With the recent events that have occurred, such as, the Ferguson, Missouri unrest, the Trayvon Martin case, and many other similar cases, I was curious to find out what influenced the Supreme Court to change its position on the “separate but equal” decision it had made in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. In 1909 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed and has been fighting discrimination ever since. It was due to their dedication to fight social injustice that the Brown v. Board of Education case was heard by the Supreme Court. It took several years for the Supreme Court to hear the case and make a decision. It took another year for the court to issue an order to enforce its decision. Today there are still over two hundred pending cases involving school desegregation.…show more content… By using a team of Civil Rights lawyers, historians, social scientists, and even a psychologist, it fought to prove that equal education was not being provided to African American children. Thurgood Marshall, who later became a United States Supreme Court Justice, argued that segregation was being used to keep “the people who were formerly in slavery as near to that stage as possible”. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed, with Chief Justice Earl Warren reading the decision out-loud to a packed courtroom. Many states vehemently opposed this decision and continued to resist. Some states closed their public schools, others made school attendance optional, and in Little Rock, Arkansas the National Guard had to be activated to enforce the law. Hundreds of school districts were sued to compel the states to comply with the Brown v. Board of Education
