Thanks to the NAACP's litigation against racially segregated public schools, the Supreme Court, in 1952, scheduled oral argument on five suits: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas); Bolling v. Sharpe (District of Columbia); Briggs v. Elliott (Clarendon County, South Carolina); Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (Virginia); and Gebhart v. Belton (New Castle County, Delaware). These cases raised “a common legal question,” the Court announced, that would justify a “consolidated opinion” (Bertain, 1955, p. 141).

NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall and co-counsel prevailed. They argued and showed that racial segregation via “equal, but separate” schooling not only “deprived the plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment” but also created in them “feelings of inferiority and doubts about personal worth” (Davis, 1973, p. 124). Announcing the Court's unanimous decision in Brown, Chief Justice Earl Warren concurred: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954). In the wake of that opinion, black communities and their allies engaged in nonviolent protests for school desegregation and equality.