Brooklyn, N.Y. – Congresswoman Yvette D. Clarke released the following statement to commemorate the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which held that racial segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, a decision that ultimately ended the system of Jim Crow under which institutions around the United States were closed to African-Americans and other people of color. 

The lawsuit was filed by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund on behalf of the parents of Linda Brown and twelve other African-American parents who were not allowed to send their children to neighborhood schools because Topeka, Kansas maintained a policy of racial segregation. Thurgood Marshall, later appointed to the Supreme Court, represented the plaintiffs at oral argument. The decision was issued on May 17, 1954.

“The decision in Brown v. Board of Education called to the conscience of this nation and to the principles on which it had been founded, that each of us are created equal and that we are entitled to the full protection of our laws,” said Congresswoman Clarke. “Today, we have a responsibility to build on the legacy of Brown, to eliminate in our schools and other institutions the practice of racial segregation that continues to divide this nation and to protect for every American the civil rights to which we are entitled by the Constitution.”

Congresswoman Clarke continued: “We should recall in our time the words of Justice Thurgood Marshall, who wrote that, ‘unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together.’”

U.S. Representative Yvette D. Clarke is a member of the House Committee on Small Business, Ethics, and Homeland Security, where she is the Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies. She represents many neighborhoods in central and southern Brooklyn, NY which include Brownsville, Crown Heights, East Flatbush, Flatbush, Gerritsen Beach, Madison, Midwood, parts of Park Slope and Flatlands, Prospect Heights, Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Sheepshead Bay, and Windsor Terrace.