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Hedgepeth & Williams v. Board of Education

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Leon Hedgepeth
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Janet Williams
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Robert Queen

“Do the right thing, do the right thing.” That was my mother’s mantra.

Dr. Thelma Napoleon-Smith says of her mother, Berline Williams

On a September 1943 morning, Black students Janet Hedgepeth and Leon Williams were denied entry to their neighborhood’s segregated junior high. The school was “not built for Negroes [sic]”. Their mothers, Gladys Hedgepeth and Berline Williams, filed a racial discrimination lawsuit which, a decade later, was used as a precusor to the historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling, abolishing racial segregation in public schools.

Brown v. Board of Education

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Linda Brown
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Thurgood Marshall

Racial segregation in schools is "inherently unequal" and is thus always unconstitutional.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954),was a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had held that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal".[note 1] The Court's unanimous decision in Brown, and its related cases, paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement, and a model for many future impact litigation cases.

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