Oliver Leon Brown was an American welder and episcopal pastor who was the plaintiff in the landmark 1954 United States Supreme Court case Oliver Brown, et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al. I
Undated photo of Brown
Plessy v. Ferguson
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Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, was a landmark United States Supreme Court decision ruling that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race
Oliver Brown (American activist)
…in the Topeka case. This decision overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine that had been used as the standard in civil rights lawsuits since the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896, in effect declaring it unconstitutional to have separate public schools for Black and white students. The decision is considered a major…
Justice Henry Billings Brown, author of the majority opinion in Plessy
Justice John Marshall Harlan became known as the "Great Dissenter" for his fiery dissent in Plessy and other early civil rights cases.
An Oklahoma City streetcar terminal's "colored" drinking fountain, 1939
1904 caricature of "White" and "Jim Crow" rail cars by John T. McCutcheon