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The Significance of Brown v. Board of Education Essay

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In 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States was confronted with the controversial Brown v. Board of Education case that challenged segregation in public education. Brown v. Board of Education was a landmark Supreme Court case because it called into question the morality and legality of racial segregation in public schools, a long-standing tradition in the Jim Crow South, and threatened to have monumental and everlasting implications for blacks and whites in America. In 1951, Oliver L. Brown, his wife Darlene, and eleven other African American parents filed a class-action lawsuit against the Board of Education of Topeka on behalf of their twenty children for denying colored children the right to attend segregated white schools and …show more content…

President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his famous “Four Freedoms” speech that “Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them” but his statements were very contradictory to how African Americans were truly being treated in the U.S. (Roosevelt, 273). After hearing complaints from African American veterans about segregation, FDR signed Executive Order 8802 in 1941 which created the Fair Employment Practices Committee to ensure that equal opportunity was given to people of color in federal jobs, yet it still did not desegregate the armed forces. It would take seven more years until President Harry S. Truman would sign Executive Order 9981 to desegregate the armed forces on July 26, 1948. Later that year in December, the United Nations issued their Universal Declaration of Human Rights which decreed that “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political, or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status…” which was important because it was the voice of the international community against discrimination based on

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