Advancing the Dream: 8 notable Civil Rights victories

By Michael Gryboski, Editor
Sunday, February 09, 2025

3. Brown v. Board of Education

Schoolboys Dwight and Floyd Armstrong arrive at Graymont Elementary School in Birmingham, Alabama, on the first day of desegregation of schools in the city, 4th September 1963. They are accompanied by their father James Armstrong, civil rights campaigner Fred Shuttlesworth and lawyer Oscar Adams. | Getty Images/Michael Ochs Archives

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that school segregation violated the U.S. Constitution, overturning their 1895 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.

The decision was given to a combination of five different lawsuits filed in school districts in Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

Several states refused to enforce the ruling for several years and numerous public schools grappled with “de facto” segregation.

Nevertheless, as noted by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, “striking down segregation in the nation’s public schools provided a major catalyst for the civil rights movement, making possible advances in desegregating housing, public accommodations, and institutions of higher education.”

“The decision gave hope to millions of Americans by permanently discrediting the legal rationale underpinning the racial caste system that had been endorsed or accepted by governments at all levels since the end of the nineteenth century. And its impact has been felt by every American,” the LDF continued.