When was brown vs board of education

The Civil Rights Act of guaranteed Black people basic economic rights to contract, sue, and own property. Significance: The intention of this law was to protect all persons in the United States, including Black people, in their civil rights. Significance: The 14th Amendment overruled Dred Scott v. It guaranteed that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside, and that no state shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens, deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person the equal protection of the law.

These cases narrowly defined Federal power and weakened the power of the Fourteenth Amendment by asserting that most of the rights of citizens are under state control. Significance: Pro-segregation states would come to justify their policies and claim that segregation in their public school systems was a states' rights issue. In March, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of , prohibiting discrimination in inns, theaters, and other places of public accommodation.

It was the last Federal civil rights act passed until Significance: Discrimination in places of public accommodation was prohibited. The Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of , and declared that the Fourteenth Amendment does not prohibit discrimination by private individuals or businesses.

Significance: The Court declared that the Fourteenth Amendment does not prohibit discrimination by private individuals or businesses, paving the way for segregation in public education.

The practices of comprehensive racial segregation known as " Jim Crow " emerged, and racial separation becomes entrenched. Significance: Black people largely disappeared from juries in the South. Florida was the first state to enact a statute requiring segregation in places of public accommodation.

Eight other states followed Florida's lead by Homer A. The Supreme Court held that separate but equal facilities for White and Black railroad passengers did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Significance: Plessy v. Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter in Plessy , argued that forced segregation of the races stamped Black people with a badge of inferiority.

That same line of argument would become a decisive factor in the Brown v. Board decision. The Supreme Court upheld a local school board's decision to close a free public Black school due to fiscal constraints, despite the fact that the district continued to operate two free public white schools. Significance: Thurgood Marshall would become lead counsel in the Brown v. Board of Education case. The Supreme Court upheld a Kentucky state law forbidding interracial instruction at all schools and colleges in the state.

Their mission was to eliminate lynching, and to fight racial and social injustice, primarily through legal action. In Gong Lum v. Rice , the Supreme Court held that a Mississippi school district may require a Chinese-American girl to attend a segregated Black school rather than a White school. Significance: The Court applied the "separate but equal" formulation of Plessy v. Ferguson to public schools. Board case. First, the establishment of separate but equal law school facilities for Black and White students would become too costly for the states.

In , an African-American man named Homer Plessy refused to give up his seat to a white man on a train in New Orleans, as he was required to do by Louisiana state law. For this action he was arrested.

Plessy, contending that the Louisiana law separating blacks from whites on trains violated the "equal protection clause" of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U. Constitution, decided to fight his arrest in court. By , his case had made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court. By a vote of , the Supreme Court ruled against Plessy. In the case of Plessy v.

Ferguson , Justice Henry Billings Brown, writing the majority opinion, stated that:. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane. The lone dissenter, Justice John Marshal Harlan, interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment another way, stated, "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.

Sadly, as a result of the Plessy decision, in the early twentieth century the Supreme Court continued to uphold the legality of Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial discrimination. In the case of Cumming v. Richmond Ga. County Board of Education , for instance, the Court refused to issue an injunction preventing a school board from spending tax money on a white high school when the same school board voted to close down a black high school for financial reasons.

Moreover, in Gong Lum v. Rice , the Court upheld a school's decision to bar a person of Chinese descent from a "white" school. Note: Some of the case information is from Patterson, James T. Brown v. Oxford University Press; New York, Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in Plessy and similar cases, many people continued to press for the abolition of Jim Crow and other racially discriminatory laws.

For about the first 20 years of its existence, it tried to persuade Congress and other legislative bodies to enact laws that would protect African Americans from lynchings and other racist actions.

Beginning in the s, though, the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund began to turn to the courts to try to make progress in overcoming legally sanctioned discrimination. Houston, together with Thurgood Marshall, devised a strategy to attack Jim Crow laws by striking at them where they were perhaps weakest—in the field of education.

Elliott , originated in Clarendon County, South Carolina, in the fall of Harry Briggs was one of 20 plaintiffs who were charging that R. Elliott, as president of the Clarendon County School Board, violated their right to equal protection under the fourteenth amendment by upholding the county's segregated education law.

Briggs featured social science testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs from some of the nation's leading child psychologists, such as Dr. Kenneth Clark, whose famous doll study concluded that segregation negatively affected the self-esteem and psyche of African-American children. Such testimony was groundbreaking because on only one other occasion in U.

The U. District Court's three-judge panel ruled against the plaintiffs, with one judge dissenting, stating that "separate but equal" schools were not in violation of the 14th amendment. In his dissenting opinion shown above , Judge Waties Waring presented some of the arguments that would later be used by the Supreme Court in Brown v.

Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court. Marshall also argued the Davis v. Originally filed in May of by plaintiff's attorneys Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill, the Davis case, like the others, argued that Virginia's segregated schools were unconstitutional because they violated the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment.

And like the Briggs case, Virginia's three-judge panel ruled against the students who were identified as plaintiffs in the case. For more on this case, see Photographs from the Dorothy Davis Case. Listed third in the order of arguments, Brown v. As in the Briggs case, this case featured social science testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs that segregation had a harmful effect on the psychology of African-American children.

While that testimony did not prevent the Topeka judges from ruling against the plaintiffs, the evidence from this case eventually found its way into the wording of the Supreme Court's May 17, opinion. The Court concluded that:. Because Washington, D. Sharpe case was argued as a fifth amendment violation of "due process.

When a District of Columbia parent, Gardner Bishop, unsuccessfully attempted to get 11 African-American students admitted into a newly constructed white junior high school, he and the Consolidated Parents Group filed suit against C. With Houston's health already failing in when he filed suit, James Nabrit, Jr. By the time the case reached the Supreme Court on appeal, George E. Hayes had been added as an attorney for the petitioners, beside James Nabrit, Jr. According to the Court, due to the decision in Plessy , "the plaintiffs and others similarly situated" had been "deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment," therefore, segregation of America's public schools was unconstitutional.

The last case listed in the order of arguments, Belton v. Gebhart , was actually two nearly identical cases the other being Bulah v. Gebhart , both originating in the state of Delaware in Ethel Belton was one of the parents listed as plaintiffs in the case brought in Claymont, while Sarah Bulah brought suit in the town of Hockessin, Delaware.

While both of these plaintiffs brought suit because their African-American children had to attend inferior schools, Sarah Bulah's situation was unique in that she was a white woman with an adopted Black child, who was still subject to the segregation laws of the state. Gebhart was argued at the Federal level by Delaware's attorney general, H.

Albert Young. The Court concluded that, even if the tangible facilities were equal between the black and white schools, racial segregation in schools is "inherently unequal" and is thus always unconstitutional. At least in the context of public schools, Plessy v. Ferguson was overruled. In the Brown II case a decided year later, the Court ordered the states to integrate their schools "with all deliberate speed.

Aaron , when the Court ruled that states were constitutionally required to implement the Supreme Court's integration orders. Widespread racial integration of the South was achieved by the late s and s. In the meantime, the equal protection ruling in Brown spilled over into other areas of the law and into the political arena as well.

Scholars now point out that Brown v. Board was not the beginning of the modern civil rights movement, but there is no doubt that it constituted a watershed moment in the struggle for racial equality in America.