In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and its companion cases the US Supreme Court unanimously held that the operation of separate public schools segregated on the basis of race was unconstitutional. The Court’s 1954 decision found that separate schools for African American public school students was “inherently unequal,” violating the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws to all citizens. The Brown decision was the Court’s first ruling to directly overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine articulated almost sixty years earlier in Plessy v. Ferguson, and laid the groundwork for ending legally imposed segregation in other public entities over the next decade. It is widely regarded by historians and legal scholars as one of the Supreme Court’s most important decisions ever rendered.