Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case that struck down school segregation. As the founder and first director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Marshall pursued an incremental strategy, at first representing African Americans who had been denied access to segregated law schools before taking on segregation in other public educational institutions that affected more people. Ginsburg, inspired by Marshall’s example, also decided to move incrementally. She represented plaintiffs with whom the male judges of the 1970s were most likely to identify.
