<Tr> <Td_colspan="2"> This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings </Td> </Tr> <Tr> <Td_colspan="2"> Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (1899) Berea College v. Kentucky (1908) </Td> </Tr> <P> Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional . The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state - sponsored segregation, insofar as it applied to public education . Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9--0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal ." As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution . This ruling paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the Civil Rights Movement, and a model for many future impact litigation cases . However, the decision's fourteen pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second decision in Brown II, 349 U.S. 294 (1955) only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed". </P> <P> For much of the sixty years preceding the Brown case, race relations in the United States had been dominated by racial segregation . This policy had been endorsed in 1896 by the United States Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that as long as the separate facilities for the separate races were equal, segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment ("no State shall...deny to any person...the equal protection of the laws"). </P>

When did the supreme court hand down the brown v. board of education ruling