Answer:
The case known as “Brown vs. Board of Education ”resolved by the Supreme Court of the United States on May 17, 1954 marks a milestone in US jurisprudence on equal rights by changing the criteria it had held for more than 70 years regarding access to African-American people to the public education system.
The plaintiff Oliver Brown, along with 12 other parents of students from Topeka, Kansas, acted on behalf of their children who were then entitled to attend educational establishments that were not attended by white students. This situation was verified even after the sanction of the Fourth Amendment in 1868.
Indeed, African-American citizens received a different treatment in 1950 compared to white citizens. And this legal situation of inferiority and discrimination was sustained in normative instruments of each of the States through the enactment of decrees that prohibited them from using the same public transport, attending the same schools or entering the same buildings. This situation of inferiority was received by the judges and embodied in numerous judgments as the doctrine of "equal, but separate"
Prior to deciding "Brown," he had ruled in "Plessy vs. the Court." Ferguson ”by a overwhelming majority of 8 votes against 1 (dissent of Judge John Marshall Harlan), ruling that Mr. Homer Plessy was responsible for being arrested for refusing to give his seat to a white person on a New Orleans train. The reasoning of the sentence is synthesized in that the Fourth Amendment undoubtedly reinforced the idea of equality of two races before the law, but if one took into account the nature of things, this could not imply the elimination of distinctions based on the color, or social status. If one race was inferior to another socially, the Constitution of the United States could not place them on the same footing.
In "Brown" the decision of the Court meant abandoning the historical interpretation of the constitutional text to employ a sociological interpretation of the effect of discrimination in American society. The Framers or the first editors of the Constitution had not been able to consider the legal status of African-American citizens because at that time they were not in school, and therefore they had to use surpassing arguments for the community at that time.
It is not a single case, but five causes related to discrimination in public education establishments: “Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka ”,“ Briggs v. Elliot ”; "Davis v. Board of Education of Prince Edward County ”,“ Bolling v Sharp ”and finally“ Gebhart v. Ehtel ”, all brought to the attention of the American Court of Justice and which gave rise to an important turn in jurisprudential matters.
