May 27, 1951

Vassar psychologist and education researcher Helen Trager was one of two experts asked by Thurgood Marshall, chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to testify in a South Carolina courtroom in the first test case of the “separate but equal” policy in Southern schools. The three-judge panel reserved its decision in the case, Briggs v. Elliott, which became one of five combined by Marshall in his 1954 for argument before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education.