In 1929, the annual NAACP conference was held in Cleveland to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the association. The NAACP had much to celebrate. She had launched a victorious crusade against lynching; won important legal battles; and organized 325 branches. La crise, the official organ of the association, was the first black magazine with a circulation of more than 100,000 copies. Among the NAACP officials in the front row (left to right) is W.E.B. Du Bois, editor of The Crisis; James Weldon Johnson, executive secretary of the NAACP, 1920-1930; Robert Bagnall, Office Manager; Daisy Lampkin, Regional Field Secretary; Walter White, Assistant Secretary, 1918-1929; William Pickens, Field Secretary; and Arthur Spingarn, Chairman of the Legal Affairs Committee. In the conclusion, Warren wrote: «We conclude that in the field of public education, the doctrine of `separate but equal` has no place. Segregated educational institutions are inherently unequal; Segregation in public education is a denial of equal protection of laws. In 1948, President Harry Truman ordered integration into the military, and in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. The Board of Education declared school segregation unconstitutional and ended the era of «separate but equal» education. On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregation in public education was unconstitutional, overturning the doctrine of «separate but equal» that had been in place since 1896 and sparking massive opposition among white Americans committed to racial inequality.
The Supreme Court`s landmark decision in Brown v. The Board of Education grew out of several cases challenging racial segregation in school districts across America filed as part of the NAACP`s Legal Defense Fund`s strategy to ban the practice nationwide. In that case, a black man named Oliver Brown sued the Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas, for refusing to allow his daughter Linda to attend elementary school near her home solely because of her race. When the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall argued that segregated schools were harmful and imposed feelings of inferiority on black children. Chief Justice Earl Warren echoed this argument, stating that «in the field of public education, the doctrine of `separate but equal` has no place. Segregated educational institutions are inherently unequal. The decision outraged white segregationists as well as civil rights activists. Throughout the South, where state constitutions and state law required separate schools, whites denounced the decision as a tyrannical exercise of federal power. Many white Southern leaders and their voters implemented a strategy of «massive resistance» to delay desegregation. These groups, made up of elected officials, business leaders, community residents, and parents, have used a range of tactics and weapons against the growing civil rights movement, including bombing and murdering civil rights activists, criminalizing peaceful protests, and using economic intimidation and threats to prevent black participation in civil rights activities. In 1960, only 98 of Arkansas` 104,000 black students attended non-segregated schools, as did 34 out of 302,000 in North Carolina, 169 out of 146,000 in Tennessee, and 103 out of 203,000 in Virginia.
In the five Deep South states, in the fall of 1960, each of the 1.4 million black schoolchildren attended separate schools. At the beginning of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3 percent of African-American children in the South attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, that number remained well below 1 percent. The Brown decision marked the beginning of a massive cultural shift in racial dynamics in the United States and also launched an organized mass opposition movement. Most white Americans, especially in the South, supported segregation. To learn more about this change, read the EJI Segregation in America report. In the southern United States, Jim Crow laws and legal racial segregation in public institutions existed from the late 19th century until the 1950s. The civil rights movement was initiated by black Southerners in the 1950s and 60s to break the dominant pattern of segregation. In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the U.S.
Supreme Court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) justifying «separate but equal» institutions.