impact of brown vs board of education on society

For all Americans, school was in, and there’d be no cutting class. Board set the terms of engagement that would help form the philosophical underpinnings of the civil rights movement.īlack education was central to Brown, but the larger, wider mission of the ruling was the education of the nation. and the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, Brown v. Board, but the decision has another, wider educational dimension the ruling ushered in another phase of America's own painful learning process on modern-day race relations. and an A.D.”Įducational opportunities for minorities were at the heart of Brown v. “For African Americans, it divides American history into a B.C.

Theodore Shaw, the associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, may have put it best in a recent story on Brown in The New York Times. There was probably no other single decision that so starkly separated the old world from the new. With Brown - literally a two-decision bombshell that spread into 1955 - the stage was set for no less than the future of the nation. The fundamental right to knowledge, information - in an increasingly complex age - was judicially reaffirmed to be one for all Americans. Ferguson, the 1896 ruling that had long institutionalized the separate-but-equal doctrine in American life. In one lightning stroke, Brown soundly repudiated Plessy v. The Supreme Court, ruling on combined cases from Topeka, Kan., to Clarendon County, S.C., handed down the Brown decision on May 17, 1954. Other black families joined in the litigation, and in 1951 the NAACP requested an injunction banning segregation of Topeka's schools. When Linda was rebuffed, she became the lead plaintiff in the case that bears her family name. The NAACP, looking for a test case to use to fight segregation, got the Brown family to take Linda to Sumner and ask to register her as a student. In 1950, Linda Brown, a 7-year-old Topeka, Kan., schoolgirl generally unaware of racial animus, attended Monroe Elementary, a predominantly black school - forced to take an 80-minute trek that included a six-block walk through the potentially dangerous switchyards of the Rock Island railroad line, despite living closer to Sumner Elementary, attended by white students. Like all pivotal judicial statements, Brown has its origins in a human dilemma.

A survey of enrollment statistics reveals that, in several important ways, the school segregation Brown was enacted to end more than two generations ago remains a fact of life today, in some parts of the country worse now than it was at the time of the decisions.

Impact of brown vs board of education on society