Who Won Brown v. Board of Education? Plaintiffs, Cases, Ruling

Oliver Brown and his fellow plaintiffs won Brown v. Board of Education. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously, 9–0, that racial segregation in public schools violated the Constitution. The decision struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine that had governed American law since 1896 and became one of the most consequential rulings in the country’s history.

The Plaintiffs Who Brought the Case

The lead plaintiff was Oliver Brown, a father in Topeka, Kansas. His seven-year-old daughter Linda lived four blocks from Sumner Elementary, an all-white school that turned her away. To reach the all-Black Monroe Elementary, she left home 80 minutes before class, walked through a railroad switchyard, crossed a busy street, and caught a bus for a 21-block trip. The NAACP recruited Brown along with twelve other Topeka parents to challenge the policy on behalf of 20 children.¹

Thurgood Marshall argued the case. As head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which he founded in 1940, Marshall had spent fourteen years building a step-by-step legal campaign against school segregation. By the time Brown reached the Supreme Court, he was no longer arguing that Black schools needed more funding. He was arguing that segregation itself was unconstitutional, and that no equalization of buildings or budgets could cure it.²

Five Cases Under One Name

The name is a little misleading. The Supreme Court consolidated five separate lawsuits from different parts of the country, all raising the same constitutional question about school segregation.³ The plaintiffs who together “won” Brown came from:

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in Kansas, brought by Oliver Brown and twelve other parents.
Briggs v. Elliott in South Carolina, brought by Harry Briggs and more than 100 parents in Clarendon County after the district provided over 30 school buses for white students and none for Black students.⁴
Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County in Virginia, which grew out of a student strike organized by 16-year-old Barbara Johns. On April 23, 1951, 117 Black high school students at Moton High School walked out over crumbling facilities, and the ten-day strike led directly to the NAACP filing suit.
Gebhart v. Belton in Delaware, the only case in which a lower court had already ordered Black students admitted to white schools. The Delaware Court of Chancery found the Black facilities “substantially inferior.”⁵
Bolling v. Sharpe from the District of Columbia, which required a different constitutional theory because D.C. is not a state.

By combining the cases, the Court made sure its answer would apply broadly rather than to a single district or a single state’s laws.²

The Unanimous Ruling

Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the opinion, and every justice signed on. That 9–0 vote mattered. A split decision would have handed segregationists an argument that the ruling was politically driven or legally unsettled. Warren reportedly spent months working behind the scenes to keep the Court together, understanding that anything less than unanimity would weaken the ruling’s authority.¹

The core holding was blunt: “We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Segregation, the Court held, denied Black children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.¹

Warren also spoke to the effect on the children themselves. Separating them from others “solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”²

The Constitutional Basis

The plaintiffs won on the Fourteenth Amendment. Section 1 provides that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”⁶ Because public education is a government function, sorting children into different schools by race amounted to the state treating some citizens as less deserving than others.

The D.C. plaintiffs in Bolling v. Sharpe needed a different theory, because the Fourteenth Amendment restrains states, not the federal government. In a companion opinion issued the same day, the Court held that the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause barred the federal government from segregating D.C. schools. The Court reasoned that it would be unthinkable to prohibit states from segregating while allowing the federal government to do the same thing in the nation’s capital.⁷

What the Plaintiffs Defeated

The biggest obstacle in front of Marshall was a 58-year-old precedent. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court had ruled that racial segregation was constitutional as long as separated facilities were of equal quality.⁸ That decision had provided the legal foundation for segregation laws across the South and beyond for more than half a century, covering schools, buses, restaurants, drinking fountains, and hospitals.

Marshall’s argument was that in public education, separate could never be equal. Even identical buildings and budgets would not cure the injury of forcing Black children into separate facilities. The Court accepted that reasoning in full, declaring “separate but equal” had no place in public education and overruling Plessy as applied to schools.¹

Why Winning in Court Did Not End Segregation

Winning the constitutional argument was one thing. Making schools actually integrate was another. The Court heard a second round of arguments on remedies, and on May 31, 1955, it issued Brown II.⁹ That ruling placed primary responsibility on local school boards to develop desegregation plans and directed federal district courts to supervise them. It told schools to proceed “with all deliberate speed,” a phrase criticized ever since for giving delay exactly the cover it needed. There were no specific deadlines and no concrete benchmarks.¹⁰

Resistance was fierce. In 1956, Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia called for “Massive Resistance,” a coordinated set of state laws designed to block integration. Some states threatened to cut funding for any public school that admitted Black students. Others closed public schools entirely rather than integrate them. In September 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deployed the state National Guard to physically block nine Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School. President Eisenhower responded by signing Executive Order 10730 and sending the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students in.¹¹

Real enforcement came only later. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed a full decade after the ruling, authorized the U.S. Attorney General to file desegregation lawsuits and gave the federal government the power to collect enrollment data by race. So while Oliver Brown, Harry Briggs, Barbara Johns’s classmates, the Gebhart plaintiffs, and the Bolling plaintiffs won the case in 1954, turning that legal victory into integrated classrooms took another generation of lawsuits, legislation, and federal intervention.

1
Justia U.S. Supreme Court. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483
2
National Archives. Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
3
U.S. Courts. History – Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment
4
National Park Service. Briggs v. Elliott – Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park
5
Justia Law. Gebhart v. Belton
6
Cornell Law Institute. 14th Amendment
7
Justia U.S. Supreme Court. Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497
8
National Archives. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
9
Justia U.S. Supreme Court. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 349 U.S. 294
10
Library of Congress. Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U.S. 294
11
National Archives. Executive Order 10730 – Desegregation of Central High School (1957)