Ethical Issues: Brown Vs. Board Of Education

A recurring issue throughout the history of both the United States and the world is the ethics and motives for breaking laws. While some may argue that everyone should follow all laws despite personal opposition, there are times when violating the law is completely necessary. This is especially true when a law is discriminatory or infringes on basic human rights. During the civil rights era in the United States, the separate but equal or “Jim Crow” laws were broken on many different occasions for these reasons by individuals or groups of people before they were eventually abolished.

State laws supporting racial segregation were common in the United States, especially the southern regions, from the 1880s to the mid 1960s. This discriminatory

The case is known as Brown vs Board of Education and it took place in May, 1954. It was centered around a young girl, Linda Brown, and her family. Biography.com’s entry on Linda Brown states that, “Linda Brown… and her two younger sisters grew up in an ethnically diverse neighborhood. Linda was forced to walk across railroad tracks and take a bus to grade school despite there being a school four blocks away from her home. This was due to the elementary schools in Topeka being racially segregated, with separate facilities for black and white children” (Biography). The article goes on to explain that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People asked Linda’s father, Oliver Brown, as well as a few other African American parents, to attempt to enroll their children in whites only schools. The Brown family attempted this without success and brought the case to the United States Supreme Court (Biography). Oliver Brown’s reason for challenging school segregation was both simple and logical. Linda’s daily trips to the African American school was dangerous for a child her age, as well as clearly unnecessary given there was a school closer to her home. Opposition to Brown vs Board of Education argued that, as with all separate but equal rulings, the segregated schools still gave equal opportunity to black and white students. This idea is false because similar to Louisiana's Separate Car Act, segregation of schools almost always meant the whites-only school had better funding and education than the African American school, giving white children an unfair advantage. The efforts of the Brown family and the other families involved in similar cases paid off, and the Supreme Court ended Brown vs. Board of Education by ruling school segregation unlawful