Davis v Prince Edward County School Board

In 1951 Barbara Johns organized a strike by almost 400 students at Prince Edward County's Robert Russa Moton High School to protest the overcrowded, dilapidated, and ill-equipped condition of the county's only high school for African Americans. Civil rights attorneys Oliver W. Hill and Spottswood Robinson III took up the students’ case to challenge “separate but equal” in federal court on the grounds that separate schools for African Americans were never equal to schools for white students.

The Prince Edward County case reached the Supreme Court of the United States and was combined with similar cases from Kansas, Delaware, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia. On May 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Supreme Court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson on the grounds that separate schools were inherently unequal. That led to more laws and lawsuits to abolish all racial segregation in American society.

 

Related Links:

The Road to Brown v. Board of Education

School Desegregaton Map, May 1958

 

How can ordinary people use the law to effect change?
Davis v Prince Edward County School Board