1949

March
Thurgood Marshall and NAACP officials meet with black residents of Clarendon County, South Carolina. They decide that the NAACP will launch a test case against segregation in public schools if at least 20 plaintiffs can be found. By November, twenty plaintiffs are assembled, and the NAACP files a class action lawsuit against the Clarendon County School Board. The case, known as Briggs v. Elliott, eventually becomes one of the cases consolidated by the Supreme Court into Brown v. Board of Education.

Year: 
1949
Decade: