Topeka, Kansas: ten year-old Linda Carol Brown and her six year old sister Terry Lynn cannot attend the nearby white Summer School, seven blocks from their house, because Jim Crow racial laws are dividing the United States. They have to walk six blocks and navigate the perilous Rock Island Railroad Switchyard to arrive to the bus stop and take a bus to black Monroe School, 1.6 km away. It is 1951, not a very remote past. The two children’s father was the plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education, a Supreme Court case establishing the unconstitutionality of public school segregation, an important success of the Civil Rights Movement against Jim Crow racial laws. This article is going to discover how this ruling paved the way to the integration of African-American people in US mainstream society.
Before 1951 United States’ society was dominated by racial segregation which initiated in 1896 with the United States Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson. This case declared the notorious principle of “separate but equal” as
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The “9 from Little Rock” were continuously bullied, sometimes in a violent manner, and for this reason each of them was assigned a soldier from the national Air Forces as a bodyguard. With Montgomery bus boycott on 1st December 1955, the civil rights movement started and its pioneer was Martin Luther King. Thanks to U.S. President Johnson, the Civil Rights Act was voted in 1964 and any type of racial discrimination was finally banned not only in public spaces but also in working and commercial relations. In 1965 the Voting Rights Act allowed African-American people to vote. School segregation, even if banned by law, was still a social issue in some places until the 70s. Little by little it lost its importance, even though nowadays some American tribunals still face cases on desegregation. (Sarat,