Brown V The Board Of Education Impact On African Americans

1991 Words4 Pages

Brown V. The Board of Education Education has long been regarded as a valuable asset for all of America's youth. Yet, for decades, the full benefits of education were denied to African Americans as a result of the prevailing social condition of Jim Crowism. Not until the verdict in Brown V the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, would this denial be acknowledged and slowly dismantled. Jim Crow laws, in U.S. history, statutes enacted by Southern states and munici-palities, beginning in the 1880s, legalizing segregation between blacks and whites (Woodward, 6). One of the most cited cases serving as the basis of Jim Crow was the Supreme Court case Plessy Vs Ferguson . The Court ruling in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson stated that separate facilities for whites and blacks were constitutional. This encouraged the passage of discriminatory laws that undermined and basically voided any progress that had been made on the behalf of blacks during the post civil war Reconstruction. These separate, but equal laws were passed for not only for railways and street cars, put for railways and streetcars, but eventually expanded to include almost all other aspects of life including public waiting rooms, restaurants, boardinghouses, theaters, hospitals, schools as well as many other public institutions. The general contention of the separate institutions created for blacks was that generally they were of inferior quality. Since the early twentieth century, the NAACP pursued avenues of legal change in order to gradually dismantle Jim Crowism. By the middle of the twentieth century it seemed they were making remarkable progress and inching closer and closer to their goal of legally creating an integrated society. In 1949 there was the case o... ... middle of paper ... ...e. New York: Penguin Group, 1999 Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of Brown V. Board of Education and Black Americas Struggle for Equality. New York: Vintage Books, 1975 Knappman, Edward W. Great American Trials. Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1994 Lee, Chungmei, and Gary Orfield. "Brown At 50: King's Dream or Pleesy's Nightmare?"The Harvard University Civil Rights Project. 19 Mar.2004 < http://www.civilrights project.harvard.edu/research/reseg04/brown50.pdf (Lee and Orfield) Martin, Waldo E. Brown v. Board of Education: A Brief History With Documents. Boston: St. Martins Press, 1988 McWhorter, John H. "Still Losing The Race?" The Manhattan Institute. 25 Mar. 2004 http://www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/_comm-still_losing.pdf (McWhorter) Vann Woodward, C .The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974 .

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