Briggs v. Elliott, 342 U.S. 350 (1952), on appeal from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of South Carolina, challenged school segregation in Summerton, South Carolina. It was the first of the five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the famous case in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional by violating the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Following the Brown decision, the district court issued a decree that struck down the school segregation law in South Carolina as unconstitutional and required the state's schools to integrate. Harry and Eliza Briggs, Reverend Joseph A. DeLaine, and Levi Pearson were awarded Congressional Gold Medals posthumously in 2003.
Letter sent by Levi Pearson to the Clarendon County School District, requesting that black children be provided with the same bus transportation that white children in the district received.
2003 Brown et al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka et al. Congressional Gold Medal
Summerton, South Carolina
Summerton is a town in Clarendon County, South Carolina, United States. Per the 2020 census, the population was 814.
Summerton, South Carolina