Minimum 300 words. Explain how one famous Supreme Court decision or one landmark
ID: 1163937 • Letter: M
Question
Minimum 300 words. Explain how one famous Supreme Court decision or one landmark piece of legislation has helped the cause of African Americans, women, gays, or another minority group. Include the history of mistreatment of the group in question, the details of the law, and how the plight of the group it affected has improved.Minimum 300 words. Explain how one famous Supreme Court decision or one landmark piece of legislation has helped the cause of African Americans, women, gays, or another minority group. Include the history of mistreatment of the group in question, the details of the law, and how the plight of the group it affected has improved.
Minimum 300 words. Explain how one famous Supreme Court decision or one landmark piece of legislation has helped the cause of African Americans, women, gays, or another minority group. Include the history of mistreatment of the group in question, the details of the law, and how the plight of the group it affected has improved.
Explanation / Answer
Before 1954 African Americans were not allowed to share same buses, schools and other public facilities as whites. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Brown v. Board of Education was one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement, and helped establish the precedent that "separate-but-equal" education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all.
The Fourteenth Amendment addresses many aspects of citizenship and the rights of citizens. The most commonly used - and frequently litigated - phrase in the amendment is "equal protection of the laws".
By the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools, and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.
In the case that would become most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka’s all-white elementary schools. In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called "equal protection clause" of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
When Brown’s case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” as segregated schools are “inherently unequal.” As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being “deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.”
By overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine, the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education had set the legal precedent that would be used to overturn laws enforcing segregation in other public facilities. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education marked a turning point in the history of race relations in the United States. On May 17, 1954, the Court stripped away constitutional sanctions for segregation by race, and made equal opportunity in education the law of the land.
Nearly 90 percent of school-age children attend public schools today - public schools that now serve more students of color than white students. Those schools shape our society. We all lose when we are separated by race. We should celebrate the changes for which civil rights activists worked and the bravery of students like Linda Brown. But we should also remember that they paid a high cost and worked for decades.