The decision resolved five cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and Washington, DC. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall, argued them. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the 9-0 opinion, which cited evidence that segregation harmed Black children.
The ruling did not set a deadline. A second decision in 1955, known as Brown II, told schools to desegregate "with all deliberate speed," which Southern officials treated as permission to delay. Under a campaign called Massive Resistance, some districts closed public schools rather than integrate. Prince Edward County, Virginia, shut its schools from 1959 to 1964. Federal troops escorted nine Black students into Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957.
Desegregation peaked in the South in the late 1980s, then slipped as courts lifted orders. In the 2020-21 school year, more than a third of public school students attended schools where at least 75 percent of students were of one race or ethnicity.