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 .

Show More
Related

  • Linda Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka

    1172 Words  | 3 Pages

    While Jim Crow was blatantly incongruent with the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of the full benefits of citizenry, it was justified by the Plessy vs. Ferguson Case of 1896 in which the Supreme Court upheld Louisiana’s Separate Car Act, requiring racially segregated railroad facilities, under the condition that such facilities were equal. This “separate but equal” doctrine was quickly, and legally, applied t...

    Read More

  • Brown v. Board of Education Decision

    2171 Words  | 5 Pages

    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...

    Read More

  • Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBoise

    1614 Words  | 4 Pages

    The NAACP was a coalition of black and white radicals which sought to remove legal barriers to full citizenship for Negroes.

    Read More

  • Simple Justice

    1367 Words  | 3 Pages

    “Simple Justice” was written by Richard Kluger and reviews the history of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation, and African America’s century-long struggle for equality under law. It began with the inequities of slavery to freedom bells to the forcing of integration in schools and the roots of laws with affect on African Americans. This story reveals the hate caused the disparagement of African Americans in America over three hundred years. I learned how African Americans were ultimately acknowledged by their simple justice. The American version of the holocaust was presented in the story. In 1954 the different between how segregation and slavery were not in fashion when compared with dishonesty of how educating African American are separate from Caucasian was justified by the various branches of government.

    Read More

  • Brown V. Board Of Education

    1492 Words  | 3 Pages

    Last summer, my then twelve year old son was asked to participate in the National Junior Leaders Conference in Washington, DC. So, I packed our stuff and we headed for our nation's capital. While there, we visited the Supreme Court and my son, never having been there before, was simply awed. A short time later, we went to the Library of Congress. At the time (I don't know whether or not it's still there), there was a display -- three or four rooms big – dedicated to the Supreme Court case Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. While the case was something that Nicholas (my son) and I had talked about on a few occasions, it was interesting to watch him as he navigated through the rooms that had photographs, court documents, newspaper articles, and other memorabilia of the case and the people involved with it. About thirty minutes into our time there, he started to cry softly, but he continued making his way through the display. He went to every single display in those several rooms; he didn't want to leave until he had seen everything and read everything. When we finally left (almost four hours after we arrived), he said to me, "It's disgraceful the way our country treated black people; there was no honor in any of it."

    Read More

  • Brown v. Board of Education

    1307 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Argumentative Essay On Brown V. Board Of Education

    704 Words  | 2 Pages

    Brown v. Board of Education, which was the 1954 Supreme Court decision ordering America’s public schools to be desegregated, has become one of the most time-honored decisions in American constitutional law, and in American history as a whole. Brown has redefined the meaning of equality of opportunity, it established a principle that all children have a constitutional right to attend school without discrimination. With time, the principles of equality that were established, because of the Brown trial, extended beyond desegregation to disability, sexuality, bilingual education, gender, the children of undocumented immigrants, and related issues of civil equality.

    Read More

  • The Role of the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Movement

    1964 Words  | 4 Pages

    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...

    Read More

  • Brown v Board of Education

    2329 Words  | 5 Pages

    Patterson, James. “Brown v Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (Pivotal Moments in American History).” Oxford University Press., 2001.

    Read More

  • NAACP

    1436 Words  | 3 Pages

    (Janken 2003) - "The 'Sea'" It is true that the NAACP stands as one of the progressive movements in America's major victories against legal, and thus political, oppression. . Within a few weeks this number was enlarged to about fifty, one-third of whom were from other cities than New York. It is the nation's oldest civil rights organization that has changed America's history. Despite violence, intimidation and hostile government policies, the NAACP and its grass-roots membership persevered.

    Read More

  • Integration and James Baldwin

    2364 Words  | 5 Pages

    Lee, Chungmei and Gary Orfield. “Brown At 50: King’s Dream or Plessy’s Nightmare?” The Civil Rights Project. 17 Jan. 2004. Harvard University. 8 April 2004. http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/research/reseg04/resegregation04.php

    Read More

  • Brown vs Board of Education Case

    1275 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Brown vs Board of Education as a major turning point in African American. Brown vs Board of Education was arguably the most important cases that impacted the African Americans and the white society because it brought a whole new perspective on whether “separate but equal” was really equal. The Brown vs Board of Education was made up of five different cases regarding school segregation. “While the facts of each case are different, the main issue in each was the constitutionality of state-sponsored segregation in public schools ("HISTORY OF BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION") .”

    Read More

  • The Causes And Effects Of The New Jim Crow Laws

    736 Words  | 2 Pages

    The laws known as “Jim Crow” were laws presented to basically establish racial apartheid in the United States. These laws were more than in effect for “for three centuries of a century beginning in the 1800s” according to a Jim Crow Law article on PBS. Many try to say these laws didn’t have that big of an effect on African American lives but in affected almost everything in their daily life from segregation of things: such as schools, parks, restrooms, libraries, bus seatings, and also restaurants. The government got away with this because of the legal theory “separate but equal” but none of the blacks establishments were to the same standards of the whites. Signs that read “Whites Only” and “Colored” were seen at places all arounds cities.

    Read More

  • African Americans And The Education System

    1054 Words  | 3 Pages

    Even though the Brown v. Board of Education was 62 years ago, African Americans are still fighting to have an equal education opportunity. “But many schools are as segregated today as they were before the ruling, and black children throughout the United States are performing at the bottom of the American educational system” (Jackson 1). Nevertheless, it took decades of hard work and struggle by numerous African Americans for a better education system. Education is the key to success, it gives people the knowledge that they need to strive and become more intelligent thinkers, which leads to more opportunities for them in the job industry. Ever since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination of any kind, African Americans have every right to have this equal educational opportunity like everyone else. But yet, they were stopped in their tracks by disapproving Americans, who confined the succession of African Americans in the education system. Now that we are in the 21st century, there’s still negligence on black’s education. The black community do not have equal education opportunities because of the lack of funding, poverty experienced by the children in the neighborhoods and society’s views of the black community.

    Read More

  • Essay On Segregation In School

    962 Words  | 2 Pages

    Segregation in schools is real, it’s happening, and it’s not subtle. Brown VS the Board of Education, the groundbreaking case that ended the

    Read More

More about Brown V The Board Of Education Impact On African Americans

Open Document