The plaintiff, Oliver Brown, worked as a welder for the Santa Fe Railroad and studied for the department. He was persuaded by Charles Scott, a local NAACP attorney and childhood friend, to join the trial. The U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the commission, citing an 1896 U.S. Supreme Court precedent set by Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld a state law requiring separate “separate but equal” facilities in railroad cars. Shortly after the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in 1783 that slavery was incompatible with the new state`s constitution, African Americans began seeking equal access to public schools. They understood that education was crucial for economic, social and political equality. Although a small minority of black Bostonians preferred a separate school where their children would be protected from abuse, the desire for integration grew.
Activists sent petitions to the legislature and school board, declaring separate schools “contrary to Commonwealth laws.” The committee responded that segregated schools were legal and appropriate and, above all, “best suited to promote the education of the [black] class of our population.” For two years, McKinley L. Burnett, president of the Topeka branch of the NAACP, tried to convince Topeka school officials to integrate their schools. After many failed attempts to ensure equal opportunity for all children, leaders of the African-American community, including Burnett and other local advocates, stepped up their efforts to transform the education system. this was his last attempt (Washburn Alumni Review, December 1989). The repeal of these restrictive laws, commonly known as Jim Crow laws, was central to the civil rights movement before 1954. In Sweatt v. Painter, the Supreme Court dealt with a legal challenge to the doctrine when a black Texas student, Heman Marion Sweatt, applied for admission to the state-sponsored University of Texas School of Law. Since Texas did not have a law school for black students, the lower court sued the case for six months, allowing the creation of a state-funded law school for black students (now known as the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University). When other appeals to the Texas Supreme Court failed, Sweatt, along with the NAACP, took the case to federal courts before eventually reaching the U.S. Supreme Court.
Here, the initial decision was overturned and Sweatt was admitted to the University of Texas School of Law. This decision was justified by the fact that the separate school was not classified as “equal,” both due to quantitative differences, such as its facilities, and intangible factors such as its isolation from most future lawyers with whom its graduates would interact. The Court held that when reviewing higher education, intangible factors must be considered in the context of “substantive equality.” On the same day, the Supreme Court ruled in McLaurin v. Oklahoma state regents that Oklahoma`s segregation laws, which required an African-American graduate student working on a doctorate in education, to sit in the hallway outside the classroom door, did not call themselves “separate but equal.” These cases put an end to the doctrine of “separation but equal” in academic and vocational education. In 1953, Earl Warren became the 14th Chief Justice of the United States, and the Warren Court launched a liberal constitutional revolution that banned racial segregation and “segregationist but equal” in the United States in a series of landmark rulings. [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] On May 17, 1954, at 12:52 p.m., the historic decision on civil rights was announced. It was decided “that in the field of public education, the doctrine of separation but equality has no place. Segregated educational institutions are inherently unequal, so plaintiffs and others are deprived of the same protection of the law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
This decision unleashed a concentrated explosion of energy that transformed public education across America. The implications of the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson for education became clear three years after the decision. In 1897, the Richmond County School Board in Georgia closed Georgia`s only African-American high school, although state law required school boards “to provide the same facilities for every race, including schools and all other matters related to education.” At that time, the school board offered two high schools for white children. It also provided sufficient funds to educate all white children in the region, while funding only half of African-American school-age children. The Supreme Court upheld the county`s decision. In Cumming v. School Board of Richmond County, GA, (1899), she held that African Americans must not only prove that a law or practice discriminated against them, but that it was passed because of “racial hostility.” Although the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) had been trying to combat segregation since the early 1900s, segregation laws were deeply embedded in the U.S. education system in the 1950s.
In Roberts v. In the city of Boston, Morris argued that Benjamin Roberts` five-year-old daughter, Sarah, had spent five separate white schools on the way to Smith School — a violation, he charged, of an 1845 law that made it illegal for a child to be “expelled from the public schools of the Commonwealth.” Morris also showed that the black school was inferior. In its verdict against him, the court concluded that Sarah Roberts should go to school even though she was further away from home. The decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, best known for introducing the “separate but equal” doctrine, was rendered on May 18, 1896, by a seven-to-one majority of the U.S. Supreme Court (one justice was not present). In 1971, the Court issued more specific instructions on how school districts should meet their urgent legal obligations. In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the court announced that the discovery of a racially unbalanced school would trigger scrutiny by the courts, and that the burden of proof would be on the district that the racial imbalance was not the result of current or past practices. In addition, the court told the districts that to correct these conditions, they should consider redrawing school boundaries and considering moving students to schools in other parts of the district in order to achieve greater racial parity. Although the Declaration of Independence declared that “all men are created equal,” this declaration would not be enshrined in law in the United States until after the Civil War (and presumably not fully fulfilled for many years thereafter).
In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, eventually ending slavery. In addition, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) strengthened the legal rights of newly freed slaves by stipulating, among other things, that no state may deprive anyone of “due process” or “equal protection of the law.” Finally, the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) further strengthened the legal rights of newly freed slaves by prohibiting states from denying anyone the right to vote on the basis of race. The entire public school system suffers as well. The law provides not only that all must be taught, but that all must be taught together. Not only should they receive the same amounts of knowledge, but they should all receive it in the same way. All should approach the same common well together; Nor can there be an exclusive source for one person or class. School is the small world where the child is trained for the larger world of life. And since, according to our institutions, all classes meet without distinction of colour in the exercise of civil functions, they should all meet, without distinction of colour, at school – beginning with those relations of equality which the Constitution and the laws promise to all.