Louisiana State Law School Essay

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation does not constitute unlawful discrimination. Previously, the state of Louisiana had established a law that required separate railway cars for white and black people. Homer Adolph Plessy, who was seven-eighths white, took a seat in a "whites only" car of a Louisiana train. He refused to move to the car reserved for blacks and was arrested. The Supreme Court decided that Louisiana state law is within constitutional boundaries. The justices based their decision on the separate-but-equal doctrine, that separate facilities for blacks and whites did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment so long as they were equal. In 1935, the NAACP begins challenging segregation in

The Court argued that the separate school would be inferior in a number of areas, including faculty, course variety, library facilities, legal writing opportunities, and overall prestige. The Court also found that the mere separation from the majority of law students harmed students' abilities to compete in the legal arena. Sipuel v. Board of Regents of University of Oklahoma in 1948, ruled students could not be denied entrance to a state law school solely because of race. Ada Lois Sipuel was denied admission to the University of Oklahoma law school because she was African American. Sipuel sued the school, alleging that because the state of Oklahoma did not provide a comparable facility for African American students under the doctrine of “separate but equal,” she would have to be admitted to the university. This was a landmark case litigated by the NAACP that helped to pave the road for Brown v. Board of Education. As seen in the film, Separate but Equal, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP approached Brown v. Board of Education with a vastly different