allowed or required segregated schools. However, throughout the 19th century more than ninety five percent of all blacks lived in the South, so segregation there affected an overwhelming majority of America's black population. After the Civil War ended in 1865, and especially after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the South continued to segregate its schools and other facilities. In the influential case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the Supreme Court upheld the practice of segregation as long as the separate facilities were "equal." By 1900, the South was an entirely segregated society.In 1909 blacks and whites, led by W. E. B. DuBois and Arthur and Joe Spingarn, formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization dedicated to fighting for racial equality and ending segregation. The NAACP challenged segregation through its Legal Defense and Education Fund. From 1936 to 1950 the organization won a number of cases leading to the desegregation of law schools and other professional schools at segregated universities in Mississippi, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Texas. The NAACP also had some success in forcing states to equalize public school funding and to pay teachers in black schools at the same rate as those in white schools. But throughout the South, public education for blacks remained terribly inadequate.Brown v. Board of Education developed from several court cases involving school segregation. One of these cases, based in Clarendon County, South Carolina, illustrated the unfairness of segregation. In the 1949-1950 school year the average annual expenditure for white students in Clarendon County totaled one hundred seventy nine dollars, but for blacks it was only forty-three dollars. The county's six thousand five hundred thirty one black students attended school in sixty-one buildings valued at $194,575. Many of the black schools lacked indoor plumbing or heating. The 2375 white st...
