By World War II a new generation of African Americans was unwilling to submit tamely to prejudice and segregation and disenfranchisement and job discrimination. Parents filed lawsuits against school segregation. Alphabetically, the first case was called Oliver Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Oliver Brown was the father of Linda Brown, who was not allowed to attend the school closest to where she lived because she was black, and the school closest to where she lived was "for whites only." The case is better known as simply Brown v. Board of Ed. The Supreme Court at this time was a liberal court that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had appointed during his many years as president (1933-1945). In 1953 Chief Justice Fred Vinson died suddenly. This gave President Dwight Eisenhower a chance to appoint the new chief justice. He appointed Earl Warren, a Republican, who had been governor of California for three terms. Warren had helped Eisenhower to win the Republican nomination in 1952, and in return Eisenhower had promised Warren to appoint him to the Supreme Court at the first opportunity to do so. But Chief Justice Earl Warren was vastly more liberal than Eisenhower realized. In 1954 Earl Warren guided the Supreme Court to overturn the Plessy case of 1896. In a unanimous decision (9-0), the Supreme Court ruled that "in the field of public education the doctrine of separate and equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." * The Court relied in part on the doll test experiments performed by Kenneth and Mamie Clark in 1939. The Clarks showed a white doll and a black doll to black school children. They then asked the children to describe each doll and how they felt about it. The black children said that the white doll was good and pretty. They liked the white doll. The black children said that the black doll was bad. They did not like it. When asked which one looked more like them, some of the children actually cried. The psychologists said, and the Supreme Court agreed, that segregation inflicted a cruel emotional and psychological harm on black children. It damaged and injured them emotionally, by teaching them that they were inferior. The injury was that the children internalized a sense of inferiority and low self esteem. They were taught to feel bad about themselves and literally taught to be ashamed of their race and color, and to hate themselves. The Supreme Court said, segregation creates in those who are separated or kept apart a sense of inferiority. And this was a denial of equal educational opportunity, which violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
One of the lawyers for the parents, a member of the NAACP, was Thurgood Marshall. Later, in 1967, he was named as the first African American justice on the Supreme Court.
The NAACP was not entirely happy with the ruling. The NAACP went back into court in 1955 to ask the Court to order IMMEDIATE de-segregation. The Court declined. Instead, it ruled that there should be de-segregation of the public schools "with all deliberate speed." In reply, in 1956, the Southern states resurrected the Confederate battle