Summary Of Imagine This Was Your School

Imagine that you were walking down the sidewalk constantly having to be cautious because you could be jumped at any given time. Imagine that you couldn’t get a good education and were forced to go to a bad school. Imagine you turned 18 and you couldn’t vote for an official you felt extremely strong about. Imagine that you were denied your rights because of your skin color. Well, this was what happened to African-American people throughout the 50’s and 60’s as they faced constant discrimination. In the article “Imagine This Was Your School” by Teri Kanefield she talks about an African-American girl in the 50’s who had to go to a bad school because she wasn’t white. She decided to protest so laws can be made to stop segregation. This is just

She is one of the many black students who are in segregated schools. While the white kids have their own school the black kids have their school which is worse in every way. Their education is not as good as the white kids get because all of their textbooks are old and the school itself is crummy. According to the text, Barbara thought about having a strike to show the schools that they would not go to school as long as schools were segregated. The text said, “One night, after Barbara said her prayers, an idea came to her: a strike. If she and her classmates refused to go to school, the school board would have to do something…” (Kanefield, 17). People from all around ridiculed her and other African-American students who protested against the government. The protests seem like a failure but they refused to give up. According to Kanefield, Barbara called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and convinced two lawyers to come down Farmville, where she lived. They said they would file a lawsuit as long as the kids would integrate into the other schools. They agreed. After that, something happened that exceeded everybody’s expectations. The lawsuit went to the Supreme Court and the case was called Brown v. Board of Education.

The African-American people are a group of people that have been segregated against since very early America. They had no rights and were slaves until Abraham Lincoln made the United States slavery-free. But the south enforced Jim Crow laws that decreased black rights. They progressively started to gain their complete rights through hard work. It started with Brown v. Board of Education which was mentioned in the paragraph before. This event took place in 1954. Not too much later, in 1955, Rosa Parks was sitting on a bus. When a group of white people could not find seats, they told Rosa and a few other black people to get out of the seat. History.com said “...the bus driver instructed Parks and three other blacks to give up their seats. Parks refused and was arrested” (Civil Rights Movement, Rosa Parks). She did something that many people were too scared to do, and she was one of the people who started the march for freedom. A bit later on in 1957, nine African-American students integrated into a white school in Little Rock, Arkansas therefore giving them the nickname “The Little Rock Nine.” They faced a lot of criticism and “...arrived at Central High School to begin classes but were instead met by