Brown Vs Board Of Education Decision example essay topic

... ents has steadily declined since 1988. In fact, the report concludes that school integration in the United States is 'lower in 2000 than in 1970, before busing for racial balance began. ' In the South, home to the majority of America's black population, there is now less school integration than there was in 1970. The Harvard report concluded, 'At the beginning of the 21st century, American schools are now 12 years into the process of continuous re-segregation. ' Today, America's schools are so heavily segregated that more than two-thirds of black and Hispanic students are in schools where a majority of the students are not white.

Also today, most of the nation's white children attend a school that is almost 80 percent white (NAACP). Hispanics are now the most segregated group of students in the nation because they live in highly concentrated clusters. Fifty years later, the Brown vs. Board of Education decision looks different. The real impact of the legal, political, and cultural eruption that changed America is not exactly what it first appeared to be. Segregated housing patterns and an increase in the number of black and Hispanic immigrants have concentrated minorities in poverty-stricken areas of big cities and created a new reality of public schools segregated by race and class. Today, it is hard to even remember America before Brown vs. Board of Education because the ruling completely changed the nation.

Before the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, the federal government lent its power to enforcing the laws of segregation under an 1896 Supreme Court ruling that permitted 'separate but equal' treatment of blacks and whites. Blacks and whites who tried to integrate factories, unions, public buses and trains, parks, the military, restaurants, department stores, and more found that the power of the federal government was with the segregationists. Before Brown vs. Board of Education, the federal government had struggled even to pass a law banning lynching (Cozzens). But after the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was a violation of the Constitution, the federal attitude toward enforcing second-class citizenship for blacks shifted on the scale of a change in the ocean's tide or a movement in the plates of the continents. Once the highest court in the land said equal treatment for all did not allow for segregation, then the lower courts, the Justice Department, and federal prosecutors, as well as the FBI, all switched sides (Patterson). They didn't always act to promote integration, but they no longer used their power to stop it.

An irreversible shift had begun, and it was the direct result of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. The change in the attitude of federal officials created a wave of anticipation among black people, who became alert to the possibility of achieving the long-desired goal of racial equality. The year after the Brown vs. Board of Education case, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a racially segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. That led to a year long bus boycott and the emergence of massive, nonviolent protests for equal rights.

That same year, a 27 year-old man by the name of Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the nation's prophet of civil rights for all Americans (NAACP). Kings grandfather had earlier led the protests resulting in Atlanta's first black high school and his father was a minister and community leader as well. King encouraged others to organize peaceful protests. In 1960 a group of black college students rose to King's challenge and organized a sit-in at a local Woolworth's lunch counter designated "whites only" in Greensboro, South Carolina.

News reports of the sit-in and the resultant harassment the students endured, inspired a sit-in movement that spread across the nation to combat segregation (Patterson). Black Americans were taking full and long awaited advantage of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Stand like Rosa Parks became more common. Blacks were determined to get their freedom and were stopping at nothing to get their word heard. This change in black and white attitudes toward race also had an impact on culture. Churches began to grapple with the Christian and Jewish principles of loving thy neighbor, even if thy neighbor had a different color skin.

Major league baseball teams no longer feared a fan revolt if they allowed more than one black player on a team. Black writers, actors, athletes, and musicians, ranging from James Baldwin to the Supremes and Muhammad Ali, began to cross over into the mainstream of American culture (Cozzens). The other side of the change in racial attitudes was white support for equal rights. College-educated young white people in the 1960's often defined themselves by their willingness to embrace racial equality. Bob Dylan sang about the changing times as answers 'blowing in the wind.

' Movies like 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' found major audiences among all races, and previously all-white private colleges and universities began opening their doors to black students (Cozzens). The resulting arguments over affirmative action in college admissions led to the Supreme Court's 1978 decision in the University of California vs. Bakke case, which outlawed the use of quotas, and its recent ruling that the University of Michigan can take race into account as one factor in admitting students to its law school. The court has also had to deal with affirmative action in the business world, in both hiring and contracts (Patterson). All of these questions were a result the questions of equality in the Constitution raised by the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. However, the most important legacy of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, by far, is the growth of an educated black middle class. The number of black people graduating from high school and college has soared since Brown vs. Board of Education, and the incomes of blacks have climbed steadily as a result.

Home ownership and investment in the stock market among black Americans have rocketed since the 1980's. The political and economic force of that black middle class continues to bring America closer to the vision of racial equality that Dr. King might have dreamed of 50 years ago. The Supreme Court's May 17, 1954, ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education remains a landmark legal decision. This decision is huge not only because it changed the history of America forever but also because it was a huge step for blacks in the United States. This decision would eventually lead to the full freedom of blacks in America. Brown vs. Board of Education is the 'Big Bang' of all American history in the 20th century.

Bibliography

Cozzens, Lisa. "Brown vs. Board of Education". Watson. org. 1995.
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. "Brown vs. Board of Education Matters to All Americans". Brown Chronicles. 2003.
Patterson, James. "Brown vs. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (Pivotal Moments in American History)". Oxford University Press., 2001.
The National Center For Public Research. "Brown vs. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) (US SC+)".
Supreme Court of The United States. 1982.