<P> In Moberly, Missouri, the schools were desegregated, as ordered . However, after 1955, the African - American teachers from the local "negro school" were not retained; this was ascribed to poor performance . They appealed their dismissal in Naomi Brooks et al., Appellants, v. School District of City of Moberly, Missouri, Etc., et al.; but it was upheld, and SCOTUS declined to hear a further appeal . </P> <P> Many Northern cities also had de facto segregation policies, which resulted in a vast gulf in educational resources between black and white communities . In Harlem, New York, for example, not a single new school had been built since the turn of the century, nor did a single nursery school exist, even as the Second Great Migration caused overcrowding of existing schools . Existing schools tended to be dilapidated and staffed with inexperienced teachers . Northern officials were in denial of the segregation, but Brown helped stimulate activism among African - American parents like Mae Mallory who, with support of the NAACP, initiated a successful lawsuit against the city and State of New York on Brown's principles . Mallory and thousands of other parents bolstered the pressure of the lawsuit with a school boycott in 1959 . During the boycott, some of the first freedom schools of the period were established . The city responded to the campaign by permitting more open transfers to high - quality, historically - white schools . (New York's African - American community, and Northern desegregation activists generally, now found themselves contending with the problem of white flight, however .) </P> <P> The intellectual roots of Plessy v. Ferguson, the landmark United States Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of racial segregation in 1896 under the doctrine of "separate but equal" were, in part, tied to the scientific racism of the era . However, the popular support for the decision was more likely a result of the racist beliefs held by many whites at the time . In deciding Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court rejected the ideas of scientific racists about the need for segregation, especially in schools . The Court buttressed its holding by citing (in footnote 11) social science research about the harms to black children caused by segregated schools . </P> <P> Both scholarly and popular ideas of hereditarianism played an important role in the attack and backlash that followed the Brown decision . The Mankind Quarterly was founded in 1960, in part in response to the Brown decision . </P>

The supreme court's landmark 1954 decision in brown vs. board of education struck down what doctrine