May 17, 2025. This weekend, there are two major anniversaries for the history of civil rights in the United States.

71 years ago today, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

It overturned the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision handed down 129 years ago tomorrow.

On that day, May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court declared that the 14th Amendment

allowed segregation within states so long as accommodations were equal.

The journey from Plessy to Brown was the story of ordinary people, creating change with the

tools they had at hand. Recently, scholars have shown how, after the Plessy decision, Black Americans in

the South used state civil law to advance their civil rights. Insisting on their rights in the South's complicated system

of credits and debts, they hammered out a legal identity. Denied justice under criminal law,

they sued companies, primarily railroad companies, for denying them equal protection against

harassment. And, according to historian Maisha S. Eatman,

they often won these civil suits, even at the hands of all white juries. It was on these grounds

that black lawyers won discrimination suits over public schools early in the 20th century. They relied

on the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that allowed

separate accommodations for black and white Americans so long as they were equal. They would point out

how much poorer the conditions in black schools were than those in white schools, proving those

conditions violated the separate but equal requirement

in the decision condoning racial segregation. Legal challenges to segregation were only one tool

in the workshop of those trying to dismantle the system. After the organizers of the Pan-American

Exposition of 1901 caricatured Black Americans,

black educator and suffragist Mary Burnett Talbert reached out to sociologist and writer W.E.B. Du Bois

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