Racism Does Not Mean Equal

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It used to be said that everybody was equal. One said it was separate but equal. Does this really mean that everybody is equal? Well, back then this meant that all of the upper class white men were equal. They had to own land and have quite a bit of money. The problem with this was that African Americans were left out. One knows they were left out because everything was segregated, including schools.
In “One Friday Morning,” Nancy is not given a scholarship because she is colored. This was before all the cases about segregation. Even then, when the cases did pass and have amendments made, the people of the towns did not follow them. In the Brown V. Board of Education case they said, separate but equal has no place when it comes to education.” When people had schools segregated it diminished blacks. African Americans are no longer slaves and they deserve the same schooling that everybody else gets. When the children feel diminished it can “affect the motivation to learn, and slow down his or her mental and educational development. This means that children would not have an equal opportunity to succeed later in life.” The south did not like the idea of integration.
A group of black children went to school in the south and had to have the military escort them into the building. The city then tried to get the courts to delay integrating the schools. The city asked for a two and a half year delay of integration because of violence in the school. This was not the only town that asked for this. There were plenty of southern towns that gave a long list of reasons as to why they wanted to wait to make the school integrated. These schools took some words that a man said as a signal to “drag their heels.” The schools also made a compe...

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... were made to help African Americans, not everybody followed through with them. There were ways to get around these laws and the courts allowed it. To take someone’s scholarship away because of their race is not making the separate but equal true. Racism is not equality of all. It is putting certain people into groups and discriminating them while making them feel worthless.

Works Cited
Banfield, Susan. The Fifteenth Amendment: African-American Men's Right to Vote. Berkeley Heights: Enslow Publishers, Inc., 1998.
Fireside, Harvey. Plessy v. Ferguson: Separate But Equal. Berkeley Heights: Enslow Publishers, Inc., 1997.
Fireside, Harvey, and Sarah Betsy Fuller. Brown v. Board of Education: Equal Schooling for All. Springfield: Enslow Publishers, Inc., 1994.
Monroe, Judy. The Nineteenth Amendment: Women's Right to Vote. Berkeley Heights: Enslow Publishers, Inc., 1998.

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