A.C.P. charged that these schools,
besides being inferior, were a violation of the "equal-protection" clause
of the Fourteenth Amendment. All of the suits, as had been expected,
were defeated in the local courts. However, they were appealed.

Though the Supreme Court had allowed the decision made in Plessy v.
Ferguson in 1896 to stand, the Court was moving closer to a reexamination
of the "separate but equal" clause. That decision had argued that
separate facilities, if they were equal, did not violate a citizen's
right to equal protection under the law. It had become the cornerstone on
which a whole dual society had been built. The Court had made no attempt,
however, to guarantee that these separate institutions would be equal,
and clearly they were not. At mid-century, the Court began by challenging
this dual system at points of blatant and obvious inequity. By 1950 in
Sweatt v. Painter, the Court was attacking subtle inequalities such as
that of institutional prestige. The next step was for the Court to ask
whether in fact separate institutions could ever be equal. In other
words, the question was whether segregation, in itself, constituted
inequality and was an infringement on a citizen's rights.

On May 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of the City of Topeka,
the Supreme Court declared that school segregation was unconstitutional
and that the "separate but equal" doctrine, which the Court itself had
maintained for half a century, was also unconstitutional. Although the
decision referred directly only to school segregation, in striking down
the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Supreme Court implied that all
legal segregation was unconstitutional. It contended that to separate
children from other children of similar age and qualifications purely on
the grounds of race generated feelings of inferiority in those children.
It argued that the segregation of white and colored children in schools
had a detrimental effect on the colored children. Further, the Court
insisted that the damaging impact of segregation was greater when it had
the sanction of law. It pointed out that segregation was usually
interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the colored child. This
resulted in a crippling psychological effect on his ability to learn by
undermining his self-confidence and motivation. Therefore, segregation
with the sanction of law deprived the child of equal education, and the
Court concluded that it was a viol