In 1892, a mixed-race shoemaker from New Orleans named Homer Plessy was arrested for riding in a “Whites-only” railcar. Four years later in Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his arrest, and made “separate but equal” the law of the land.
But in reality, nothing was equal. Black Americans were routinely denied access to housing and jobs, and in many parts of the country they were also denied the right to vote and subjected to racial violence.
But in 1909, a group of Black and White reformers came together in New York City to fight back, establishing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Among the NAACP’s founders were Ida B. Wells – the pioneering journalist who exposed the horrors of lynching – and W.E.B. Du Bois – the Harvard-trained scholar who gave the movement its voice through The Crisis magazine.
The organization would soon find its most powerful tool for change: the courts. In 1940, a brilliant young attorney named Thurgood Marshall started the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund … and began chipping away at segregation in America case by case.
In December 1953, Marshall stood before the U.S. Supreme Court and argued that segregation in America was an attempt to keep the formerly enslaved in “as near that stage as is possible,” and that now was the time to end it. Five months later the court unanimously ruled in his favor.
In May 1955 Marshall said, “We are confident that desegregation will proceed, to open the doors to true democracy for all of the children of our nation.”
In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” doctrine – in place for nearly 60 years – was unconstitutional. While the landmark ruling didn’t end segregation overnight – both housing and schools remained deeply segregated by race – it did push the United States much closer to its founding ideals.
And that young lawyer who devised the legal strategy to dismantle segregation? In 1967 Thurgood Marshall became the first African American to sit on the United States Supreme Court.
Story produced by Lucie Kirk. Editor: Carol Ross.
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