Equality in education has been an ongoing struggle in America for a long time. Slowly, changes have been made to allow all races and genders to be able receive an equal education. However, we see this is false, and through various ways we can see how certain people are not put in the right situations to benefit positively from their academic careers and be the people they want to be. In our history, we can look at three events that facilitated the right of all to receive an education. First, there was the Alvarez vs. Lemon Grove case in 1931, where Mexican-Americans fought hard for their right of education and prevailed in the first successful school desegregation court case in the history of the United States. In the Supreme Court case of …show more content…
Board of Education is perhaps the biggest catalyst to other educational desegregation cases that was met with tremendous recoil. Brown vs. Board of Education came in two sections, Brown I and Brown II. Brown I was what brought the decision that the segregation of schools was unconstitutional. At first, states such as Missouri and Kansas began integrating blacks into their schools without any problems. The Southern States, however, simply were not having it. One of the first problems that arose was in Milford, Delaware. In Milford, in accordance to the new law, eleven black kids were admitted into Milford High School. White parents became completely outraged and made threats of violence, held school meetings, and burned crosses. The next semester, many white parents boycotted the school, forcing the institution to quit their desegregation efforts in order to remain open. Instances such as Milford were not uncommon in the southern states, as they were attempting to hamper the desegregation process as much as possible. The southern states were successful in their attempts, as “ten years after Brown I, only 1.2% of blacks went to school in Confederate states,” (Bell, 2006, p.1500). This lack of any real progress led to Brown II. Essentially, the purpose of Brown II was to ensure that desegregation actually occurred. There was an ongoing battle as to whether the ruling should force desegregation immediately, or slow and steadily. Slow and steady won, and all states were …show more content…
Board of Education, some schools began the process of desegregation. The most famous school that faced great challenges in this process was Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Unlike the white community as a whole, the school board of Central High School wanted and prepared to integrate black students. About 200 black students were eligible to apply to attend Central High. After hearing this news, the community was angered. The parents of these black students were getting random phone calls from white folk threatening and warning them that they would be better off sending their kids to Horace Mann High School, an all-black school. Governor Faubus even created a secret committee called the Grey Commission that, “planned to circumvent the Brown decision” (Branton, 1983, p. 253). Faubus was easily a great villain in this historic event in American history. He used his political platform to fire up people and resist the executive order to desegregate
Despite the ruling of the Supreme court for the states to desegregate their schools, there was some resistance to the ruling. This prompted the Supreme court to make another ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (2) (n.d.). The ruling, in this case, ordered states to immediately comply with the ruling in Brown I.
The case started with a third-grader named Linda Brown. She was a black girl who lived just seen blocks away from an elementary school for white children. Despite living so close to that particular school, Linda had to walk more than a mile, and through a dangerous railroad switchyard, to get to the black elementary school in which she was enrolled. Oliver Brown, Linda's father tried to get Linda switched to the white school, but the principal of that school refuse to enroll her. After being told that his daughter could not attend the school that was closer to their home and that would be safer for Linda to get to and from, Mr. Brown went to the NAACP for help, and as it turned out, the NAACP had been looking for a case with strong enough merits that it could challenge the issue of segregation in pubic schools. The NAACP found other parents to join the suit and it then filed an injunction seeking to end segregation in the public schools in Kansas (Knappman, 1994, pg 466).
Board of Education was a United States Supreme Court case in 1954 that the court declared state laws to establish separate public schools for black segregated public schools to be unconstitutional. Brown v. Board of Education was filed against the Topeka, Kansas school board by plaintiff Oliver Brown, parent of one of the children that access was denied to Topeka’s none colored schools. Brown claimed that Topeka 's racial segregation violated the Constitution 's Equal Protection Clause because, the city 's black and white schools were not equal to each other. However, the court dismissed and claimed and clarified that segregated public schools were "substantially" equal enough to be constitutional under the Plessy doctrine. After hearing what the court had said to Brown he decided to appeal the Supreme Court. When Chief Justice Earl Warren stepped in the court spoke in an unanimous decision written by Warren himself stating that, racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Also congress noticed that the Amendment did not prohibit integration and that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal education to both black and white students. Since the supreme court noticed this issue they had to focus on racial equality and galvanized and developed civil
It is important, of course, to note that the Supreme Court was not able to immediately create and implement desegregation policy, because the Court does face constraints in the area of local implementation. However, the Brown decision was crucial for the success of the desegregation movement, because it supported the Civil Rights Act and provided a precedent for later decisions like Green that would help to implement the ruling at the district level. The courts were thus able to make decisions in this policy area that profoundly shaped the way that civil rights policy developed in the United States, as the courts were enabled to create successful policy in the area of school desegregation because of the combined influence of federal court
The nine African-American students were not accepted into Central High graciously. White segregationists were angered and despised the idea of integration. Perhaps the angriest segregationist was Orval Faubus. Born in 1910, Orval Faubus became the Governor of Arkansas in 1955. He fought tooth and nail against the desegregation of Central High School, and personally appointed the Arkansas Nation Guard to block the Nine from entering the school. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, however, was not pleased with Faubus. After Faubus refused...
Discrimination is still a chronic global issue, and drastic inequalities still exist at the present time. Thus, the Affirmative Action Law is an important tool to many minorities most especially to women, and people of color, for the reason that this program provides an equality on educational, and professional opportunities for every qualified individual living in the United States. Without this program, a higher education would have been impossible for a “minority students” to attain. Additionally, without the Affirmative Action, a fair opportunity to have a higher-level career...
The case of brown v. board of education was one of the biggest turning points for African Americans to becoming accepted into white society at the time. Brown vs. Board of education to this day remains one of, if not the most important cases that African Americans have brought to the surface for the better of the United States. Brown v. Board of Education was not simply about children and education (Silent Covenants pg 11); it was about being equal in a society that claims African Americans were treated equal, when in fact they were definitely not. This case was the starting point for many Americans to realize that separate but equal did not work. The separate but equal label did not make sense either, the circumstances were clearly not separate but equal. Brown v. Board of Education brought this out, this case was the reason that blacks and whites no longer have separate restrooms and water fountains, this was the case that truly destroyed the saying separate but equal, Brown vs. Board of education truly made everyone equal.
Before the decision of Brown v. Board of Education, many people accepted school segregation and, in most of the southern states, required segregation. Schools during this time were supposed to uphold the “separate but equal” standard set during the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson; however, most, if not all, of the “black” schools were not comparable to the “white” schools. The resources the “white” schools had available definitely exceed the resources given to “black” schools not only in quantity, but also in quality. Brown v. Board of Education was not the first case that assaulted the public school segregation in the south. The title of the case was shortened from Oliver Brown ET. Al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka Kansas. The official titled included reference to the other twelve cases that were started in the early 1950’s that came from South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and the District of Columbia. The case carried Oliver Brown’s name because he was the only male parent fighting for integration. The case of Brown v. Board o...
Governor Orville Faubus used his executive powers as Governor of Arkansas to call out in the National Guard to stop the Supreme Court decision of allowing nine African American from integrating Central High School in Little Rock.
Also, although Little Rock was seen as a success, as the President was behind the blacks, after the incident was over, Governor Faubus closed all schools in Little Rock until 1959 as he would prefer there to be no schools than desegregated schools. This shows that there was always a way for the whites to get around desegregation without much attention being paid to it.
Langston Hughes wrote a poem, in 1951, called “Harlem”. It sums up the play A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore- and the run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over- like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?” Lorraine Hansberry uses this poem to open A Raisin in the Sun. This dialogue suggests what happens to the African American’s dream during the Brown v. Board of Education trials. While critiquing this play I was a little disappointed that Brown v. Board of Education was not discussed directly. However, I did find the plot of the play, and the people who were attending it to be very interesting.
The discrimination against Caucasian and Asian American students a long with the toleration of lower quality work produced by African American students and other minority students is an example of the problems caused by Affirmative Action. Although affirmative action intends to do good, lowering the standards by which certain racial groups are admitted to college is not the way to solve the problem of diversity in America's universities. The condition of America's public schools is directly responsible for the poor academic achievement of minority children. Instead of addressing educational discrepancies caused by poverty and discrimination, we are merely covering them up and pretending they do not exist, and allowing ourselves to avoid what it takes to make a d... ... middle of paper ... ...
The issue of equality in education is not a new problem. In 1787, our federal government required all territories petitioning for statehood to provide free education for all citizens. As part of this requirement, every state constitution included, “an education clause, which typically called for a “thorough and efficient” or “uniform” system of public schools” (School Funding 6). Despite this requirement, a “uniform” system of schools has yet to be achieved in this country for a variety of reasons, many of which I will discuss later on. During the early part of th...
The Supreme Court is perhaps most well known for the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. By declaring that segregation in schools was unconstitutional, Kevern Verney says a ‘direct reversal of the Plessy … ruling’1 58 years earlier was affected. It was Plessy which gave southern states the authority to continue persecuting African-Americans for the next sixty years. The first positive aspect of Brown was was the actual integration of white and black students in schools. Unfortunately, this was not carried out to a suitable degree, with many local authorities feeling no obligation to change the status quo. The Supreme Court did issue a second ruling, the so called Brown 2, in 1955. This forwarded the idea that integration should proceed 'with all deliberate speed', but James T. Patterson tells us even by 1964 ‘only an estimated 1.2% of black children ... attended public schools with white children’2. This demonstrates that, although the Supreme Court was working for Civil Rights, it was still unable to force change. Rathbone agrees, saying the Supreme Court ‘did not do enough to ensure compliance’3. However, Patterson goes on to say that ‘the case did have some impact’4. He explains how the ruling, although often ignored, acted ‘relatively quickly in most of the boarder s...
Surprisingly, the initiation came from a young, black girl who had to travel several miles to attend a segregated school even though she lived right next door to a white elementary school. This famous court case, known as Brown vs. Board of Education, determined that segregation in public schools based on race was unconstitutional. This decision was the result of decades of efforts by black segregationist opponents. With black and white children attending the same schools, having equal opportunities elsewhere became increasingly desirable.