Separate but equal: Plessy v. Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education According to Jack M. Fletcher Separate but equal "refers to a racial policy, formerly practiced in some parts of the United States, by which blacks could be segregated if given equal opportunity" (17). Separate but equal was a creed legalized in United States constitutional law that defended and authorized racial isolation as not violating the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which guaranteed equal protection under the law to all citizens, and other federal civil rights laws. . Under this policy, the government was authorized to assist with facilities, offices, housing, medical care, school, work, and transportation. Board of Education was actually the name given to five different cases that were heard by the United States Court regarding the issue of segregation in government-funded schools. These cases were Brown v. Topeka School Board, Briggs v. Elliot, Davis v. Prince Edward County (VA) School Board, 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-sponsored segregation in public schools. By 1954, large areas of the United States had racially segregated schools, made legal by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which held that segregated public facilities were sacred as long as high-contrast offices were equivalent to one another. On the other hand, in the mid-20th century, civil rights groups established legal and political barriers to racial isolation. In the mid-1950s, NAACP attorneys filed lawsuits on behalf of schoolchildren of color and their families in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, seeking court motions to force school districts to let blacks attend white public schools. One of these classroom activities, Brown v. Board of Education, was filed against the Topeka, Kansas, school board by an offended illustrator, Oliver Brown, guardian of one of the children who was denied access to Topeka's white schools. Brown said, “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 never could be” (Carter , 56 years old). The court rejected his case, ruling that separate public schools were “substantially” equal enough to be constitutional under the Plessy doctrine. Brown went to the Supreme Court, which merged, and then looked at all school segregation activities together. Thurgood Marshall, in 1967, who could be elected the Court's first black shareholder, was the boss of the offended.