The Supreme Court`s Ruling in Brown Vs Board of Education Answers

The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, citing the U.S. Supreme Court`s precedent in Plessy v. Ferguson. [21] Judge Walter Huxman wrote the advisory opinion for the three-judge panel of the district court, which contained nine «findings of fact» based on the evidence presented at trial. Although finding number eight concluded that segregation in public education had an adverse effect on black children, the court denied the remedy on the grounds that Topeka`s black and white schools were essentially the same in terms of buildings, transportation, curricula, and teachers` academic qualifications. [22] [23] This statement would be explicitly cited in the subsequent Supreme Court opinion on this case. [24] Segregation is the practice of requiring separate housing, education and other services for people of colour. Segregation was repeatedly enacted in 18th and 19th century America, with some believing that blacks and whites could not coexist. As the . Virginia had one of the accompaniment cases in Brown involving Prince Edward County schools. Among the main opponents of the Brown decision was U.S. Senator Harry F.

Byrd, who led the Byrd Organization and promised a strategy of massive resistance. Governor Thomas Stanley, a member of the Byrd Organization, appointed the Gray Commission, 32 Democrats led by Senator Garland Gray, to investigate the matter and make recommendations. The Commission recommended that municipalities have «broad discretion» to comply with the new legal requirements. However, in 1956, a special session of the Virginia legislature passed a legislative package that allowed the governor to simply close all schools under federal court desegregation orders. In early 1958, newly elected Governor J. Lindsay Almond closed public schools in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Warren counties instead of complying with desegregation orders, leaving 10,000 children out of school despite the efforts of various parent groups. However, he ruled when the Virginia Supreme Court ruled on Lee Jackson`s holiday that the closures violated the state constitution, and a panel of federal judges ruled that they violated the U.S. Constitution. In early February 1959, Arlington County (which was also the subject of an NAACP lawsuit and had lost its elected school board due to other parts of the Stanley Plan) and Norfolk schools were peacefully abolished. Soon, all counties except Prince Edward County were reopened and integrated. This took the extreme step of not allocating funds to its school system, forcing all public schools to close, even though Prince Edward County provided tuition fees to all students, regardless of race, that could be used for private, non-denominational education. Because there were no private schools for blacks in the county, black children in the county between 1959 and 1963 had to either leave the county to receive an education or not receive an education.

All private schools in the region remained racially separate. This lasted until 1964, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Prince Edward County`s decision to provide tuition to private schools that accepted only whites violated the equality clause of the 14th Amendment, in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County. [64] Also in 1957, Florida`s reaction was mixed. Its legislator adopted an interposition resolution condemning the decision and declaring it null and void. But Florida Governor LeRoy Collins, although he joined the protest against the court`s decision, refused to sign it, arguing that the attempt to overturn the verdict should be made using legal methods. Despite the Plessy Supreme Court decision and similar cases, many people continued to lobby for the repeal of Jim Crow and other racially discriminatory laws. One particular organization that fought for racial equality was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909. For the first 20 years of its existence, it sought to persuade Congress and other legislative bodies to pass laws that would protect African Americans from lynching and other acts of racism. However, beginning in the 1930s, the NAACP`s Legal Defense and Education Fund turned to the courts to make progress in combating legally sanctioned discrimination.

From 1935 to 1938, the legal branch of the NAACP was headed by Charles Hamilton Houston. Houston, along with Thurgood Marshall, developed a strategy to attack Jim Crow laws by attacking them where they were perhaps weakest – in education. While Marshall played a crucial role in all of the cases listed below, Houston was head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, while Murray v. Maryland and Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada has been decided. After Houston returned to private practice in 1938, Marshall became head of the fund and used it to investigate cases of Sweat v. Maler and McLaurin v. Oklahoma Board of Regents of Higher Education. Many northern cities also had de facto segregation policies that led to a significant gap in educational resources between black and white communities. In Harlem, New York, for example, not a single new school had been built since the turn of the century, and there was not a single kindergarten, even as the Second Great Migration led to overcrowding of existing schools. Existing schools tended to be dilapidated and staffed with inexperienced teachers. Northern officials denied segregation, but Brown helped boost activism among African-American parents like Mae Mallory, who, with NAACP support, launched a successful lawsuit against the city and state of New York over Brown`s principles.

Mallory and thousands of other parents increased the pressure of the lawsuit with a school boycott in 1959. During the boycott, some of the first freedom schools of the time were founded. The city responded to the campaign by allowing more open transfers to high-quality, historically white schools. (New York`s African-American community and segregation activists in the North in general, however, were now grappling with the problem of white flight.) [65] [66] During segregation, it was common for black schools to have fewer resources and worse facilities than white schools, despite the equality required by the «separate but equal» doctrine.