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... white student, while only $ 17. 04 was spent on black students. The history of black education after the civil war has many different histories. The three main groups that make up this history are southern blacks, southern whites, and northern whites. Whose history it is to tell is a tough question, considering that all groups have a firm stake in the development of black education. All of their ideologies and attitudes toward black education shaped the place of education in the South. (Levering, 1993).
Brown v. Board of Education is considered the most significant civil rights court case of the 20 th century for the legal precedent it set and for the hope it gave to black people throughout the nation. Since the turn of the 20 th century, the southern states had had a legal justification for requiring black students to attend segregated schools. The Supreme Court's 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson upheld segregated railroad car seating in Louisiana on the grounds that "equal but separate" seating did not violate the black passengers' rights to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. For half a century, this near-unanimous decision served as the legal grounds for racial segregation in virtually all areas of southern life, including education.
However, segregated schools in the South, while separate, were definitely not equal. Whites attended school in brick and stone buildings, while black students were relegated to unheated, overcrowded shacks with crude furniture, inadequate libraries, and under qualified teachers. In 1930 white schools in South Carolina received ten times more money than black schools. By the 1950 s little had changed, and many blacks, believing that the best hope for racial equality lay in education, looked to the NAACP to mount a concerted legal attack on school segregation.
A modest beginning had already been made with the organization's victory in a 1938 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that the University of Missouri's grant of an out-of-state scholarship to keep a black student out of its law school denied the student equal protection under the law. (Martin, 1998). In 1951 the NAACP coordinated the filing of lawsuits challenging segregated schooling in South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, the District of Columbia, and Kansas. The Kansas case was the one that earned a place in the history books. Oliver Brown and the parents of 12 other black children filed a lawsuit against the Topeka Board of Education protesting the city's segregation of black and white students. Brown's eight-year-old daughter Linda was required to take a 21 -block bus ride to an all-black school every day when there was a white school within three blocks of the Browns' house.
The bus that Linda Brown took arrived at her school before it opened, leaving her waiting outside for half an hour on cold winter mornings. The NAACP argued that segregated schooling had a harmful psychological effect on black children, but the suit was dismissed on the grounds that no law had been broken, as Topeka was legally authorized by the state of Kansas to maintain separate schools for white and black students. On December 9, 1952, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on all five of the cases on the Brown docket but postponed its ruling and requested a rehearing, which took place the following year. In the interim, Chief Justice Fred Vinson died and the newly elected President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren in his place. Eventually the two dissenting justices were won over but a major compromise was required -- agreement that the ruling would be implemented gradually rather than at once, as the NAACP had requested.
The historic ruling was announced on May 17, 1954, by Chief Justice Warren. Stressing the fact that public education was "a right which must be made available to all on equal terms, " Warren voiced the court's opinion that separating black children "from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. " The crucial reversal of Plessy came in the most famous part of the ruling: "We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. " The Brown v. Board of Education ruling was jubilantly received by blacks across the nation, and a number of border states, as well as the District of Columbia, took rapid steps to desegregate their school systems. (Martin, 1998). However, the states of the deep South used the gradual implementation decision, announced a year after the initial ruling, as a pretext for years of delay and defiance.
The Court had left implementation up to state and local authorities. The southern states responded with hundreds of laws and resolutions that effectively blocked or limited desegregation. One popular tactic was the pupil-placement law, which gave local school authorities the prerogative of arbitrarily placing students in any school they chose, as long as they maintained that the placement was for psychological, academic, or any other purposes besides race. Other ways of circumventing the desegregation ruling included shutting down schools facing desegregation orders or providing tuition for students who chose to attend segregated private schools.
The southern states remained largely unchecked in their legislative resistance to the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which received little support from the other branches of the federal government. Southern members of Congress openly incited their states to defy the ruling and even voiced their determination to have the decision reversed. President Eisenhower, a conservative president courting white southern voters, refused to express support for the Brown decision or lobby in any way for its enforcement. Privately, he voiced regret at his appointment of the Supreme Court justice who had been instrumental in obtaining the unanimous ruling. Legal resistance to Brown was accompanied by harassment of black children who did attend newly desegregated schools, to the point that many parents gave up and re enrolled their children in all-black schools.
Black children were attacked by shouting, rock-throwing mobs, mistreated by teachers, and tormented by their white classmates. In many communities there was a resurgence of Ku Klux Klan activities and growing membership in the White Citizens' Councils that were a more respectable version of the Klan. In 1960 only one-sixth of 1 % of southern black students attended a desegregated school. By 1964 this figure had risen to 2 %, although two years later it remained under 1 % for three states in the deep South. Nevertheless, thanks to federal civil rights legislation and tougher federal enforcement of desegregation guidelines, the 1960 s eventually saw significant progress in southern desegregation: the number of black students attending desegregated schools rose to 16 % in 1967, 20 % in 1968, and 58 % by 1970.
Due to white flight from southern cities to the suburbs and from public to private schools, black enrollment in integrated schools had once again fallen to under 50 % by 1980. In 1986 the Brown v. Board of Education case was reopened in Topeka on grounds that full integration of the school system had not been achieved. Plaintiffs charged that the school board had provided ways for white parents to avoid sending their children to integrated schools and had drawn boundaries that preserved racially segregated school districts. A federal court eventually ordered the city to produce an integration plan.
The urban North had become increasingly segregated as well, with over 60 % of black students attending schools that were virtually all-black. By the mid- 1990 s most black children in the nation still attended schools where less than half the students were white. The Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education proved to be only one step in a long and arduous journey toward equality in the nation's schools, but the decision retains an important place in United States history. (Martin, 1998). A lot of things changed from that time, but it is not really until the turn of the twentieth century that a handful of blacks began to enter the scientific fields.
Among these people are Charles Henry Turner, George Washington Carver, Ernest Everett Just, St. Elmo Brady, Samuel Imes, and Percy Haven Julian. Generally speaking, African Americans have made important contributions to science since the eighteenth century, beginning with the work of Benjamin Banneker, an astronomer, architect, mathematician, and engineer who, among other things. Late in the century, 1876 to be exact, the first black Ph. D. in science, Edward Bouuchet received his degree in Physics from Yale University.
He was the first Black to receive a Ph. D. from an American university and one of the first recipients of any color to earn that degree. Professional opportunities in science were not open to him, though he had worked beside some of America's top physicists, including the eminent Josiah Willard Gibbs at Yale. Let me say that I am passionate about the need for a quality education. I believe that it is the key to unlocking the shackles that many place upon themselves.
It is the key to overcome the racial barriers that are both real and perceived. Schools that are more concerned about passing state assessment exams than preparing kids for college and a professional career. It is not the case for all, but most Black children are receiving an inferior education that limits their ability to succeed. Who is to blame? Is it school board members?
Is it school administrators? Is it teachers? Is it parents? Is it culture? Is it the student? The answer to all these questions is, probably, yes In total overview of currents situation, it can be said that the access to education for the whites is available to them through the financial advantages and arrangements.
And the solution appears to be largely social and economic, not legal. If the handful of institutions that serve blacks were upgraded, then it would not be advantageous for whites to use their financial resources to segregate themselves to the educational suburbs. If blacks and other minority students had financial resources to participate in higher education, colleges and universities could maintain their enrollment levels and tuition revenues without lowering standards and without grade inflating, two means used for extending access and retention rates to whites. These alternative financial arrangements need not cost more than is currently spent, but the savings in social costs and social justice would become much greater. (Wells, 1994). Bibliography: Ashmore, Harry S. The Negro and the Schools.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B.
DuBois: Biography of a race, 1868 - 1919. New York: The Viking Press, 1993. Doughterty, Jack. "Black Teachers and the early Civil Rights Movement in Milwaukee. " History of Education Quarterly, 38. No. 2 (Summer 1998), 123 - 41.
Du Bois, W. E. B. "Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?" Journal of Negro Education, 4 (July 1935), 328 - 35. James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South Urban and Wagoner.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Louis A. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc. , 1983. Martin Jr. , Waldo E. (Ed. ) Brown v.
Board of Education: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1998. Wells, Amy S. African-American Students in White Suburban Schools.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Outline Introduction. Feeling of a Black man Statistics from the U. S. Bureau of Census (positive & negative).
HBCUs success or failure? Body: Backs History in Education African Americans after the Civil War. James Andersons view Booker T. Washington approach Efforts of missionary agencies Brown v. Board of Education Conclusion Black people in science Opinion about education Current overview
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Research essay sample on Blacks History In Education Part 2
