Separate but equal: Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education According to Jack M. Fletcher Separate but equal is “pertaining to a racial policy, formerly practiced in some parts of the United States, under which blacks could be segregated if equal opportunity were afforded” (17). Separate but equal was a legalized belief in United States constitutional law that upheld and permitted racial segregation as it did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which provided equivalent protection of the law to all citizens, and other federal laws on civil rights. Under this policy, the government was allowed to provide assistance to facilities, offices, housing, medical care, education, employment and transportation. Board of Education was actually the name given to five different cases heard by the Incomparable Court of the United States involving the issue of solitary confinement in government-funded schools. These cases were Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Briggs v. Elliot, Davis v. Board of Education of Prince Edward County (VA.), Boiling v. Sharpe, and Gebhart v. Ethel. Although the facts of each case are distinct, the primary issue in each was the legality of state segregation in public schools. By 1954, large portions of the United States had segregated schools, made legal by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), who argued that segregated public facilities were sacred as long as high-contrast offices were equivalent to each other. On the other hand, in the mid-20th century, civil rights groups created legal and political challenges to racial isolation. In the mid-1950s, NAACP lawyers filed lawsuits on behalf of black schoolchildren and their families in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, seeking court requests to force school districts to allow blacks to attend white public schools. One such class activity, Brown v. Board of Education, was registered against the school board of Topeka, Kansas, by an illustrative aggrieved party, Oliver Brown, guardian of one of the boys who were denied admission to the white schools of Topeka. Brown stated, “Topeka's racial segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution because the city's black and white schools were not equal to each other and could never be” (Carter, 56). The court rejected his case, ruling that segregated public schools were "considerably" equal enough to be constitutional under the Plessy doctrine. Brown spoke before the Supreme Court, which convened and subsequently reviewed all school segregation activities together. Thurgood Marshall, in 1967 who could be chosen as the first black member of the Court, was the leading leader of the offended