The Brown V. Board Of Education Case

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Imagine having to walk twelve miles in the snow or ride a bus thirty minutes just to get to school in the morning when there is a school two miles away from your house, how about having to use a textbook that has not been updated for years. That is exactly what it felt like to be an African American child during times of segregation in our country. In this paper I am going to explore the reasons for the Brown v. Board of Education case, the case itself and the affect it had on society then and our society now. Segregation started in the United Sates after the end of the civil war during the reconstruction era when the government created what was known as Jim Crow laws which stated that states could impose legal punishments on people who consorted …show more content…

In 1951, a class action suit was filed against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas in the District Court. Thirteen parents of Topeka formed to make the plaintiffs. There suit had called for the school district to change their policy of racial segregation. The Topeka Board of Education operated two different elementary schools under a Kansas law passed in 1879, which allowed but did not enforce those districts to maintain a separate elementary school for African American children than the school for the white children. The thirteen parents had been recruited by the local NAACP leaders. The named parent was Oliver L. Brown, a welder, an assistant pastor at the local church, and an African American. He was persuaded to join the lawsuit by a childhood friend. Brown 's daughter Linda Brown had to walk six blocks to her third grade school bus stop to ride to Monroe Elementary, her segregated black school one mile away, while Sumner Elementary, a white school, was only seven blocks away from her home. The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, naming the U.S. Supreme Court example set in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had upheld a state law requiring "separate but equal" segregated facilities for African Americans and whites in railway cars. The District Court panel found that segregation in public education was a harmful effect on African American children, but denied relief on the ground that the African American and white schools in Topeka were considerably equal with respect to buildings, transportation, curriculum and the educational qualifications of

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