<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 effectively 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> <P> The plaintiffs in Brown asserted that this system of racial separation, while masquerading as providing separate but equal treatment of both white and black Americans, instead perpetuated inferior accommodations, services, and treatment for black Americans . Racial segregation in education varied widely from the 17 states that required racial segregation to the 16 in which it was prohibited . Brown was influenced by UNESCO's 1950 Statement, signed by a wide variety of internationally renowned scholars, titled The Race Question . This declaration denounced previous attempts at scientifically justifying racism as well as morally condemning racism . Another work that the Supreme Court cited was Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). Myrdal had been a signatory of the UNESCO declaration . The research performed by the educational psychologists Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark also influenced the Court's decision . The Clarks' "doll test" studies presented substantial arguments to the Supreme Court about how segregation affected black schoolchildren's mental status . </P> <P> The United States and the Soviet Union were both at the height of the Cold War during this time, and U.S. officials, including Supreme Court Justices, were highly aware of the harm that segregation and racism played on America's international image . When Justice William O. Douglas traveled to India in 1950, the first question he was asked was, "Why does America tolerate the lynching of Negroes?" Douglas later wrote that he had learned from his travels that "the attitude of the United States toward its colored minorities is a powerful factor in our relations with India ." Chief Justice Earl Warren, nominated to the Supreme Court by President Eisenhower, echoed Douglas's concerns in a 1954 speech to the American Bar Association, proclaiming that "Our American system like all others is on trial both at home and abroad,...the extent to which we maintain the spirit of our constitution with its Bill of Rights, will in the long run do more to make it both secure and the object of adulation than the number of hydrogen bombs we stockpile ." </P>

Which supreme court decision was rendered invalid by the landmark civil rights case