LAD #37: Brown vs. Board of Education

            The 1950's in America were a time of terrible discrimination against blacks, this discrimination even ranged to schools. Even though white schools were supposed to be equal in quality to black schools, this was not the case. Black children schools were in a very bad shape from the buildings to the books. For third grader Linda Brown even getting to school was a major problem. Her black school was a mile away and a very dangerous walk. Her father tried to get her enrolled to the closer white school but he was turned down. The NAACP found this problem as a good opportunity to protest and challenge the terrible discrimination between black and white schools. The NAACP were defeated in Kansas, which is where Brown's school was located but then the case was moved up to the Supreme Court in 1951. In the Supreme Court this case was combined with other similar cases. "The Court had to make its decision based not on whether or not the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment had desegregated schools in mind when they wrote the amendment in 1868, but based on whether or not desegregated schools deprived black children of equal protection of the law when the case was decided, in 1954". In the end the court's unanimous decision was that the idea of separate but equal that came from Plessy vs. Ferguson was unconstitutional. Although this only applied to public schools not other public places. This was a large step towards gaining equality in the school systems, even though there were still not many regulations on discrimination.