Brown vs. Board of Education

School desegregation was made possible after the landmark “Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka” in 1954, ending years of divisive and racist polices against Black schoolchildren. While the law was to be observed nationally, resistance to the change was rampant in the South resulting in a major case that developed in the city of […]

The late Thelma White Camack occupies a small but important corner in the annals of Black history in the state of Texas. As a prospective student at Texas Western College, Camack was denied due to her race which prompted the NAACP to rally around her for their desegregation cause. Camack was born Thelma Joyce White […]

Nearly 60 years ago, Dot Counts-Scoggins, then known as Dorothy Counts, endured racism so harsh that her parents had to send her to school out-of-state. As one of the first students to racially integrate Charlotte, North Carolina’s Harry Harding High School, Counts became an unwilling figure of the civil rights movement. The 1954 Brown vs. […]

The NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund is the first civil and human rights law firm, established in 1940 by late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. The early seeds of the LDF can be traced to the year before when prominent Black attorney Charles Hamilton Houston helped bolster the NAACP’s legal department. Houston, a former vice-dean and dean […]

On Tuesday, vice-presidential candidates Tim Kaine and Mike Pence squared off in the small Virginia town of Farmville. While the debate between the party rivals was the centerpiece, the town itself was home to an incident some consider to be one of the earliest protests that helped focus the Civil Rights Movement. On April 23, […]

Jim Crow is back. The notion of a post-racial society after President Barack Obama was elected as the nation’s first black president has just been blown up: America’s public schools are re-segregating at an alarming rate. Decades of racial progress in public schools is now being erased, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report […]

The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision on May 17, 1954 by the U.S. Supreme Court set into motion the desegregation of public schools across the nation. On this day that same year, Washington, D.C. and Maryland public schools racially integrated their classrooms on the heels of the landmark ruling. The integration of […]

This weekend is the 60th anniversary of the historic Brown V. Board Of Education Of Topeka, the court decision that marked the beginning of the end to legal segregation in public schools. But efforts to end racially segregated schools happened far before the May 17, 1954 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed it at last. Segregated […]

Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher was a student from Chickasha, Oklahoma who was the first black student at University of Oklahoma. She was denied entry in 1946 because she was black. After teaming with Thurgood Marshall, she won the case and began classes in 1949. Her case was among those that set the precedent for Brown […]