Supreme Court Cases Dbq

The nation has significantly improved throughout history, in the years 1857-1954, three main supreme court cases had changed the perspectives of others by giving them a different view of things. Civil liberties, mostly deal with regard to freedom of action and speech which hasn’t always been fair to African-Americans, in history, they have been treated unfairly just due to the color of their skin. They have been segregated primarily throughout history, not having the equal about of civil rights as White-American people. However, the supreme court cases of Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Brown v. Board affected the role of African-Americans and how they weren’t able to own land, sit wherever they would like to sit on a railway

Dred Scott was born a slave in Virginia around 1795, he then lived in the free state of Illinois and in the free territory, where slavery was prohibited under the Missouri Compromise of 1820. However, in 1846, the Scotts sued for their freedom in the Circuit Court of St. Louis, Missouri. They argued that their years of living in free territories had freed them from slavery, they lost that case. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney concluded that making slavery illegal in certain territories, Congress had exceeded its authority under the Constitution, that just because Dred Scott was black he was not considered a citizen and could not sue the federal courts. Moreover, instead of resolving the controversy, the case increased the conflict over slavery in the country (Scott v. Sandford (1857), page 336). In Document 3b, according to Paul Finkelman, it pushed the nation closer to war, that it destroyed any chance of an agreement between the North and South over slavery in the territories. Therefore, the impact of the Dred Scott decision brought the nation closer to the Civil War by opening the Northerners who believed that slavery could be tolerable as long as it stayed in the South and brought them to realize that if they did not stop slavery now, they might never have that chance again. The Dred Scott v. Sandford

Ferguson, there were separate railway cars for white and colored people. Homer Plessy was convicted of sitting in a whites-only car. He had white parents, but since he had black ancestry, he was considered black. He argued that the Louisiana’s Separate Car Act of 1890 violated the Thirteenth Amendment, which required all people to be treated equally under the law. Therefore, the Court upheld this act, however, Justice Henry Brown claims that the abolition of slavery did not prevent states from making legal distinctions between races (Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), page 511). Based on Document 4, Separate Accommodation states that railway companies carrying passengers, they shall provide equal, but separated accommodations for the white, and colored races. Also, in Document 7a, in the chart of Per-Pupil Expenditures in the Selected Southern States, 1939-1940 School year, provides that African American students in Southern areas that they got a lower amount of funds than the White students in the South. Thus, the Plessy v. Ferguson case impacted the South with enforcing segregation in the most aspects of daily life. It upheld the state’s rights to regulate social and economic matters within their borders and even though segregation didn’t disappear overnight, today people of all races can travel and sit next to each other with