Segregation Be Legal
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Louise Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005), a resident of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to obey bus driver James Blake`s request to give up her seat to a white man. She was arrested, her fingerprints were taken and detained. When Parks agreed to have his case challenged, he became a celebratory cause in the fight against Jim Crow laws. Their trial for this act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of the largest and most successful mass segregation movements in history, and placed Martin Luther King Jr., one of the boycott organizers, at the forefront of the civil rights movement, which promoted peaceful protests against Jim Crow laws. Unfortunately, following the Plessy decision in the early twentieth century, the Supreme Court continued to uphold the legality of Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial discrimination. For example, in Cumming v. Richmond (Ga.) County Board of Education (1899), the court refused to issue an injunction preventing a school board from spending taxpayers` money on a white high school when the same school board voted to close a black high school for financial reasons. Furthermore, in Gong Lum v. Rice (1927), the court upheld a school`s decision to exclude a person of Chinese descent from a “white” school. In 1933, the NAACP undertook Hocutt v. Wilson, the first test case of segregation in higher education.
The plaintiff was Thomas R. Hocutt, a student at the North Carolina College for Negroes who had been denied admission to the University of North Carolina School of Pharmacy. Attorneys Conrad O. Pearson and Cecil McCoy sought help from the NAACP after filing a lawsuit. Charles Houston recommended William Hitie to lead the litigation. According to Pearson, “the white bar [present] was unanimous in its praise” of Hasties and his colleagues in litigation, but the case was undermined by the refusal of the president of North Carolina College to publish Hocutt`s transcript. The legal system was directed against black citizens, with former Confederate soldiers working as police officers and judges, making it difficult for African Americans to win cases and ensure they were subject to the black codes. Thurgood Marshall hired Robert L. Carter as a legal assistant at the Legal Defense Fund in 1944 and promoted him to associate counsel in 1945. Carter is a graduate of Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), Howard Law School and earned a Master of Laws degree from Columbia University. He helped prepare briefs in the McLaurin and Sweatt cases and argued McLaurin in Oklahoma and before the Supreme Court. Carter later became Marshall`s chief adviser in the Brown trial.
He recommended the social science strategy, which became a crucial factor in the Brown decision. He also wrote the Brown case brief and presented the argument to the Supreme Court. From 1956 to 1968, he was general counsel of the NAACP. In 1972, President Nixon appointed Carter to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, where he remains a judge. The Wilson administration introduced segregation in federal offices, despite numerous protests from African-American leaders and white progressive groups in the North and Midwest. [33] He appointed segregationist Southern politicians because he firmly believed that racial segregation was in the best interests of black and European Americans. [34] At the Great Reunification of 1913 in Gettysburg, Wilson addressed the crowd on July 4, the half-centenary of Abraham Lincoln`s declaration that “all men are created equal”: In 1971, the court issued more specific instructions on how school districts should fulfill their urgent legal obligations. In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the court announced that the discovery of a racially unbalanced school would trigger scrutiny by the courts, and that the burden of proof was on the district that the racial imbalance was not the result of current or past practices. In addition, the court told the districts that to correct these conditions, they should consider redrawing school boundaries and considering moving students to schools in other parts of the district in order to achieve greater racial parity. However, this formed the basis for subsequent generations to advance racial equality and racial segregation.
Chafe argued that the essential places at the beginning of the change were institutions, especially black churches, which functioned as centers of community building and political discussion. In addition, some all-black communities such as Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and Ruthville, Virginia, served as sources of pride and inspiration for black society as a whole. Over time, resistance and open disregard for existing repressive laws grew until it reached a boiling point in the aggressive, large-scale activism of the civil rights movement of the 1950s. [52] School segregation in the North was also an important issue. [69] In Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, cities in the southern states imposed school segregation, even though state laws prohibited their practice. [69] Indiana also required school segregation under state law. [69] In the 1940s, however, NAACP lawsuits rapidly reduced segregation in the southern regions of Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. [69] In 1949, Indiana also officially repealed its school segregation law. [69] The most common form of segregation in the northern states came from anti-miscegenation laws.
[70] Racial segregation became law in most parts of the southern United States until the civil rights movement. These laws, known as Jim Crow laws, forced the separation of facilities and services, prohibited intermarriage, and denied the right to vote. The court`s altered perception of segregation and its decision in Brown I were influenced by UNESCO`s 1950 statement, The Race Question, as well as an article by Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), which denounced earlier attempts to scientifically justify racism. Another document cited by the Supreme Court is research by educational psychologists Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark. The Clarks` “doll test” studies presented the Supreme Court with substantial arguments about how segregation affected the mental state of black schoolchildren. Massey and Denton suggested that the leading cause of poverty among African Americans is segregation. This segregation created the black urban ghettos of the inner city that create poverty traps and prevent blacks from escaping the lower class. It is sometimes claimed that these neighborhoods have institutionalized an inner-city black culture that is negatively stigmatized and dictates the economic situation of the black community. Sociolinguist William Labov[99] argues that persistent segregation supports the use of African-American English (AAE) while endangering its speakers. Although EAA is stigmatized, sociolinguists who study it find it to be a legitimate dialect of English that is as systematic as any other. [100] Arthur Spears argues that there is no inherent educational disadvantage in speaking PPA and that it exists in colloquial, more standardized forms.
[101] The Supreme Court judges who met to decide the case realized that they were deeply divided on the issues raised. While most wanted to overthrow Plessy and declare segregation in public schools unconstitutional, they had various reasons for doing so. Unable to find a solution before June 1953 (the end of the Court`s mandate 1952-1953), the Tribunal decided to reconsider the case in December 1953. Meanwhile, Chief Justice Fred Vinson passed away and was replaced by Governor Earl Warren of California. After the case was heard again in 1953, Chief Justice Warren was able to do something his predecessor had failed to do, and that was get all justices to accept a unanimous decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. On May 14, 1954, he delivered the opinion of the Tribunal and stated: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of `separate but equal` has no place. Segregated educational institutions are inherently unequal. For the respondent: Topeka`s lawyers argued that the separate schools for non-whites at Topeka were equal in all respects and fully agreed with Plessy v. Ferguson. The buildings, curricula offered, and quality of teachers were quite comparable, and because some federal funds for Native Americans applied only to non-white schools, some programs for minority children were actually better than those offered in white schools. They pointed to Plessy`s decision to support segregation, arguing that they had created “equal facilities” in good faith, even though the races were separated. In addition, they argued that racial discrimination does not harm children.
Racial segregation takes two forms. De jure segregation enforced racial segregation by law and was the form imposed by slavery laws before the Civil War and by black codes and Jim Crow laws after the war. De jure segregation was prohibited by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. [10] In some areas, however, segregation has already been used by the Warren Court in decisions such as the Board of Education`s Brown v. decision, which abolished school segregation in the United States.