During the early 1950's, the NAACP used their political power to file lawsuits in four different states. Their goal was the end of segregation which was keeping black children from white public schools. Eventually, the lawsuits reached the Supreme Court and were titled under the court case Brown v. Board of Education. Before the court case reached its decision, Chief Justice Fred M. was killed from a heart attack and replaced by new Chief Justice Ed Warren. Chief Justice Warren led the other justices in voting unanimously on the landmark court case. The Supreme Court ruled that "Separate but equal" was unconstitutional because the segregated schools themselves were unequal. Despite the progression of education, there was heavy resistance among the South. The Court realized it would ultimately depend upon the "compliance of whites to comply" as they had no guarantee to enforce the new rulings at a local level (Urban 270).
The Supreme Court unanimously voted to end segregation for a few reasons. The justices saw the most important function of state and local governments to educate citizens. The justices cited the importance education holds in awakening cultural values and in developing children for professional training. The black schools would continue to lack proper academic resources to assist successful life training which the justices identified as unequal treatment. (Frazer 279) The Supreme Court also realized the psychological effect the segregation was holding on black children. To accept laws that enforced the placing of colored peoples in segregated schools based solely on the blackness of their skin denoted the inferiority of them as a race. To uphold a the past Plessy v Ferguson court case would keep in place this sense of inferiority. Inferiority of any kind is unequal.
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