In the courts

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 617.

The US Supreme Court had decided in 1896 that ‘separate but equal' facilities for blacks and whites were legal. By the 1950s, 21 states had segregated public schools. Most of the black schools were not as good as the white ones.

Oliver Brown of Topeka, Kansas, decided to challenge the 1896 Supreme Court decision. He asked the local school board to let his daughter attend a nearby white school. When the board refused, Brown sued them. The case of Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka[1] (1954) eventually reached the Supreme Court and is one of the most famous legal cases in U.S. history. The defenders of school segregation argued that states had a right to make decisions about social and edu­cational issues and that segregation was not harmful to blacks. Lawyers for Brown argued that black and white schools were not equal and that federal laws prohibit unequal treatment. The Supreme Court ruled in Browns favor. The Chief Justice noted, ‘Separate educational facili­ties are inherently unequal.' In other words, the fact that the schools are separate means that they must be unequal. A year later, the Court ordered all schools to be desegregated.

Many communities followed the courts order, but in other places, local and state governments refused. In 1957, the Arkansas governor tried to prevent African-American students from attending the all-white high school in the state capital, Little Rock. President Dwight Eisenhower had to send in soldiers to protect the black students. Some communities closed their public schools because they did not want black children to attend. Some white families took their children out of public schools and sent them to private schools. By 1960, in spite of the Supreme Court decision, less than one percent of black children in the South attended school with white children.