The Case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka - Essay Example

In 1954, Oliver L. Brown began the process of reversing this by challenging the Topeka Board of Education on its policy of segregated schools. He was angry because his daughter had to walk six blocks across, cross train tracks, then board a bus and ride for over a mile to get to her black school, while there was a white school only six blocks away. This seemed especially ridiculous because his daughter’s playmates were largely white and attended that school.Unlike many areas, Topeka worked very hard to ensure that its white and African American schools were largely equal – they had equal funding, facilities, and staff, so it essentially came to question whether it was possible for two facilities to actually be equal if they were separate.

In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court said that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal and that the only way to ensure truly equal access to education was to have them not be segregated at all. This decision made it illegal to segregate schools based on race and began a process of re-integration, which would eventually pave the road for many other improvements in race relations in America.