Thurgood Marshall and Brown

Explain the 1954 decision.

Warm-up, learn, try it together, practice, then a quick check. About 15 minutes.

What children learn in Level 69

Thurgood Marshall was a brilliant lawyer for the NAACP. For years, Marshall traveled the South, taking cases against segregation, often at great risk.
Marshall's goal was to end “separate but equal” in schools. Several cases went together to the Supreme Court. One came from the Brown family, of Topeka, Kansas, where young Linda Brown had to travel far to a Black school.
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided, 9 to 0, that separate schools are unequal, and that segregating public schools broke the Constitution.
Many places fought the ruling. In 1957, in Little Rock, Arkansas, nine Black teenagers needed soldiers to protect them as they walked into Central High School.
In 1967, Thurgood Marshall became the first Black justice on the Supreme Court. It took years, but the law had changed.

Georgia Standards of Excellence in Social Studies:

SS5H6.b — Explain the key events and people of the Civil Rights movement: Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and civil rights activities of Thurgood Marshall, Lyndon B. Johnson, Cesar Chavez, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr.