Even though this case is always referred to as Brown v. Board of Education, the real title is Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. This would suggest that this case was about one person against the Topeka Kansas School Board, but this case actually involved several families in 4 states and the District of Columbia all contesting that school segregation violated the 14th Amendment, which required separate separations. but equal education. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay The students were separated, but the families said their education was definitely not equal. These cases did not make it to the lower courts and all went to the Supreme Court. When the Brown case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court consolidated them all into one case and named it Brown v. Topeka Board of Education . In 1951, Mr. Oliver Brown argued in A Kansas court that his 3rd grade African American daughter was not treated equally with white schoolchildren. Her main argument was about the distance her daughter had to travel to school rather than the quality of her education. He claimed that school segregation was unconstitutional because his daughter had to travel a significant distance just to catch a bus and get to school. it was much further from her house than a white school which was only 7 blocks from her house. He noted that this went against the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Kansas recognized that segregation was harmful to African American students, but maintained the separate but equal clause and ruled in favor of the Board of Education. To truly understand how Mr. Oliver Brown managed to get the Supreme Court to hear this case, one really has to go back six decades earlier, to the 1896 Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson. In that case, the Supreme Court declared that laws prohibiting African Americans from sharing the same transportation and other public places as whites were constitutional as long as those places were separate but equal. These laws were known as the “Jim Crow” laws and the “segregation laws.” but equal” lasted for the next 60 years until Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka. Fast forward to the early 1950s, when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began to challenge segregation in America and decided to make the case for Brown against Board of Education. Mr. Thurgood Marshall was an NAACP attorney who argued the case on behalf of the plaintiffs. He was so well-liked that 13 years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall as the first African-American justice to the United States Supreme Court. When the Supreme Court heard the case, the nine all-white, all-male justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, but Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson ruled that Plessy's verdict that upheld segregation had to be maintained. But in late 1953, an unexpected turn of events occurred and Vinson died before the case was decided. President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, which not only changed the potential outcome of this case, but literally started a civil rights movement in our country. Chief Justice Warren had a completely different opinion than Vinson and was able to win his case. in engineering a unanimous verdict against school segregation,.