"'The Supreme Court decision [on Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas] is the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation,' Harlem's Amsterdam News exclaimed. ‘It will alleviate troubles in many other fields.' The Chicago Defender added, ‘this means the beginning of the end of the dual society in American life and the system…of segregation which supports it.'"

Oliver Brown, father of Linda Brown decided that his third grade daughter should not have to walk one mile through a railroad switchyard just to get to the bus stop before she could even get to the separate Negro school for her area. He attempted to enroll her in the white public school only three blocks from their home, but her
He ordered the desegregation of the armed forces, the end of discrimination in federal hiring practices, asked congress to outlaw poll taxes, establish a permanent FEPC at the national level, and asked to make lynching a federal offence. Congress did not pass his requests, but it was a step in the right direction. These legal actions made it possible for Oliver Brown to fight for his daughters civil rights. After being denied admission into the Sumner School because of her race, Linda Brown's father, Oliver, took the matter to the NAACP. Joined with four other discrimination hearings, Thurgood Marshall led an all star defense team to the Supreme Court to argue the unconstitutionality of segregation within the schools. They argued their case, saying that state-imposed segregation was inherently discriminatory and therefore a denial of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. They maintained that segregation created feelings of inferiority among black children and therefore even though these schools were supposedly separate but equal, they would never be equal as long as there was the feeling of inferiority created by segregation. They sighted evidence from Professor Kenneth B. Clark and wife Mamie Clark's study that placed identical dolls save the skin color, one black and one white, in front of black children. When questioned by the prosecution, Clark explained his study. He focused mainly on the