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Plessy V. Ferguson & Brown V Board Of Education

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Nicholas Tovar
Mrs. Holt
Legal Systems
02 October 2017
Unit 1 Essay: Plessy v. Ferguson & Brown v. Board of Education The landmark power known as judicial review has had many lasting effects on laws known as precedents, from permitting the separation of two races to requiring that all defendants receive attorneys. Precedents regard racial segregation are the basis of what the cases Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education established when viewed as two components of one story. Plessy v. Ferguson resulted in the “separate, but equal” doctrine allowing African Americans and white Americans to stay separate. Brown v. …show more content…

Board of Education, resulted in the overturning of the “separate, but equal” doctrine under the realization that separation is what took away the equality. In the early 1950s, schools in Topeka, Kansas segregated people by race, leaving Linda Brown and her sister to walk through a hazardous railroad switchyard to get to the bus stop for their school. There was a school closer to where they lived, however, it was an all white school. Linda and her family saw the segregation systems as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and took it to court. Federal district courts claimed the segregation was harmful to African American youths, however due to the similar qualities the all-black and all-white schools shared, it was deemed fully constitutional under the “separate, but equal” doctrine. The case was taken to the Supreme Court and the court expressed that even though the schools shared similar facilities, segregated schools could never be equal. As such, the “separate, but equal” doctrine was overruled as it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This decision resulted in the precedent that any laws that segregated people, no matter how similar their facilities may be, was unconstitutional.(Paraphrased from www.streetlaw.org) One way the two cases are linked is through their subject matter; that being segregation and racial discrimination. An article written by Alex

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