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The Pros And Cons Of Brown V Board Of Education

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The Brown V Board of Education case overturned provisions of the Plessy v Ferguson decision of 1896 which allowed “separate but equal” in all public areas including public schools. This case began a spark in the American Civil Rights Movement by demanding public facilities to allow African Americans the same privileges as whites. This case ended tolerance of racial segregation, however, the decision did not succeed in fully desegregating public education, but it definitely started a revolution. In addition to separate but equal, most facilities ignored the requirement, including most school districts which neglected their all black schools. In the early 1950s, NAACP lawyers brought class action lawsuits on behalf of black school students in multiple states including Virginia, Delaware, Kansas and South Carolina, seeking court orders to demand school districts to let black students attend white public schools. One of these class actions, Brown V Board of Education was filed against the Topeka Kansas school board by a man by the name of Oliver Brown, a parent of one of the students that was denied access to Topeka’s white schools. Oliver Brown claimed that Topeka’s racial segregation violated the constitution’s Equal Protection Clause which says “no state shall make or enforce any law which shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”, this amendment did not include prohibiting integration. The federal district court dismissed his claim and ruled that segregation in public schools were “substantially equal enough”. The court negotiated and in the end decided that even if the facilities were equal between white and black schools, racial segregation in schools is “inherently unequal”, meaning it had been unconstitutional. The court later demanded the states to integrate their schools immediately. Brown v. Board of Education case had a major impact on not only the Civil Rights Movement but society as a whole. As we all know, segregation between black and whites has gone on forever. Generations continued to teach their children and explain to them that it was normal, up until these landmark cases began did it become known that it isn’t right to treat others differently based on

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