Brown v. Board of Education

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court which ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, even if the segregated facilities are equal in quality. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had ruled that racial segregation laws were constitutional as long as the facilities for each race were equal, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal". The Court's unanimous decision in Brown and its related cases paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement, and it became a model for many future impact litigation cases.