Brown vs. Board of Education consisted of a group of five legal appeals that challenged the racial segregation in public schools in Kansas, Virginia, Delaware, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia. When the appeals reached the Supreme Court, and they all had the same issue, the court heard arguments on them together. Kansas case was first. The combined appeal was known as Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka Shawnee County, Kansas. Oliver Brown, and twelve other parents, 1951, supported the NAACP, and filed suit against the Topeka, Kansas, Board of Education, when the board refuse to allow their colored children attend the white school located in their neighborhood. The attorneys for the Board of Education argued that, when attending segregated schools, it prepared children for the segregated society they would face as adults. They also stated that segregation had a damaging effect on black schoolchildren.