Title: An End and a Beginning: The Fiftieth Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education--The Landmark Case that Led to the Abolition of School Segregation.
Abstract: On May 17, 2004, the United States will observe the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. By invalidating the doctrine of separate but in the field of public education, a doctrine that had been approved by the same court nearly sixty years earlier in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Brown decision removed the foundation for the system of official segregation--the infamous Jim Crow laws--that dictated the structure of race relations across much of our nation. Brown has rightly been identified as a watershed event in our constitutional history, setting the stage for the civil rights movement that transformed the landscape of American society and politics. The legacy of the decision and the issues it raised continue to reverberate in our society today. This article offers a brief history of the individuals and events behind the decision. It begins with the Plessy decision's impact and the early efforts to contain that impact which [aid the groundwork for Brown v. Board The article then looks at the individual stories of the cases challenging public school segregation that were eventually consolidated under the name of Brown v. Board of Education. It concludes with a description of the efforts within the Supreme Court to bring nine justices together in a decision that would bring an end to segregation by law in American society. A Dream Deferred: Plessy v. Ferguson and Its Aftermath In its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the U.S. Supreme Court made clear that any hope for equality for the millions of black Americans emancipated during the War would be a dream deferred. Just thirty years before the Plessy decision, the hope that the United States might put its legacy of slavery and racial inequality behind it did not seem unfounded. Following the War, the United States Congress had passed a series of amendments to the Constitution, collectively known as the Civil War amendments,' that abolished slavery (Thirteenth Amendment); granted all citizens the right to vote, regardless of color, or previous condition of servitude (Fifteenth Amendment); and, most broadly, provided that no state shall make or enforce that would abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States ... nor deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws (Fourteenth Amendment). Congress also passed two civil rights acts, in 1866 and 1875, to protect the rights of black Americans and, under Reconstruction, quashed early attempts by state legislatures in the South to establish laws, known as the Black Codes, that would restrict the rights of newly freed slaves. Slavery was never restored, but following the end of Reconstruction, state legislatures quickly went to work to limit the impact of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and keep black Americans in a state of legally enforced inferiority. With Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court demonstrated that it had little will to stop state efforts to subvert the War amendments. In ruling that the state of Louisiana could segregate railway passenger cars according to race, the Court drew a line between what it described as legal or political equality, on the one hand, and social equality, on the other. The Fourteenth Amendment, wrote Justice Brown for the majority, could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation, in places where they are liable to be brought into contact, do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power. …
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 3
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