Green v. County School Board

Segregated schooling at all levels was a fact of American life. The Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) paved the way for a half century of racial segregation by establishing the "separate but equal doctrine" allowing states and school boards to provide separate accommodations provided they were equal in all other respects. Beginning in the 1930s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) embarked on a legal strategy designed to challenge this doctrine. They began by bringing cases against segregated universities, hoping to establish precedents in higher education that they could then use to challenge the separate but equal doctrine in primary and secondary schools. These initial measures were largely successful.

The NAACP's legal strategy came to fruition in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. In that case, the Supreme Court reversed Plessy v. Ferguson and declared that classifications based solely on race violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The decision promised a swift and sweeping end to segregation in the South and elsewhere, but this momentum was slowed by a second Brown decision, known as Brown II, the following year. That decision blunted the impact of the first by allowing states the opportunity to delay implementation of desegregation. It was in this environment of implementation that the case of Green v. County School Board played out.