon as it was proposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Although Kennedy was unable to secure passage of the bill in Congress, a stronger version was eventually passed with the urging of his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the bill into law on July 2, 1964, following one of the longest debates in Senate history. White groups opposed to integration with Blacks responded to the act with a significant backlash that took the form of protests, increased support for pro-segregation candidates for public office, and some racial violence. The constitutionality of the act was immediately challenged and was upheld by the Supreme Court in the test case Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S. (1964). The act gave federal law enforcement agencies the power to prevent racial discrimination in employment, voting, and the use of public facilities. The act was followed the next year by the Voting Rights Act, which aimed to ensure that African Americans could exercise their right to vote under the Fifteenth Amendment.

The Million Man March

Doug Mills/AP

Thirty-two years after King's March on Washington, Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, organized the Million Man March for Washington, D.C., to promote African American unity and values and to bring about a spiritual renewal that would instill a sense of personal responsibility in African American men for improving the condition of African Americans. Estimates of the number of marchers, most of whom were African American men, ranged from 400,000 to nearly 1.1 million, ranking it among the largest gatherings of its kind in American history. The event was directed by Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., the former head of the NAACP, and attracted many prominent African Americans, including Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, Cornel West, and Maya Angelou, though a number of African American leaders did not attend, including Mary Frances Berry, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and Representative John Lewis, the latter of whom saw Farrakhan's message as an effort to "resegregate America." It was reported that in response to the march some 1.7 million African American men registered to vote.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Riding Freedom: 10 Milestones in U.S. Civil Rights History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On May 4, 1961, a group of seven African Americans and six whites left Washington, D.C., on the first Freedom Ride in two buses bound for New Orleans. They were hoping to provoke the federal government into enforcing the 1960 Supreme Court ruling in Boynton v.

# data[].attributes.headline
What impact did the March on Washington have on the Civil Rights Movement?

# data[].attributes.subject
What impact did the March on Washington have on the Civil Rights Movement?

# data[].attributes.body
Read the article and discuss the impact you believe the March on Washington had on the Civil Rights Movement as a whole.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
March on Washington - Date, Facts & Significance | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The March on Washington was a massive protest march that occurred in August 1963, when some 250,000 people gathered i…

# data[].attributes.body
This week we will be starting Unit 9. This unit covers the Civil Rights Movement including important people, court cases, and events. At the bell, take 5-10 minutes to read through the article of the day and answer the attached question. We will discuss the article and your answers before starting the lesson.

# data[].attributes.headline
How did Brown v. Board of Education spark the Civil Rights Movement?

# data[].attributes.subject
How did Brown v. Board of Education spark the Civil Rights Movement?

# data[].attributes.body
Read the article and discuss why you believe this court case ignited the Civil Rights Movement.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren issued the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education, ruling that racial segregation in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The upshot: Students of color in America would no longer be forced by law to attend traditionally under-resourced Black-only schools.

The decision marked a legal turning point for the American civil-rights movement. But it would take much more than a decree from the nation's highest court to change hearts, minds and two centuries of entrenched racism. Brown was initially met with inertia and, in most southern states, active resistance. More than half a century later, progress has been made, but the vision of Warren's court has not been fully realized.

The Supreme Court Rules 'Separate' Means Unequal

The landmark case began as five separate class-action lawsuits brought by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) on behalf of Black schoolchildren and their families in Kansas, South Carolina, Delaware, Virginia and Washington, D.C. The lead plaintiff, Oliver Brown, had filed suit against the Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas in 1951, after his daughter Linda was denied admission to a white elementary school.

Her all-Black school, Monroe Elementary, was fortunate-and unique-to be endowed with well-kept facilities, well-trained teachers and adequate materials. But the other four lawsuits embedded in the Brown case pointed to more common fundamental challenges. The case in Clarendon, South Carolina described school buildings as no more than dilapidated wooden shacks. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, the high school had no cafeteria, gym, nurse's office or teachers' restrooms, and overcrowding led to students being housed in an old school bus and tar-paper shacks.

Brown v. Board First to Rule Against Segregation Since Reconstruction Era

The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board marked a shining moment in the NAACP's decades-long campaign to combat school segregation. In declaring school segregation as unconstitutional, the Court overturned the longstanding "separate but equal" doctrine established nearly 60 years earlier in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In his opinion, Chief Justice Warren asserted public education was an essential right that deserved equal protection, stating unequivocally that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

Still, Thurgood Marshall, head of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund and lead lawyer from the plaintiffs, knew the fight was far from over-and that the high court's decision was only a first step in the long, complicated process of dismantling institutionalized racism. He warned his colleagues soon after the verdict came down: "The fight has just begun."

In 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously strikes down segregation in public schools, sparking the Civil Rights movement.

Brown v. Board Does Not Instantly Desegregate Schools

In its landmark ruling, the Supreme Court didn't specify exactly how to end school segregation, but rather asked to hear further arguments on the issue. The Court's timidity, combined with steadfast local resistance, meant that the bold Brown v. Board of Education ruling did little on the community level to achieve the goal of desegregation. Black students, to a large degree, still attended schools with substandard facilities, out-of-date textbooks and often no basic school supplies.

In a 1955 case known as Brown v. Board II, the Court gave much of the responsibility for the implementation of desegregation to local school authorities and lower courts, urging that the process proceed "with all deliberate speed." But many lower court judges in the South, who had been appointed by segregationist politicians, were emboldened to resist desegregation by the Court's lackluster enforcement of the Brown decision.

In Prince Edward County, where one of the five class-action suits behind Brown was filed, the Board of Supervisors refused to appropriate funds for the County School Board, choosing to shut down the public schools for five years rather than integrate them.

This backlash against the Court's verdict reached the highest levels of government: In 1956, 82 representatives and 19 senators endorsed a so-called "Southern Manifesto" in Congress, urging Southerners to use all "lawful means" at their disposal to resist the "chaos and confusion" that school desegregation would cause.

In 1964, a full decade after the decision, more than 98 percent of Black children in the South still attended segregated schools.

The Brown Ruling Becomes a Catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement

For the first time since the Reconstruction Era, the Court's ruling focused national attention on the subjugation of Black Americans. The result? The growth of the nascent civil-rights movement, which would doggedly challenge segregation and demand legal equality for Black families through boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides and voter-registration drives.

The Brown verdict inspired Southern Blacks to defy restrictive and punitive Jim Crow laws, however, the ruling also galvanized Southern whites in defense of segregation-including the infamous standoff at a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. Violence against civil-rights activists escalated, outraging many in the North and abroad, helping to speed up the passage of major civil-rights and voting-rights legislation by the mid-1960s.

Finally, in 1964, two provisions within the Civil Rights Act effectively gave the federal government the power to enforce school desegregation for the first time: The Justice Department could sue schools that refused to integrate, and the government could withhold funding from segregated schools. Within five years after the act took effect, nearly a third of Black children in the South attended integrated schools, and that figure reached as high as 90 percent by 1973.

Legacy and Impact of Brown v. Board

More than 60 years after the landmark ruling, assessing its impact remains a complicated endeavor. The Court's verdict fell short of initial hopes that it would end school segregation in America for good, and some argued that larger social and political forces within the nation played a far greater role in ending segregation.

As the Supreme Court has grown increasingly polarized along political lines, both conservative and liberal justices have claimed the legacy of Brown v. Board to argue different sides in the constitutional debate. In 2007, the Court ruled 5-4 against allowing public schools to take race into account in their admission policies in order to achieve or maintain integration.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, asserted: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." And in a dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the ruling "rewrites the history of one of this court's most important decisions."

Are Schools 'Separate But Equal' in the 21st Century?

School segregation remains in force all over America today, largely because many of the neighborhoods in which schools are still located are themselves segregated. Despite the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 and later judicial decisions making racial discrimination illegal, exclusionary economic-zoning laws still bar low-income and working-class Americans from many neighborhoods, which in many cases reduces their access to higher quality schools.

According to a 2014 report by Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute report, as of the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board verdict the typical Black student attended a school where only 29 percent of his or her fellow students were white, down from some 36 percent in 1980.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Brown v. Board of Education: The First Step in the Desegregation of America's Schools | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Supreme Court ruling was initially met with inertia and, in many states, active resistance.