Organized by Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—one of the leading groups to spearhead the Civil Rights Movement during the late 1950s and early 1960s—and the NAACP, the March for Democratic Schools marked the anniversary of the notorious U.S. Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson (delivered on May 18, 1896), which upheld an 1890 Louisiana statute that mandated racially segregated railroad cars, reinforcing the concept of "separate but equal" access for blacks in America. The decision was overturned by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, a decision that gave rise to the Civil Rights Movement.