Fifty years ago today, the US Supreme Court, in the landmark Brown v The Board of Education case, ended legal segregation in US schools and helped to spark the Civil Rights movement, writes Michael Farrell.
Linda Brown was eight years old in 1951. She was the daughter of the Rev Oliver Brown, minister of Topeka, Kansas. To get to school each day she had to walk a mile, cross a railway switching yard and travel two miles on a rickety bus. When she got there, the school was run-down and overcrowded.
Yet there was a much better equipped, less crowded school only a few blocks from her home.
She could not go there because she was black. It was reserved for whites.
Kansas was not as virulently racist as the southern US states but the public elementary schools in Topeka, the state capital, were racially segregated, based on an 1896 Supreme Court decision called Plessy v Ferguson.
That case had upheld the provision of separate black and white carriages on Louisiana railways and the court had said that providing "separate but equal" public facilities did not amount to unlawful discrimination.
The facilities were never equal, however. Black carriages were dirty and bare; blacks had to sit at the back of buses and give up their seats for whites; they had to use outside toilets - if there were any. They weren't served in cafes and their schools were underfunded and poorly equipped, condemning generations of black children to a sub-standard education.
Even in Topeka, where the disparity in facilities was nothing like as bad as Alabama or Mississippi, the school board spent three times as much on the education of each white child as on each black child, while exclusion from the superior white schools left black children with a deep sense of inferiority.
Black parents were angry that, almost 100 years after the US Civil War, their children were still discriminated against.
The legal director of the black civil rights group, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), Thurgood Marshall, was keen to challenge the Plessy v Ferguson decision in the more liberal political climate that followed the second World War.
In 1951 the NAACP began a series of five legal cases from Kansas, Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington DC, claiming that "separate but equal" school provision was in breach of the guarantee of equal protection by the law in the 14th amendment to the US constitution.
Linda Brown's father was one of 13 parents from Topeka who joined in the action on behalf of their children. The five cases went to the Supreme Court, which ruled on May 17th, 1954. It dealt with the Topeka case first and the landmark decision went down in history as Brown v Board of Education.
In a short, unanimous judgment Chief Justice Earl Warren said: "Segregation of white and coloured children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the coloured children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group . . . We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."
The legal basis for segregation, not just in education but in all public facilities, had been removed.
The effect of the Brown decision was not immediate. In a further ruling in 1955, the Supreme Court said that desegregation should proceed "with all deliberate speed", which gave the segregationists an excuse to delay as much as possible.
In 1957 the US federal government had to send in 1,500 troops and deploy the National Guard to enable nine black teenagers to enrol in Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
But it was a rearguard action by the governor of Arkansas; desegregation was now the law.
The Brown decision gave a huge impetus to those blacks - and whites - who wanted to challenge the "Jim Crow" segregationist system in the southern states, and contributed massively to the Civil Rights movement and ultimately to the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
The struggle to integrate US schools has been a long-drawn-out one and is still going on. It has been made more difficult by the high level of residential segregation. Cities and colleges have had to adopt new strategies such as bussing and affirmative action and there have been repeated applications to the Supreme Court to try to block such schemes.
But the basic principle of Brown v Board of Education still stands: "Separate but equal" is "inherently unequal".
Linda Brown Thompson, as she now is, became a music teacher and still lives in Topeka, where she and her younger sister, Cheryl, run a foundation to preserve the legacy of the Brown case and provide scholarships for minority students.
Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP legal director, went on to become in 1967 the first African-American member of the Supreme Court and one of its most distinguished judges. He died in 1993.
Michael Farrell is a solicitor and a member of the Irish Human Rights Commission. He is a former activist in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights movement.