The Jim Crow laws were:
- White nurses were forbidden to treat black males
- White teachers were forbidden to teach black students
- South Carolina had a law, which made it illegal for blacks and white workers to look out the same window
- Florida: Separate warehouses for "Negro" and white textbooks
- Separate telephone booths in Oklahoma
- New Orleans: Segregated white and black prostitutes
- Atlanta: Two sets of bibles for searing in witnesses
- All circuses, shows and tent exhibitions, to which the attendance of . . . More than one race is invited or expected to attend shall provide for the convenience of its patrons not less than two ticket offices with individual ticket sellers, and not less than two entrances to the said performance, with individual ticket takers and receivers, and in the case of outside or tent performances, the said ticket offices shall not be less than 25 feet apart
- It shall be unlawful for a white person to marry anyone except a white person
- No colored barber shall serve as a barber to white women or girls (Georgia)
- It shall be unlawful for any amateur white baseball team to play on any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of a playground devoted to the Negro race (Georgia)
- Black women were forbidden from trying on dresses, hats, shoes
- Libraries Reserved for Whites
- Exclusion of blacks from amusement parks, roller skating rinks, bowling alleys, swimming pools, tennis courts and parks in many cities
- Separate seating in theaters, on buses, in waiting rooms and in trains
As you can see from these laws, the black people were simply made a mockery of.
The black people found it hard in life; they had high levels of illiteracy and had little or no education. The black people were not given a chance in life. They were classed as second class citizens. This is terribly unfair and needed a stop putting to it.
Education System
In spite of the belief that public education should be available to every child irrespective of race, gender or economic status, this did not happen in the 1950s in reality. Discrimination in schools on the basis of race was present. White children were separated from black children in schools.
During the 1950s segregation by race in public and private schools was still common in the United States. The South had separate schools for African Americans and whites and this system had been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in Plessey v. Ferguson (1896). In the North no such laws existed, but racial segregation was still common in schools. The southern states opposed the education of blacks because these states were still favouring slavery. In spite of individual efforts, the education of blacks remained very low until Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. The literacy rate that was around 5% in the 1860s rose to 40% in 1890 and by 1910 it was at 70%.
Segregation usually resulted in inferior education for blacks. Average public expenses for white schools exceeded expenses for black schools. Teachers in white schools generally received higher pay than did teachers in black schools, and facilities in most white schools were far superior to facilities in most black schools.
The black people were segregated from the white people not only in every day life but in schools also, this was disgraceful. There were schools for black children and schools for white children. The white people didn’t want their children to be mixing with the black children. The black people were treated like animals. The black children had to be taught by black teachers and the white children had to be taught by white teachers. A black child was not allowed to attend a white school and a white child would not want to attend a black school. The white children received better education than the black children. This is because the black children had poor facilities, they were taught by poorly trained teachers, and there was no encouragement and no opportunities for advancement in their further lives and their future. The only real opportunity for advancement for a black child was through sport.
NAACP
The NAACP stands for the National Association for Advancement of Coloured People. This was seen as the only was to improve the states of black people through education. In 1954 segregation was firmly in place in the southern states. So it was about time someone did something about it. The National Association for Advancement of Coloured People declared that “Segregation is the way in which a society tells a group of human beings that they are inferior to the other groups.” Segregation meant separate restaurants and entertainment facilities, separate waiting rooms in bus stations, even separate launderettes and drinking fountains. Worst of all were the segregated schools. Twenty states, as well as Washington DC, had legally enforced school segregation. They were supposed to be ‘separate but equal’. But separate schools were never equal; the schools for the black children were never as good as those for the whites. The NAACP challenged the right of the local school boards, including the one in Topeka, Kansas, to run segregated schools.
Brown V. Education Board of Topeka
In Topeka, Kansas, a black third-grader named Linda Brown had to walk one mile through a railroad switchyard to get to her black elementary school, even though a white elementary school was only seven blocks away. Linda's father, Oliver Brown, tried to register her in the white elementary school, but the principal of the school refused. Brown went to McKinley Burnett, the head of Topeka's branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and asked for help. The NAACP was eager to assist the Browns, as it had long wanted to challenge segregation in public schools. Other black parents joined Brown, and, in 1951, the NAACP requested a ban that would forbid the segregation of Topeka's public schools.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas heard Brown's case from June 25-26, 1951. At the trial, the NAACP argued that segregated schools sent the message to black children that they were inferior to whites; therefore, the schools were basically unequal. One of the expert witnesses, Dr. Hugh W. Speer, testified that:
"...if the coloured children are denied the experience in school of associating with white children, who represent 90 percent of our national society in which these coloured children must live, then the coloured child's curriculum is being greatly curtailed. The Topeka curriculum or any school curriculum cannot be equal under segregation."
The Board of Education's defence was that, because segregation in Topeka and elsewhere pervaded many other aspects of life, segregated schools simply prepared black children for the segregation they would face during adulthood. The board also argued that segregated schools were not necessarily harmful to black children; great African Americans such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and George Washington Carver had overcome more than just segregated schools to achieve what they achieved.
The request for a ban put the court in a difficult decision. On the one hand, the judges agreed with the expert witnesses; in their decision, they wrote:
Segregation of white and coloured children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the coloured children...A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn.
On the other hand, the example of allowed separate but equal school systems for blacks and whites, and no Supreme Court ruling had overturned Plessey yet. Because of the example of Plessey, the court felt "forced" to rule in favour of the Board of Education.
Brown and the NAACP appealed to the Supreme Court on October 1, 1951 and their case was combined with other cases that challenged school segregation in South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. The Supreme Court first heard the case on December 9, 1952, but failed to reach a decision. In the re-argument, heard from December 7-8, 1953, the Court requested that both sides discuss "the circumstances surrounding the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868." The Court had to make its decision based on whether or not desegregated schools deprived black children of equal protection of the law when the case was decided, in 1954.
On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren read the decision of the unanimous Court:
"We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does...We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Supreme Court struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessey for public education, ruled in favour of the plaintiffs, and required the desegregation of schools across America.
The Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision did not abolish segregation in other public areas, such as restaurants and restrooms, nor did it require desegregation of public schools by a specific time. It did, however, declare the liberal or compulsory segregation that existed in 21 states illegal. It was a giant step towards complete desegregation of public schools. Even partial desegregation of these schools, however, was still very far away, as would soon become apparent.
Reactions of the Courts decision
President Eisenhower was not pleased with the Court’s decision because, although he supported racial integration, he knew how stubborn southern whites were, and he favoured a gradual process of breaking down racial barriers. Privately he said that his appointment of Earl Warren to the Court was “the biggest damn-fool mistake I ever made”. Publicly he declared his responsibility as head of the federal government: ‘The Constitution is as the Supreme Court interprets it and I must do my very best to see that it is carried out’.
The following year the Supreme Court ruled that the states had to comply with their ruling and get on with integrating their schools. But southern whites were furiously determined not to give away. Diehard segregationists called it ‘Black Monday’ and one southern senator, Harry F. Byrd, provided a fighting slogan when he urged ‘massive resistance’. Southern states fell back on the argument of ‘states rights’, that each state had the right to decide such matters for themselves. By the end of 1956, in six southern states not a single black child was attending a school with white children and in the other states only small steps had been taken towards integration.
Even when the Supreme Court had ruled that segregation was unlawful, southerners, including state governments and police forces, resisted integration so that violence and deaths resulted. The Ku Klux Klan organised poor whites in rural areas whilst the self-appointed Citizen’s Councils recruited middle-class people. Responses to the Supreme Court’s ruling ranged from deliberate inaction and obstinacy by school boards to riots, bombings and even the murder of NAACP supporters. White racial prejudice in opposition to desegregation was shown in the most extreme form by the Ku Klux Klan. They were responsible for many crimes of murder, violence and intimidation of black fellow Americans.
Lynching and beatings which had declined since the 1920s increased again. In 1955, fourteen year old Emmett Till, from Chicago, was brutally murdered while staying with relatives in Mississippi.
Unused to southern ways and the extent of bigotry, Emmett unwisely had been cheeky to a young white woman. Those believed to be responsible were acquitted by an all-white-jury. But the impact of Emmett’s murder, and the failure to punish those responsible, was enormous and focused attention on the injustice and violence that black people in the South had to face; his mother described her dead son as ‘ a little nobody who shook up the world’.
White Violence V. Blacks
The white people had so much hatred for the blacks. They wanted to remain segregated. An example of the hatred shared is Little Rock, Arkansas.
The Little Rock Nine, as they later came to be called, were the first black teenagers to attend all-white Central High School in , , in 1957. These remarkable young African-American students challenged segregation in the deep South and won.
Although Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregation in schools, many racist school systems defied the law by intimidating and threatening black students—Central High School was a notorious example. But the Little Rock Nine were determined to attend the school and receive the same education offered to white students, no matter what. Things grew ugly and frightening right away. On the first day of school, the Governor of Arkansas ordered the state's National Guard to block the black students from entering the school. Imagine what it must have been like to be a student confronted by armed soldiers! President had to send in federal troops to protect the students. He sent in one thousand US paratroopers, many with fixed bayonets, to protect the small number of black students as they attended school for the next twelve months.
But that was only the beginning of their ordeal. Every morning on their way to school angry crowds of whites taunted and insulted the Little Rock Nine—they even received death threats. One of the students, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, said "I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the mob. . . . I looked into the face of an old woman, and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat at me." As scared as they were, the students wouldn't give up, and several went on to graduate from Central High. Nine black teenagers challenged a racist system and defeated it.
The fact that heavily armed troops were necessary if black and white children were to attend school together was clear evidence of the deep-rooted racial hatred and discrimination that existed.
The anti-desegregation protests were often violent this was seen as the only way to the whites. They would use violence towards the blacks hoping that they would give in and remain in superior to the whites forever. This however was not going to happen; blacks had had enough of the segregation which occurred in USA and wanted to be treated as an equal and so was prepared to fight for it.
Reactions
There was very little immediate desegregation of the schools. But Desegregation was taking place-slowly but surely.
Virginia took several decades to desegregate. The Brown decision was followed by years of protest and litigation and followed by a long process of further resistance and slow change. In September 1960, just 170 out of 204,000 black students in Virginia were enrolled in white schools. By 1963, the situation, as reflected in the state's capital, was not much better-of the 26,000 black students in Richmond, only 312 were enrolled in 12 formerly all-white schools. In Prince Edward County, where public schools remained closed for five years, the situation was particularly difficult.
Virginia and other Southern states resisted desegregation through a wide array of tactics, especially the development of "freedom of choice" plans. It is not surprising that many black students chose to stay in their familiar schools rather than attend white schools. "Freedom of choice" plans put an end to highly segregated school systems and brought only token integration. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, on the other hand, and the 1968 Supreme Court decision Green v. New Kent County, Va., helped to end these means of avoiding desegregation as schools across the South integrated gradually during the late 1960s and 1970s.
Conclusion
The desegregation of schools in the USA awakened the black people’s awareness of Civil Rights and the fact that prejudice could be over turned by legal means.
The desegregation of the schools called into question the American values. It also increased the Black aspirations. They now had opportunities for advancement in their occupations. They could receive better housing and had a break out of the “ghetto” culture. One thing that they now had which they never would have been allowed before is the political advancement.
Black people were now beginning to be treated as equals and had the opportunities in life to go far.
- Educational attainment for African Americans has increased considerably since 1950.
- The proportion of the population with a high school degree increased by 300% during this time, the proportion of the population with a 4-year college degree increased by almost 500%.
- Difference between African American and white educational attainment has declined but is still common.
- High School dropout rates for African Americans have decreased substantially in the last thirty years, dropping from 33.5% in 1974 to 17% in 2002.
- H.S. dropout rates still remain 50% higher than the white dropout rate in 2002 of 11%.
- College enrollment rates have increased from 36% in 1960 to 57.7% in 2002 for African Americans (an increase of 66%).
- College enrollment rates for Whites increased by 45% during this forty-four year time period
- African American poverty rates have declined by approximately 60% since 1959, white poverty rates declined by approximately 50% during this time.
- Disparity persists: African American individual and family poverty rates are currently twice the rate of Whites.
- The number of African American children in poverty has declined substantially since 1960.
- Disparity persists: African American child poverty rates were approximately double the rate of white child poverty in the 1990’s.
- Incomes have more than doubled for African American men, women and families since the 1950’s.
- Difference in income has actually grown since 1954, the median African American family income in 1954 was 55% of the white median, in 2002 this figure had grown to 62%.
- Although income difference has closed, a tremendous disparity in net assets between African Americans and Whites is evident in recent Census Data.
- In 2000, the median assets ($7,500) for African American households were 9.5% of the median assets for non-Hispanic whites ($79,000).
- Data suggest improvements since 1954 vary based on the indicator, education and poverty has improved but economic and crime indicators have not improved as much.
- Despite improvements across multiple indicators, significant racial disparities in education, poverty, economic health, income, health, crime still exist.