Brown V. Board Of Ed

            In the Midwest town of Topeka, Kansas, a little girl named Linda Brown had to ride the bus five miles to school each day although a public school was located only four blocks away from her home. She met all the requirements to attend except one. Linda brown was black and black children were not allowed to go to white schools, her father, Oliver Brown asked McKinley Burnett, head of the Topeka branch of the NAACP for help. He was eager to help Brown, as it had long wanted to challenge segregation in public schools. The NAACP argued that segregated schools sent the message to black children that they were inferior to whites, therefore the schools were unequal, one of the expert witnesses, Dr. Hugh Speer testified that "if the colored children are denied the experience of associating with white children, then the colored child's curriculum is greatly curtailed and not equal under segregation." .
             The Board of Education's defense was that segregated schools simply prepared black children for the segregation they would face during adulthood. They argued that segregated schools were not necessarily harmful to black children; great African American such as Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver had overcome segregated schools to achieve what they did. The request for an injunction by the NAACP put the court in a difficult decision. The judges agreed with the expert witnesses that the segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. Because of the precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson allowing separate but equal school systems for blacks and whites and no Supreme Court ruling had overturned Plessy yet, the court felt compelled to rule in favor of the Board of Education. Brown and the NAACP appealed to the Supreme Court in 1951.