Brown v. Board of Education
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50 free Brown V. Board of Education trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that public schools divided by race could not stand. Brown v. Board of Education was the work of ordinary parents, students who walked out of class and a small team of lawyers, and it changed how Americans argue about equality. This quiz covers the whole story: the families who put their names on the lawsuits, the courtroom strategy and the evidence, the justices and how they reached their decision, and what happened afterwards as officials stalled, resisted and were finally pushed to comply. It also asks about the earlier rulings the decision swept aside and the later ones that shaped its legacy. It is written for students revising for a US history or government test, anyone running a class who wants a ready-made check, and readers curious about the story behind the headline. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark used which toys in the experiments cited in Brown v. Board?
Dolls
Dolls identical except for skin and hair color were shown to children, and most preferred the white one. The Court cited the research as proof that segregation bred a sense of inferiority.
Q 02Which lawyer argued Brown v. Board and later became the first Black justice on the Supreme Court?
Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall won 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court as a movement lawyer, then joined the bench himself in 1967.
Q 03Which six-year-old needed a federal escort into a formerly all-white New Orleans school in 1960?
Ruby Bridges
Ruby Bridges spent that year as the only child in her class, taught alone by the one teacher who agreed to have her after white parents pulled their children out.
Q 04The 1896 ruling that Brown v. Board rejected had approved racial separation in which setting?
Train cars
Train cars were the issue: a New Orleans man was arrested in 1892 after deliberately taking a seat in a whites-only coach, in a test case local activists had arranged in advance.
Q 05Brown v. Board began when thirteen parents sued the school board of which Kansas city?
Topeka
Topeka's school district now works from a building named for McKinley Burnett, the local activist who organized the lawsuit against it.
Q 06Which Chief Justice, a former governor new to the Court, wrote the opinion in Brown v. Board?
Earl Warren
Earl Warren kept revising the opinion until every justice would sign it, convinced that a split ruling would only encourage the South to resist.
Q 07In which Arkansas city did nine Black students need Army paratroopers to enter Central High in 1957?
Little Rock
Little Rock Central High admitted the nine by the end of that September, but the soldiers could not spare them a year of physical and verbal abuse from many white classmates.
Q 08Which president sent Army troops to Arkansas in 1957 to escort nine Black students into school?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight D. Eisenhower also took the Arkansas National Guard out of the governor's hands, turning the soldiers who had blocked the students into their protectors.
Q 09Which organization recruited the Kansas families in Brown v. Board and supplied their lawyers?
NAACP
The NAACP also sponsored the companion lawsuits from three other states, the fruit of a courtroom campaign against segregated education that it had been building since the 1930s.
Q 10Which doctrine, used to defend segregation since 1896, did Brown v. Board reject for public schools?
Separate but equal
Separate but equal has no place in public education, the Court said, because dividing children by race harms them even where buildings, books and budgets match.
Q 11Brown v. Board held that segregated schools violated which amendment, adopted after the Civil War?
The Fourteenth
The Fourteenth Amendment promises every person the equal protection of the laws. The justices found its drafting history inconclusive and looked instead at what schooling had become by 1954.
Q 12Which 1896 decision, upholding a Louisiana segregation law, did Brown v. Board finally reject?
Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson was decided 7–1, and its lone dissenter predicted it would become as infamous as the Dred Scott ruling. It stood for 58 years.
Q 13Which step did Linda Brown, the schoolgirl in Brown v. Board, take as a parent 25 years later?
Q 21Prince Edward County, Virginia, took which step in 1959 rather than obey an order to desegregate?
Closed its public schools
Prince Edward County closed its public schools for five years. White children were given help to attend private classes, while for four of those years Black children had no schooling unless they left the county.
Q 22Oliver Brown, lead plaintiff in Brown v. Board, did which job while training to become a minister?
Welder
Welder in the Santa Fe repair shops, Oliver Brown was asked to join the lawsuit by a childhood friend who was one of its lawyers. He died in 1961, aged 42.
Q 23When Brown v. Board was filed, public education in Linda Brown's home city was segregated only at which level?
Reopened the case
She reopened the case, arguing that the same Kansas district her father had sued was still dividing children by race. It stayed under court supervision until 1999.
Q 14Which phrase did the Court use in 1955 to tell school districts how quickly to obey Brown v. Board?
All deliberate speed
All deliberate speed proved vague enough for districts to stall for years. Justice Felix Frankfurter suggested the wording, hoping to endorse gradual change.
Q 15Which law, a decade after Brown v. Board, let federal officials cut funds to segregated schools?
Civil Rights Act
The Civil Rights Act also let the federal government file its own lawsuits against school officials who resisted, a job that had fallen to parents and their lawyers.
Q 16Judges citing Brown v. Board struck down segregated seating on which Alabama city's buses in 1956?
Montgomery
Montgomery's buses had been boycotted for six months when the judges ruled, and riders stayed off them until the Supreme Court upheld the decision late that year.
Q 17Which group was widely fired or laid off across the South as schools merged after Brown v. Board?
Black teachers
Black teachers and principals were dismissed as their schools were shut or merged, because the merged schools were built around white leadership. One historian says the South moved faster on that than on integration.
Q 18Which president put the lead lawyer from Brown v. Board on the Supreme Court in 1967?
Lyndon Johnson
Lyndon Johnson had made him Solicitor General two years earlier, the government's own advocate before the justices and a post widely seen as a stepping stone to the Court.
Q 19Bolling v. Sharpe, decided with Brown v. Board, came from which place where no state law applied?
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C. answers to Congress rather than a state, so the clause used in Brown did not reach its schools. The Court relied on the Fifth Amendment's promise of due process instead.
Q 20Which Alabama governor stood in a university doorway in 1963 to stop two Black students enrolling?
George Wallace
George Wallace stepped aside the same day, once the president put the Alabama National Guard under federal command and its general told him to move.
Elementary schools
Elementary schools were the only ones her city kept separate, under a Kansas law that covered a dozen larger communities. Its high school had enrolled both races since 1871.
Q 24Which former school for Black children now houses the Brown v. Board National Historical Park?
Monroe
Monroe is the school Linda Brown attended, a mile from her home. A 2022 law extended the park's reach beyond Kansas, to schools tied to the lawsuits decided with hers.
Q 25Which Arkansas governor used the National Guard to keep nine Black students out of school in 1957?
Orval Faubus
Orval Faubus had earlier hinted he might comply with the Court. Most histories say he called out the Guard to win over segregationist voters as he sought a third term.
Q 26Which 1956 document, signed by 101 members of Congress, called Brown v. Board an abuse of power?
Southern Manifesto
The Southern Manifesto was signed by the entire delegations of seven states, but three senators from the region refused, including Tennessee's Estes Kefauver and Al Gore Sr.
Q 27Which 16-year-old led a Virginia school strike that grew into one of the cases in Brown v. Board?
Barbara Johns
Barbara Johns has stood in the US Capitol since 2025, when her statue took the place of Robert E. Lee's as one of Virginia's two in the building.
Q 28Which state sent Gebhart v. Belton, the only case in Brown v. Board the families had already won?
Delaware
Delaware's chancellor found the Black schools plainly inferior and ordered the children admitted to white schools at once, so there it was the school officials who appealed.
Q 29Briggs v. Elliott, the first of the five cases combined into Brown v. Board, came from which state?
South Carolina
South Carolina's case began with a father's 1947 request for a school bus: the county ran 30 buses for white children and none for Black ones.
Q 30Where in the nation's capital did the lead lawyer who argued Brown v. Board study law?
Howard University
Howard University's law dean taught his students to be social engineers who used the courts against Jim Crow, and the man who argued Brown was his star pupil.