of African Americans would work just as hard to secure the rights of Whites in these former colonies. He went on to amass a considerable record of Supreme Court challenges to state-sponsored discrimination.
These cases included: Smith vs, Allright which overthrew the South's "white primary" in 1944; Shelley vs. Kraemer striking down the legality of racially restrictive covenants - private agreements not to sell land to Blacks; Sweatt vs. Painter and Sipuel vs. University of Oklahoma in two graduate school integration cases, forcing the universities of Texas and Oklahoma to integrate their law schools in 1950 (Thurgood).
His best known of Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1954, the landmark case which demolished the legal basis for segregation in America, ended the legal separation of Black and White children in public schools in America, and which sparked the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, led to more Black high schools, more Black college graduates and the rise of the Black middle class in numbers and in political power during the second half of the 20th century (Finkelman; Thurgood). He argued that the "equal protection clause" of the Constitution requires that states treat all citizens alike, regardless of race, and although precedent was against him, managed to pe
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