Although this case is always referred to as Brown v. Board of Education, the actual title is Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. This would make you think that this case was about one person against the Topeka Kansas Board of Education, but in reality this case was about several families in 4 states and the District of Columbia contesting that school segregation violated the 14th Amendment, which required separation but equal education. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The students were separated but the families argued that their education was certainly not equal. These cases did not win in the lower courts and all went to the Supreme Court. When Brown's case and four other school segregation cases first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court bundled them all into one case and called it Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In 1951, Mr. Oliver Brown argued in Kansas court that his third-grade African-American daughter was not being treated the same as white school-age children. His biggest argument had to do with the distance his daughter had to travel to school more than the quality of her education. She argued that school segregation was unconstitutional because her daughter had to travel a significant distance just to catch a bus to school. it was much further from her home than a white school that was only 7 blocks from her home. He noted that this went against the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Kansas agreed that segregation was harmful to African American students, but supported the separate but equal clause and ruled in favor of the Board of Education. To truly understand how Oliver Brown was able to get the Supreme Court to hear this case, we really have to look back sixty years earlier to the 1896 Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson. In that case, the Supreme Court affirmed that laws prohibiting African Americans from sharing the same transportation and other public places with whites were constitutional as long as the places were separate but equal. These laws were known as “Jim Crow” laws and “separate” laws. but equal” remained in effect 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 argue the case of Brown v. Board of Education. Mr. Thurgood Marshall was an NAACP attorney who argued the case on behalf of the plaintiffs. He was so well regarded that 13 years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson named Marshall the first African-American justice of the U.S. 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 was of the opinion that the Plessy verdict upholding segregation should stand . But in late 1953, an unexpected turn of events occurred, and Vinson died before the case was ever decided. President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, which proved to not only change 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 successful in issuing a unanimous verdict against school segregation the following year. In her decision, Warren wrote that “in the field of public education the,.