According to U.S. Court Cases the segregation among whites and blacks was a legal law established for almost sixty years in the United States. However, Brown vs. The Board of Education was the turning point in race relations. Still, most of the conflict between whites and blacks would be in the south, because they where the largest racial minority. They were subject to laws and customs, which prevented from full participation in social life. As a matter of fact, many of the laws imposed on black were that of segregation in public schools (U.S. Court Cases 154). Yet, to understand the laws that were being questioned in the case of Brown vs. The Board of Education, one must look back to the beginning, to when laws were first set to limit the lives of African Americans.

with his colleagues on the Court (68).

Finally, on May 6, 1896, the Supreme Court delivered its verdict. With a vote of seven to one, the Court maintained Plessy's conviction. Henry Billings, Associate Justice stated that meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment was "undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law... but could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based on color." (22) He continued by stating that the segregation of the two races did not mean to imply that either race was inferior to the other in any way. Brown then stated that all laws should be followed and upheld "for the promotion for the public good, and not for the annoyance... or a particular class." However, he added that a law demanding the division of races on public railways is no "more obnoxious to the Fourteenth Amendment than that acts of Congress requiring separate schools for colored children in the District of Columbia." (22) Finally Brown concluded his opinion by stating: "If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane." (23)

In The Soul of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois' study of African American education he states: "The Negro colleges, founded, were inadequately equipped, illogically distributed, and varying efficiency and grade; the normal high schools were doing little more than common-school work, and the common schools were training but a third of the children who ought to be in them, and training these often too poorly." (Tackach 27)

When his daughter Linda was to enter the third grade in September, Brown took her to the whites-only school and tried to enroll her. Without any history of racial activism, Brown headed down the corridor to the principal's office. He was told that such an enrollment was impossible due to the segregation laws of Topeka, Kansas. Thereafter, Brown sought help from the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Kraft 110).

Marshall, with the help of his excellent assistants scrutinized previous Supreme Court decisions that might contribute as legal precedents in this case. Somehow, they needed to find a way to controvert the Supreme Court's ruling in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case. They had to influence the court into believing that the rulings on school desegregation handed down during the first decades of the twentieth century should never govern these recent cases. Marshall and his team would have to present the argument that the most recent school desegregation victories suggest that the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision was losing its legal and moral standing, especially when it dealt with public education (58).

Unfortunately, there was much uproar that was against the Supreme Court's decision. Some states refused to make any move toward integration. For example, Orval Faubua, governor of Arkansas called in the National Guard when several black children tried to attend a previously all white school in Little Rock. The children underwent a great deal of turmoil as white parents and others blocked the way for the black students.

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