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Changes After Desegregation of Public Schools

It is a commonplace of American history of the 1950s and 1960s that the desegregation of public schools mandated by Brown v. Board of Education exerted a dramatic effect on social experience. The civil rights movement of the 1960s emerged in significant part out of that 1954 decision. By and large, the movement focused on where it began: the South, where beginning in the 1880s a whole range of laws meant to exclude blacks from everyday white social experience had been put on the books. The origin of the term describing that dynamic--the Jim Crow laws--is obscure, but the effect was to segregate public venues of all kinds, including transportation. In 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that legislation was powerless to erase what it took to be racial instinct, which was held to belong to a different category from equality before the law (Kluger 73ff). Brown overturned Plessy, the apotheosis of de jure segregation, conceptually collapsing equality before the law specifically guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment into equality in the context of social experience not specifically mentioned by that Amendment.

Education, per Brown, was the experience under review. But it turned out that so was access to public accommodations, the vote, public transportation, housing, and employment opportunities. By the 1960s, projects of social reform sought to close the gap between Brown and well-entrenched patterns of segregated social experience on a range of issue fronts. In the cities of Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, Alabama, Atlanta, and Albany, Georgia, and finally in Memphis, Martin Luther King, Jr., was instrumental in bringing about practical application of racial integration of public accommodations, voting rights for blacks, and equality of employment opportunity. Less well-known, but no less important, than the stirring successes of Dr. King and the movement in the South were their failures in the North in the ...

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Changes After Desegregation of Public Schools. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:24, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1695938.html