During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the Fourteenth Amendment served as both a legal sword and shield. Activists and lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund—most notably Thurgood Marshall—used the Equal Protection Clause to dismantle segregation in public schools, transportation, and public accommodations. The strategy was deliberate: chipping away at Plessy by proving that segregated facilities were inherently unequal. Brown v. Board of Education was the crowning achievement, but it was preceded by cases like Missouri ex rel.