Medgar & Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story that Awakened America

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and racism, including racist violence and the Jim Crow era.

Brown v. Board of Education was a 1954 legal case in which the US Supreme Court reached a landmark decision, ruling the racial segregation of public schools unconstitutional. It was a crucial victory in the civil rights movement that helped promote the integration of educational institutions. The case began after a Black man from Topeka, Oliver Brown, filed a lawsuit against a school that would not admit his daughter. Four other suits related to school segregation had also been filed and were included in the final case.

The leader of the NAACP, which had been battling segregation since the early 1950s, acted as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. Earl Warren, recently appointed chief justice by President Dwight Eisenhower, secured a unanimous decision among the justices, declaring that segregation violated Black people’s rights to equal protection under the law according to the 14th Amendment. The decision provoked significant backlash from much of the South’s white population, who resisted desegregation and social change.