Issue of Brown v. Board of Education

In 1954, the United States Supreme Court decided the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education. The Court, by a 9-0 vote, held that the segregation of school children based on race violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court relied heavily on the work of social scientists, who found that segregation generated a feeling of inferiority among African-American students. This paper will analyze that issue, both in the context of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and in the context of modern American society.

Segregation started not long after slavery ended. After the Civil War, Congress sought to ensure the rights of freed slaves by passing three amendments to the U.S. Constitution: the Thirteenth, which ended slavery; the Fourteenth, which barred discrimination based on race; and the Fifteenth, which enfranchised African-American males. Congress also enacted several other measures that benefited African-Americans (Barker and McCorry, p. 94).

Those advances came to a halt after the 1876 presidential election. By agreeing to end military rule in the South, Republican candidate Rutherford Hayes won the support of Congress, which decided the election because of a tie in electoral college votes. Whites soon returned to power in the former Confederacy, rolling back almost all of the gains made by African-Americans. Southern whites then went about building a rigid social structure that separated the races, especially in the schoo

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ts on young children. Clark asked children to pick a doll, black or white. Most African-American children preferred the white doll, leading Clark to conclude that segregation had fostered a feeling a self-hatred (Cose, p. 71). Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that segregation of school children "because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." Four decades later, much has changed in the American landscape thanks to Brown and its progeny. However, much of the promise of Brown has not been realized. State-mandated segregation has ended, yet blacks and whites still mostly live apart and mostly attend school apart. The Supreme Court lost its appetite for desegregation during the 1970s, when it rejected a plan to integrate Detroit's schools, which were 89 percent black (Kozoll, p. 198-201). Without integration, many blacks are saddled with inferior schools because a disproportionate number of African-Americans reside in poor urban areas. The disparity in funding between the inner city and suburban communities is glaring. Since Brown, the black middle class has doubled, but many African-Americans still

Category: Government - I