May 17 · This Day in America
At noon in Washington, Chief Justice Earl Warren reads aloud a decision the nation has been bracing for. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court rules — unanimously, nine to nothing, every justice signing on — that segregated public schools violate the Constitution. The old fiction of "separate but equal," the law of the land since 1896, is finished. "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," Warren says, and the sentence does the work of a century. It will take years, troops, and courage to make it real in every schoolhouse. Resistance is fierce and immediate. But the legal scaffolding of American apartheid has been pulled down by the country's highest court, on its own authority, in its own words. A little girl in Topeka named Linda Brown lent her name to the promise that a child's school could no longer depend on the color of that child.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1875
At a new track outside Louisville, fifteen horses break from the line in the first Kentucky Derby. A colt named Aristides wins. The jockey is Oliver Lewis, a Black rider — as were thirteen of the fifteen mounts that day, in an era when the best American horsemen were Black men. The Derby endures; their names were too often left out of the story.
Source: www.kentuckyderby.com
“We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”Chief Justice Earl Warren, Brown v. Board of Education, 1954