Thurgood Marshall

African-American students follow a geography lesson in a segregated school. The separate facilities for black students required by Plessy v. Ferguson were rarely equal in quality to the schools available to white students.

segregated schools if these institutions were judged equal to the schools reserved for white students. The judgments, of course, were made by people committed to preserving the separation of the races. Segregation had become the law of the land. SEPARATE BUT NOT EQUAL To help himprepare his arguments in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , Marshall recruited dozens of experts: lawyers, constitutional scholars, sociologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, and educators. Under Marshall’s guidance, the team scrutinized all aspects of the Fourteenth Amendment, examined every available study of children’s learning patterns, and pored over research on the history and psychological effects of segregation on youngsters of both races.

C H A P T E R 1 : E q U A L J U S T I C E U N D E R L Aw

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