Jim Crow Law Case Study

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For men of color within the academy, the pathway for opportunities, specifically in access to higher education as students or access to career opportunities as professionals, has always been a more challenging and bumpier road (Cohen & Kisker, 2010). According to Giles (2010), a “chilly” institutional climate while studying and working at predominately White institutions (PWIs) is what most men of color experience. PWIs represent some of the most beautiful imagery, buildings, art, landscape, rich history, ritual, and tradition. However, these bastions of intellectual advancement also struggle with historical legacies and contemporary practices of exclusion and marginality. According to Cohen and Kisker (2010), the original colleges and …show more content…

For example, the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case which upheld the constitutionality of segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. It stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African-American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a Jim Crow car, breaking a Louisiana law. Jim Crow Laws were a system of government-sanctioned racial oppression and segregation in the United States.
Rejecting Plessy’s argument that his constitutional rights were violated, the Court ruled that a state law that “implies merely a legal distinction” between whites and blacks did not conflict with the 13th (Abolishment of Slavery) and14th (Basic Rights of Citizenry). Amendments. Restrictive legislation based on race continued following the Plessy decision, its reasoning was not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. (CITE)
The Brown v. Board of Education decisions of the mid-1950s literally altered the complexion of the body politics of American culture, but left the head, and to a lesser degree, the heart, on the same two-society track, one White and the other non-White (black, brown, red, and yellow), one of “haves,” the other, “have-nots (Taylor & Francis, 2015). Ensuring race-based court cases throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and challenges to desegregation and racial justice-oriented legislation have weakened and watered down many gains of the past 60 years, and repeatedly sounded the death-knell …show more content…

According to institutional data from the Office of Equity and Diversity, Upstate University in particular, struggles to recruit and retain “highly qualified” male candidates of color in the faculty ranks (Office of Equity & Diversity, 2014, p. 1)
This study will look to investigate, identify, and understand the lived experiences of male faculty of color at Upstate University. To do so, a qualitative phenomenological study was designed to dig deep into the research while constantly bracketing to capture the reality or true lived experiences of the participants (Collins, 2000, Creswell, 2007; Van Manen, 1990).
The purpose of phenomenological research is to illuminate the specific, to identify phenomena through how they are perceived by the actors in a situation (Lester,