Segregation

3 Pages 843 Words

The Supreme Court's decision launched the legal movement to desegregate U.S. society. At that time, many areas of the United States, especially in the South, were racially segregated. In segregated areas, blacks and whites went to separate schools, lived in separate neighborhoods, rode in separate parts of buses, and drank from separate drinking fountains. State laws called Jim Crow laws required or permitted such separation. An 1896 Supreme Court decision in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson had permitted separate railroad cars or trains as long as they were equal in nature. The 1896 decision established the "separate but equal" principle, which later was used to uphold other kinds of segregation in the United States. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, guided by its chief lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, decided to use the Brown case and its companion cases to challenge the "separate but equal" principle. In the Brown case itself, Oliver Brown, an African American railroad worker in Topeka, Kansas, sued the Topeka Board of Education for not allowing Linda Brown, his daughter, to attend Sumner Elementary School, an all-white school near her home. The other cases involved similar suits by black parents from other parts of the country. Marshall attacked the "separate but equal" rule by arguing that segregation harms minority students by making them feel inferior and thus interfering with their ability to learn.
By declaring that the discriminatory nature of racial segregation ... "violates the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees all citizens equal protection of the laws," Brown v. Board of Education laid the foundation for shaping future national and international policies regarding human rights. Brown v. Board of Education was not simply about children and education. The laws and policies struck down by this court decision were products of the human tendencies to prejudge, discriminate again...