African-American soldiers had also fought valiantly in World War II, and when they returned, they came with a determination to improve their status in American society. A sustained campaign for Civil Rights developed at a national level in the late 1940s. The primary focus of this campaign was to overturn the "separate but equal" doctrine, legitimized by the 1896 "Plessy v. Ferguson" decision of the United States Supreme Court. In 1954 the court, in its unanimous "Brown v. Board of Education" decision, reversed the earlier decision and ruled that segregated facilities, even if equal, were unconstitutional.