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importance of brown vs board of education
importance of brown vs board of education
plessy v. ferguson and brown board of education
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Brown vs. Board of Education Although slavery was finally ended at the end of the nineteenth century black people found themselves still in the process of fighting. What they had to fight for was their own rights. The Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the civil war brought about literal freedom but the beliefs and attitudes of whites, especially in the south kept the black people repressed. In this paper I would like to share the research that I found that helped to launch the fight for freedom in every aspect possible for black people and that is the case of Brown vs. Board of education. This case to place in 1954 and helped to end the segregation laws that withheld black and white schools being integrated. Before I begin the story of Linda Brown I would first like to bring up the 1896 case of Plessy vs. Ferguson. This case arose from resentment among the black and Creole residents in New Orleans who felt it unnecessary to pay the cost of separate cars. The bigger issue dealt with the battle between the Louisiana statute of 1890 mandating that railroad cars be separate but equal and the fourteenth amendment of the Constitution stating equality for all. Unfortunately most thought that the fourteenth amendment dealt with political equality not social equality. This case brought about the series of Jim Crow laws which basically created two separate but supposedly equal societies. These laws were upheld until the Brown vs. Board of Education case came through. Linda Brown was a third grader in Topeka, Kansas that had to walk two miles a day to get to and from the black segregated school she attended. A white school was only seven blocks away. Linda’s father Oliver Brown decided to try and get his daughter... ... middle of paper ... ...t, however abolish segregation in other public facilities such as restaurants and bathrooms. It also did not specify when the desegregation of schools should take place. What it did do was declare mandatory segregation that existed in twenty-one states as unconstitutional. I believe that the Supreme Court did make the right decision and that the NAACP brought up a good case not only in its unfairness politically but socially. Imagine living somewhere where you knew that you could not share with the majority of the society and what kind of mental position that would put you in. I would feel utterly hopeless and education would not be very important to me because I may not be able to put my knowledge towards good use. I think that’s what most children would have felt like and that it would have caused a lot more social and economical problems in their future.
Throughout history, segregation has always been a part of United States history. This is showed through the relationships between the blacks and whites, the whites had a master-slave relationship and the blacks had a slave-master relationship. And this is also true after the civil war, when the blacks attained rights! Even though they had obtained rights the whites were always one step above them and lead superiority over them continuously. This is true in the Supreme court case “Plessy v. Ferguson”. The Court case ruled that blacks and whites had to have separate facilities and it was only constitutional if the facilities were equal. this means that they also constituted that this was not a violation of the 13th and 14th amendment because they weren 't considered slaves and had “equal” facilities even though they were separate. Even if the Supreme court case “Plessy v. Ferguson” set the precedent that separate but equal was correct, I would disagree with that precedent, because they interpreted
The significance of Brown directly following the court ruling has been called a ‘Supreme Court Bomb’1, as depicted in an image published five days later in a Richmond paper. The San Francisco Chronicle felt that Brown would have an immediate and great ‘impact of anti-Segregation’, calling it ‘a social revolution’2. Judge Constance Motley called it ‘the catalyst for all the demonstrations’3 that followed. The last of these sources was from an NAACP lawyer, the other two from pro-Civil Rights publications. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that these people wished to promote the success of the ruling, perhaps leading them to exaggerate its significance. By overstating how much they thought would be changed by the court’s decision, they could have been promoting their own hopes. It remains a fact, however, that the ruling did overturn the precedent set by Plessy v. Ferguson sixty years earlier. The Supreme Court went against that ruling’s central idea, ‘separate but equal’, saying it had ‘no place’ in the American constitution, and that ‘separate educational facilities are inherently unequal’4. Willoughby and Paterson claim that Brown managed to ‘end the vice-like grip of the Plessy precedent’. ...
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...
Oliver Brown, father of Linda Brown decided that his third grade daughter should not have to walk one mile through a railroad switchyard just to get to the bus stop before she could even get to the separate Negro school for her area. He attempted to enroll her in the white public school only three blocks from their home, but her enrollment was denied due to her race. The browns believed this was a violation of their rights, and took their case to the courts. This wasn’t the first time that blacks found their constitutional rights violated. After the civil war, laws were passed to continue the separation of blacks and whites throughout the southern states, starting with the Jim Crow laws which officially segregated the whites from the black. It wasn’t until 1896 in Plessy vs. Ferguson that black people even began to see equality as an option. Nothing changed in the world until 1954 when the historical ruling of Brown vs. The Board of Education that anything changed. Until then, all stores, restaurants, schools and public places were deemed ‘separate but equal’ through the Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling in 1896. Many cases just like the Brown vs. Board of Education were taken to the Supreme Court together in a class action suite. The world changed when nine justices made the decision to deem segregation in public schools unconstitutional.
“We conclude unanimously that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (qtd. in Irons 163). Many African-Americans waited to hear this quote from Chief Justice Earl Warren after many years of fighting for better educational opportunities by means of school desegregation. African-Americans went through much anguish before the Brown v. Board of Education trial even took place, especially in the Deep South. Little did they know that what looked like the beginning of the end was just another battle in what seemed like an endless war. Brown v. Board of Education was an important battle won during the Civil Rights Movement; however, it did have a major drawback simply because no deadline existed, an issue that author James Baldwin grasped from the moment the decision was made. The South took full advantage of this major flaw and continued to keep its segregated schools with no intention of ever integrating.
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).
The case started in Topeka, Kansas, a black third-grader named Linda Brown had to walk one mile through a railroad switchyard to get to her black elementary school, even though a white elementary school was only seven blocks away. Linda's father, Oliver Brown, tried to enroll her in the white elementary school seven blocks from her house, but the principal of the school refused simply because the child was black. Brown went to McKinley Burnett, the head of Topeka's branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and asked for help (All Deliberate Speed pg 23). The NAACP was eager to assist the Browns, as it had long wanted to challenge segregation in public schools. The NAACP was looking for a case like this because they figured if they could just expose what had really been going on in "separate but equal society" that the circumstances really were not separate but equal, bur really much more disadvantaged to the colored people, that everything would be changed. The NAACP was hoping that if they could just prove this to society that the case would uplift most of the separate but equal facilities. The hopes of this case were for much more than just the school system, the colored people wanted to get this case to the top to abolish separate but equal.
Throughout the 1950s, the NAACP with the help of Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall pursued lawsuits against the “separate but equal” policy instated by the Plessy v. Ferguson case. For years, colleges and universities in which there was no African American counterpart avoided court orders to admit black students by hastily setting up “equal” counterparts. But in 1950, the Supreme Court ordered that a black student be admitted to the University of Texas Law School, despite the fact that the state “…had established a “school” for him in the basement” (Foner 953). The court declared that there was no way that this “school” was equal, and demanded that the student be admitted to the law school, sparking an era that called for desegregation. Later, in 1954, a landmark decision came from the Supreme Court as a result of the Brown v. BOE case. In the early 1950s, a man named Oliver Brown went to court to fight that fact that his daughter “…was forced to walk across dangerous railroad tracks each morning rather than being allowed to attend a nearby school restricted to whites” (Foner 953). The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, and on May 17, 1954, the court declared that “Segregation in public education…violated the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment” (Foner 954), arguing that the
Brown v. Board of Education was a significant case that began many debates and movements across the United States of America. The basis of the argument was that “separate but equal” schools for white and African-American children were unconstitutional. This case was first filed as a class action suit, which took it to court at a state level, but after the jurisdiction was seen as unfair, was then brought to the Supreme Court. This case was supposed to be the beginning of the end of national segregation of colored people. (USHistoryatlas.com, 2015) Brown v. Board of Education proved that even though most people thought that racism was a problem that had been solved, the root of segregation was much deeper
...v. Ferguson. After Brown v. Board, the government could not support segregation because “Separate but equal” was not in effect. However, the most obvious and rewarding result of the case was the integration in public schools in the entire United States, even though the desegregation was a long process.
African Americans are still facing segregation today that was thought to have ended many years ago. Brown v. Board of Education declared the decision of having separate schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. As Brown v. Board of Education launches its case, we see how it sets the infrastructure to end racial segregation in all public spaces. Today, Brown v. Board of Education has made changes to our educational system and democracy, but hasn’t succeeded to end racial segregation due to the cases still being seen today. Brown v. Board of Education to this day remains one of the most important cases that African Americans have brought to the surface for the good of the United States. Brown v. Board of Education didn’t just focus on children and education, it also focused on how important equality is even when society claimed that African Americans were treated equal, when they weren’t. This was the case that opened the eyes of many American’s to notice that the separate but equal strategy was in fact unlawful.
In 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States was confronted with the controversial Brown v. Board of Education case that challenged segregation in public education. Brown v. Board of Education was a landmark Supreme Court case because it called into question the morality and legality of racial segregation in public schools, a long-standing tradition in the Jim Crow South, and threatened to have monumental and everlasting implications for blacks and whites in America. The Brown v. Board of Education case is often noted for initiating racial integration and launching the civil rights movement. In 1951, Oliver L. Brown, his wife Darlene, and eleven other African American parents filed a class-action lawsuit against the Board of Education of Topeka, and sued them for denying their colored children the right to attend segregated white schools. They sought to change the policy of racial segregation in their school district. The plaintiffs collaborated with the leadership of the local Topeka NAACP to overturn segregation in public schools. In the fall of 1951, the parents tried to enroll their children into the neighborhood schools, but they were denied enrollment in the white schools and told to attend segregated black schools. The District Court noted that segregation in public education had a harmful effect on black children, but denied the need to desegregate schools because “the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors” in Topeka, Kansas were all equal. The District Court confirmed the precedent established in Plessy v. Ferguson by the Supreme Court in 1896 and upheld state laws permitting, or requiring, segregation in public education.
...did not follow these rules they still followed Jim Crow laws. These laws segregated the south and made life extremely hard on coloreds. The Supreme Court knew that some states wouldn’t comply so they made each attorney general send in a plan for desegregation. “Rather, it asked the attorney generals of all states with laws permitting segregation in their public schools to submit plans for how to proceed with desegregation”(Supreme Court 1955). Even though desegregation was in the process life for coloreds was still not easy.
From A historical perspective the unsuccessful journey of the Black male student from public school through to his unfulfilled place in society did not end with Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision that ended de jure school segregation in 1954. Even though a series of civil rights bills in the 1950s and 1960s el...
Patterson, James. “Brown v Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (Pivotal Moments in American History).” Oxford University Press., 2001.