Brown vs. Board of Education
BROWN VS. BOARD OF EDUCATION As we all know our educational system and the way we all go to school today isn’t the same way it was 50+ years ago. Both white and blacks didn’t go to the same schools. Blacks weren’t even allowed to use the same bathroom because the color of their skin. Regardless of their skin color should all children have the same rights and shouldn’t they be able to attend the same schools? This was the main question before the United States Supreme Court in 1954. In Topeka, Kansas, a black third-grader named Linda Brown had to walk one mile through a railroad switchyard to get to her black elementary school, even though a white elementary school was only seven blocks away. Linda’s father, Oliver Brown, tried to enroll her in the white elementary school, but her application was denied due to the color of her skin. Brown went to McKinley Burnett, the head of Topeka’s branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and asked for help. The NAACP was eager to assist the Browns. The Brown’s felt that the decision of the Board violated the Constitution, alleging that the segregated school system deprived Linda Brown of the equal protection of the laws required under the Fourteenth Amendment. With Brown’s complaint, it had a right plaintiff at the right time. Other black parents joined Brown in the right as well. The U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas heard Brown’s case from June 25-26, 1951. At the trial the NAACP argued that segregated schools sent the message to black children that they were inferior to whites ultimately making the segregated schools unequal as they had been made out to be in the Plessy vs. Ferguson trial that was decided by the Supreme Court in 1896. The Board of Education’s defense was that because segregation in Topeka and in many other states and cities pervaded many other aspects of life, segregated schools simply prepared black children for the segregation they would face during