Brown vs. Board of Education

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...

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...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.