Denied ‘rightful place in history’: Supreme Court refuses to rename Brown v. Board of Education after family of first school desegregation case filed

Main: Nathaniel Briggs discusses his petition to the Supreme Court to change the name of the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka to Briggs v. Elliott (Screengrab via YouTube/WLTX). Inset: the justices of the United States Supreme Court are shown. (Alex Wong/Getty images).

The United States Supreme Court declined to even consider correcting a clerical error that descendants of civil rights activists say resulted in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka being known by the wrong case name for nearly seven decades. According to the family involved, an “inadvertent clerical misstep” has deprived them of “their rightful place in history in spite of the great physical, emotional, and financial risks” taken by their loved ones.

During the early 1950s, five cases challenging the constitutionality of state-sponsored racial segregation in schools reached the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Briggs v. Elliott, Davis v. Board of Education of Prince Edward County (VA.), Bolling v. Sharpe, and Gebhart v. Ethel. The cases arose from different school districts and had different underlying facts, but focused the same central legal issue.

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