Public schools were relatively rare throughout the United States, but were often segregated by race where they existed. The same Congress that passed the Fourteenth Amendment created racially segregated schools for the District of Columbia. Beginning in 1877, many states passed “Jim Crow” laws requiring segregation in public places. Jim Crow laws were adopted in every southern state as well as some in the North. Louisiana’s policy requiring that blacks sit in separate railcars from whites was challenged and upheld in the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).
Released on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9–0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result this segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. As consequence of this ruling the way for integration and the civil rights movement was opened. Background Everything started with the 10-year-old Linda Brown, in Topeka, Kansas, who had to walk a whole mile through a railroad then wait for a school bus to go to a "black elementary school”, even though a white elementary school was only seven blocks away. Therefore, Linda's father, Oliver Brown, tried to enroll her in the white elementary school, but the principal of the school denied the request.
Brown 2 The Brown versus the Board of Education was a Supreme Court case that was an enormous decision that impact the desegregation of schools between African American and Caucasian children and took place in 1954. The Supreme Court handed down the landmark decision Brown versus the Board of Education, in which the court ordered the end of state-mandated racial segregation of public schools (93 Harv. L. Rev.518(1979-1980). With this decision, it set off the revolution in the civil rights law and the political justice for blacks causing them more lead way in and out of court. This decision was a life changing experience for equality and is still continuing to this day.
They protested, marched, wrote letters to Congress, wrote letters to the President, etc. On May 17, 1954, The US Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. This decision declared that separate but equal educational facilities were unconstitutional. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2015) A form of legislation to alleviate race within prejudicial boundaries was the Voting Rights Act of 1965; this law prohibits racial discrimination in voting. This year commemorates 50 years since the infamous march in Selma, Alabama.
In the following year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. This law banned discrimination in school, public places, jobs and many other fields. African Americans received the right to vote in 1967. In 1957, the Supreme Court ordered the Governor of Arkansas, to let nine black students attend a white-only school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Because of lack of communication Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine students, she was forced to march up the street alone with people shouting insults.
Plessy v Ferguson was the landmark case decision on May 18, 1896 in which it was upheld by Supreme Court ruling to reinforce the Louisiana law that enforced the segregation of railroad facilities. It was determined that segregation was not considered a form of discrimination so long as the races were ‘equally’ accommodated. This became also known as the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine because it was well known that the conditions were certainly not equal. The overall outcome of this case set the equal rights movement back 100 years until Brown v Board of Education of Topeka overthrew this doctrine in 1954. This ruling was forever change the future of the school system for native born Black Americans and immigrants alike.
The Legislation Itself After Herman Marion Sweatt had gone through the state courts unsuccessfully, he and the NAACP and Thurgood Marshall took their case to the Supreme Court. Herman Marion Sweatt was denied admission to the state supported University of Texas Law School solely because he was black and state law forbade the admission of blacks to that particular law school. He was offered, but he refused, to be admitted to a separate law school, newly established by the state, just for blacks. The “black school” had just 5 professors and 23 students while the actual University of Texas Law School had 16 professors and 850 students. The defendant claimed that the legal education that was offered to the petitioner (Herman Marion Sweatt) was not substantially equal to that which he would receive if admitted to the University of Texas Law School, and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment required that he be allowed admittance to the state law school.
Furthermore, with the utilisation of these factors we can come to the conclusion whether or not progress was made. President Harry Truman’s presidency, between 1945-53 saw dramatic change in black civil rights within America. In September 1946, President Truman set up a liberal civil rights committee that was utilised to investigate the increasing violence against black people. This was very significant and had a huge impact due to the fact the committee issued a report titled ‘To Secure these Rights’ which outlined the fact that Black Civil rights were not equal to that of whites. For example, the report highlighted several factors that needed ‘de facto’ change such as the abolition of poll tax and anti-lynching legislation.
The desegregation of schools via Brown vs. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, was a long and hard fought battle. Although Brown came long before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it would be over a decade before Chief Justice Warren’s ruling “with all deliberate speed” would be enforced. The strongest resistance to desegregation came from the South. The impact desegregation had on the children of that era differed greatly from black to white. How desegregation impacted both white and black students and why the South was so resistant to it is the primary focus of this paper.
For much of the ninety years preceding the Brown case, race relations in the U.S. had been dominated by racial segregation. This policy had been endorsed in 1896 by the United States Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that as long as the separate facilities for the separate races were equal, segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment ("no State shall... deny to any person... the equal protection of the laws."). The plaintiffs in Brown asserted that this system of racial separation, while masquerading as providing separate but equal treatment of both white and black Americans, instead perpetuated inferior accommodations, services, and treatment for black Americans. Racial segregation in education varied widely from the 17 states that required racial segregation to the 16 that prohibited it. Brown was influenced by UNESCO's 1950 Statement, signed by a wide variety of internationally renowned scholars, titled The Race Question.