Brown V Board
10 Pages 2519 Words
st Arab-Americans. We are uniting as a country to stop hatred and racism and The decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case was one of the first steps toward creating a country of equality and equal opportunity.
The NAACP and African-American citizens had long waged a campaign against segregation in education, a practice upheld by the "separate but equal" doctrine in the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. The NAACP had been able to break the all-white barriers in a few universities and graduate schools, but the court continued to maintain that segregation in and of itself was legal.
The Brown case was brought by an NAACP lawyer and now historically famous, Thurgood Marshall (who would later become the first black justice to serve on the supreme court) , to allow Linda Brown, an 8 yea- old African American student from Topeka, Kansas, to attend the nearby white school which segregation laws in the school system forbade her from attending. Chief Justice Earl Warren presided over the case, and on May 17, 1954 decided in Brown's favor. In a brief, unanimous opinion delivered by Warren, the Court declared that: "separate education facilities are inherently unequal" and that racial segregation violates the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, thus overruling the Plessy case. Many Americans praised Warren's decision that "In the field of education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. ( Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483), and saw it as a long overdue step toward ending segregation entirely. The decision was not embraced by all. The South was still heavily segregated and vowed to fight the decision. There were still many other Americans who did not want to have their children sit next to African American children.
The decision would have been a challenging one to make considering the social and constitutional issues involved. The social i...