What impact did Brown vs Board of Education have on the relationship between the federal government and state governments?

Answer 1

Federalism is a political philosophy which, in the United States, is often associated with favoring the power and policies of the central (federal) government over state sovereignty.

Brown v. Board of Education, (1954), was a consolidation of five class-action lawsuits filed against county and municipal school boards that were racially segregated due to state laws that explicitly sanctioned such policies.

Education has always fallen under the States' purview, per the Tenth Amendment, which assigns to the states, "...powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." The federal government didn't dictate educational policies.

The Fourteenth Amendment, however, addressed issues of equal protection under the law, which applied not only to the federal government, but to the states as well. In Brown, the Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" is not equal, regardless of the quality of teachers and facilities, because educating African-American children apart from white children implies African-American children are inferior. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments were designed to provide true equality in civil rights and remove the stigma of descending from people who had been slaves.

Application of the Fourteenth Amendment to States' school policies is an example of Federalism when the Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Section 2), which elevates constitutional and federal law over state law, interferes with or abrogates powers that ordinarily belong to the states (in this case, education).

Answer 2

It showed that Federal Laws and the national government are still superior to the state governments.