On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court announced its unanimous decision in the most important civil rights case of the twentieth century. The Court had found, just as Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall had observed on their tour of the South twenty years earlier, that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” State laws that established separate public schools for blacks and whites were thus ruled unconstitutional, in violation of the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment.
