Brown Vs Board Of Education Vs Education

Brian Collins
2/1/18
Period 8
Research Draft
Although the African Americans deserved immediate integration, at the time slow integration of public schools in America would have eased the tension and made integration easier in most states.
Following the Civil War, the United States passed the Thirteenth Amendment into the Constitution in 1865, abolishing slavery. America ratified the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, giving equal protection of all people under the law. Even with the ratification of these amendments, racial discrimination grew in the United States. Many Southern states passed laws segregating blacks and whites in public spaces such as restaurants, trains, and schools (Shelley, background). In 1896, the Supreme Court upheld the

Board of Education case was over, integration became the next step in creating an equal education and protection under the law in public schools. With the issue of the doctrine “separate but equal” taken control of, the government had to figure out a way to integrate the students safely. Brown vs. Board of Education ruled that public schools will integrate "with all deliberate speed." The deliberate speed doctrine of Brown vs. Board of Education allowed a delay in the desegregation of public schools, this Doctrine was not applied equally to the desegregation of public recreational facilities by the court of appeals for the sixth circuit in the case of Watson vs. City of Memphis. This lead to restraining the city from controlling public parks and facilities based on race (Duke Law Journal). Though in Brown vs. Board they ruled the doctrine of ‘deliberate speed,’ Fourteen years later in the case Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools must come to an end "at once" (Adams-Wade, Norma). At the Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education case, Jack Greenberg, the civil rights lawyer and Director-Counsel of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal defense Fund, declared, “We’ll ask immediate integration. We will not wait for the close of the school year or even until the end of the semester. Every Southern state will be affected.” Greenberg’s arguments lead to the decision for instantaneous change (Sibley,

Holmes County Board of Education decision caused a lot of problems in southern states especially Virginia, Texas, and Arkansas (Huston, Luther A.). In Virginia, there was the “Massive Resistance” of desegregation in their public schools. White politicians and voters resisted integration even with Brown vs. Board of Education already decided. The white politicians fought to maintain the school’s system of segregation in place by closing several public schools. One county’s PTA even stated that, "as the lesser of two evils, the end of public education, rather than unsegregated schools" They were more willing to end public education all together before they desegregated their schools (Muse, Benjamin). Texas has had segregation in their constitution for more than eighty years. Texas' system allows for no discrimination but does allowed the separation of races, according to the Supreme Court's original ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education it was “the evil of discrimination and not segregation per se that is condemned by the United States Constitution.” According to Luther A. Huston, “If Texas had to abolish segregation it should be a gradual adjustment in view of the complexities of the problem.” Texas had too long of a history of segregation for them to just give it up overnight. Texas needed time to ease into the new environment of integrated public schooling (Huston, Luther). In Arkansas, violence was especially present with the integration of the Little