A landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was actually a combination of five cases that challenged school segregation in Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia, and Topeka, Kansas. (Though decided in 1954, the Court’s opinion as excerpted below was not published until 1955.) Although Brown v. Board of Education did not explicitly reverse the Court’s earlier ruling in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, which permitted states to provide “separate but equal” facilities for people of different races, it was clearly the beginning of the end of the Supreme Court’s willingness to give constitutional sanction to state-sponsored segregation. Brown v. Board of Education was authored by the recently appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren and was a harbinger of the new, more activist role that the Court would take in protecting civil rights and civil liberties under his leadership.