Thanks to the generous support of a $2 million gift from the John G Heyburn II Initiative for Excellence in the Federal Judiciary, founded and directed by Martha Heyburn, M.D., University of Kentucky Libraries has established a faculty chair position to oversee and expand the library system’s collaboration with the Heyburn Initiative. In this role, the chair will engage in outreach, educational, archival and oral history work in support of the Heyburn Initiative.
Brown v. Board of Education was a Supreme Court case decided on May 17, 1954 concerning the desegregation of American public schools. This landmark ruling effectively reversed the longstanding decision in
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had ruled that the segregation of public facilities was legal as long as the separated accommodations were of equal quality, the origin of the infamous “separate but equal” standard. In that decision, the court had argued that African Americans were not “lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a white man.”
Brown was the product of a half century long legal endeavor to destroy a facially unjust legal system based on white supremacist assumptions.