The majority opinion of seven to one was written by Justice Henry Billings Brown. Justice Brewer was not present. The court ruled that the Louisiana law violated neither the Thirteenth nor the Fourteenth Amendment. According to the court, the Thirteenth Amendment applied only to slavery and the Fourteenth Amendment sought to give African Americans no social equality, but only political and civil equality with whites. This reasoning will dominate political debate and court decisions for the next sixty years. In the majority decision, Brown J. wrote, “Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or abolish distinctions based on physical differences.” In other words, legislation cannot change public opinion, “and trying to do so can only exacerbate the difficulties of the current situation.” Reflecting the common bias of the majority of the country at the time, Brown argued: “If the civil and political rights of the two races are equal, one cannot be civilly or politically inferior to the other. If one race is socially inferior to the other, the Constitution of the United States cannot place it on the same level. The court said the Louisiana law was an appropriate exercise of the state`s “police power” enacted to promote the public good. The announcement made international headlines and many newspapers saw the decision as a confirmation of Justice Harlan`s dissenting opinion in the 1896 Plessy case. As new research has shown that segregation of students by “race” is detrimental to them, even when the facilities were the same, “separate but equal” facilities were found unconstitutional in a series of Supreme Court decisions under Chief Justice Earl Warren, beginning with Brown v. School Board in 1954. [7] [8] [9] However, the subsequent repeal of segregation laws and practices was a lengthy process.
which lasted much of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and included federal legislation (notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964) and numerous lawsuits. To what extent is a society in which people are judged by their skin color and divided into groups civilized? The Jim Crow laws of the late 1800s and early 1900s contributed to the collapse of our society and destroyed the work of rebuilding in the South. They widened racial disparities and allowed states to elevate blacks as an inferior race. When the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled against racial segregation, ruling that racial segregation was deprived of the rights granted by the 14th Amendment, many common practices were forced to change. The civil rights movement also helped abolish these practices, but not without great violent resistance. For nearly 60 years, segregation has legally divided the peoples of our country and created racial inequality that has had a devastating effect on society. The history of segregation and the role of the courts in it reminds us that the Supreme Court has not always interpreted the Constitution in the fairest and most advantageous way, nor can it always interpret it.
When this happens, the citizens of the United States must be willing to unite to overcome the law, if necessary to save equality and justice. Sipuel v. The Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma is a case of the Supreme Court of the United States concerning the racial segregation of African Americans by the University of Oklahoma and the application of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Brown case was actually a combination of five cases involving segregation in public schools in Kansas, Delaware, Virginia, South Carolina and the District of Columbia. Oliver Brown, the father of lead plaintiff Linda Brown, filed a lawsuit on her behalf after Linda was denied admission to an all-white public school in Topeka, Kansas. The entire public school system suffers as well. The law provides not only that all must be taught, but that all must be taught together. Not only should they receive the same amounts of knowledge, but they should all receive it in the same way. All should approach the same common well together; Nor can there be an exclusive source for one person or class. School is the small world where the child is trained for the larger world of life.
And since, according to our institutions, all classes meet without distinction of colour in the exercise of civil functions, they should all meet, without distinction of colour, at school – beginning with those relations of equality which the Constitution and the laws promise to all. The Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision, saying the separate school was not permissible, both because of quantitative differences between institutions and because of intangible factors, such as its isolation from most of the future lawyers with whom its graduates would interact. In the United States, the transition from segregation to the integration of public schools did not happen overnight. De Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 at Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, a shift in perceptions of race relations slowly found its way into the education system. Over time, minorities have progressed towards equal opportunities to attend the school of their choice. What began as a glimmer of hope has turned into a flood of reality thanks to the courage and perseverance of students and lawyers. The main legal decisions concerning education are presented here. In the landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated institutions, if they were equal, did not violate the Constitution.
Segregation, according to the court, is not discrimination. In March 1850, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools did not deepen or perpetuate racial caste and discrimination. Racial bias, wrote Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, “is not created by law and is unlikely to be changed by law.” He recognized that all citizens should have “equality before the law,” as Sumner had argued, but that doesn`t mean there can`t be separate schools for black children. It would not go as far as the landmark Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, at the beginning of the civil rights movement, that the majority of the Supreme Court would essentially agree with Harlan`s view in Plessy v. Ferguson. “I don`t see how we can differentiate one group from others these days and say they`re not entitled to exactly the same treatment as everyone else,” Warren said. “Right now, my instincts and timid feelings will lead me to say that in these cases we should tolerate the practice of segregation in public schools,” he said. Finally, in 1992, the Court proposed that he invest in local politics until all the effects of past discriminatory behaviour had been eliminated. In United States v. Fordice, the court noted that while the University of Mississippi is currently pursuing “racially neutral policies,” the effects of its previous discriminatory practices remain. For example, access standards in historically white institutions were higher than those in historically black institutions, a policy that was “suspicious because it appeared as a means of maintaining segregation.” The court also mentioned that the state maintained duplicate programs that were eerily close to the old “separate but equal” system of the state.
