financial aid for higher education. Pell Grants, state loans, and other sources of financial aid, including private philanthropy, have increased during the past three decades but Gray (2004) maintains ôthe need has not been fully metö (3).
For African Americans, education has longed represented the ôway our and up!ö (Gray 2004, 2). Despite an increase in the number of African Americans graduating high school and being represented in higher education, the 11% of students enrolled today is below the 14.5% of African Americans in society that are college-age (Gray 2004). As such, the modern needs of African American students are still unfulfilled. The United Negro College Fund maintains that the goal of the African American community must be ôover-representationö in higher education (Gray 2004, 2). In order to understand the importance of education to African Americans today, one must understand some of the reasons behind the progress of the past century.
Historically, the United States Supreme Court has been an instrumental American institution in the struggle for freedom and civil rights for African Americans. However, social change is often slow, with advances in civil rights moving ahead in small steps rather than large strides. Two landmark Supreme Court decisions that illustrate this process were handed down nearly six decades apart; Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas (1954).
Plessy v. Ferguson is generally viewed as legitimizing segregation by affirming the ôseparate but equalö doctrine of race. At issue was the constitutionality of a Louisiana Law that mandated equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored raced on all pa
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