Thurgood Marshall

five children, Briggs had joined 19 other black parents in a suit against the county’s segregated school system. As a result, Briggs and his wife had lost their jobs and their credit at the local bank. Defeated in each of the five locations, the black students and parents appealed to the Supreme Court. Because the Kansas case—in which Topeka parent Oliver Brown sued his city’s school board—came first alphabetically, the five cases came to be known collectively as Brown v. Board of Education . The case presented the court with a question of vital importance tomillions of Americans: Is government-enforced school segregation unconstitutional? When the segregation cases came before the Supreme Court, legal counsel, directed by attorney Thurgood Marshall, was supplied by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Founded in 1909, the NAACP—whose membership was biracial—had spent decades fighting racial discrimination and segregation. In its early years, the NAACP concentrated on obtaining black suffrage , eliminating lynching and other mob violence against blacks, and promoting integration in housing and public places. By the early 1930s, NAACP officials realized that blacks could never achieve social and economic equality without educational equality, and the organization made improved schooling for blacks a top priority. Thurgood Marshall had joined the organization in 1934. Now, in 1953, the 45-year-old attorney hoped for a major victory in what had been a long, grueling struggle. REVERSING COURT PRECEDENT Marshall hoped towin the Brown caseby demolishing the “separate-but-equal” doctrine establishedby Plessy v. Ferguson . A celebratedSupremeCourt case of 1896, Plessy began when a blackman, Homer Adolph Plessy, refused to ride in the JimCrow (segregated) car of a train passing through Louisiana. (The popularminstrel shows of the nineteenth

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