She’s been helping organize Black History Month events for 25 years, but Sylvia Cyrus-Albritton has noticed something a little different about this February: an intensely personal response to the celebration’s theme.

The topic, the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision, has generated an outpouring of enthusiasm and a flood of events planned this month by schools, libraries and other organizations.

“It’s a more emotional issue. The mood is more personal,” said Cyrus-Albritton, interim executive director of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the Washington, D.C., group that sets Black History Month themes.

“That decision affected people on a much different level than some of the other themes for Black History Month. … It just challenged the moral fabric of this country.”

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that separating black and white children in public schools was unconstitutional. Segregating students solely on the basis of their race denied black children the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, it said.

“In the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” the court ruled. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

The ruling overturned the court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which concluded there was nothing unconstitutional about a Louisiana law that required separate but equal railroad cars for black and white passengers.

“Brown broke the back of American apartheid,” said Theodore Shaw, associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. “It was a case that finally breathed life into the 14th Amendment for African-Americans.”