Donald M. Payne: “I, too, rise today to commemorate the 49th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down the separate…”

“I, too, rise today to commemorate the 49th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down the separate but equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896. A young girl by the name of Linda Brown attended the fifth grade at public school in Topeka, Kansas. After being denied admission to a white elementary school, the NAACP took up her case along with similar ones in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware. All five cases were argued together in December 1952 by Thurgood Marshall, who headed the NAACP Legal Defense Fund at that time. Mr. Marshall, born in Maryland, educated at Douglass High School, went on to Lincoln University, a small black college in Oxford, Pennsylvania, and then graduated with honors and applied to the white University of Maryland law school. He was denied admission. Howard University accepted him, and he graduated at the top of his class, passing the bar exam, taking up private practice and specializing in civil rights cases. At 26, he was hired by the Baltimore branch of the NAACP, and one of his first civil rights cases was a successful effort to gain admission for a young black man to the University of Maryland, the very institution that denied Thurgood Marshall admittance 2 years earlier. The unanimous 1954 decision ruled all school segregation unconstitutional. W.E.B. du Boise wrote, "I have seen the impossible happen.…”