After the abolishment of slavery in the United States by the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), racial discrimination still widely defined the treatment of African Americans in the south. Discrimination became more structured with laws resulting from court cases like Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896). The Supreme Court ruled in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case that “Jim Crow type laws were constitutional as long as they allowed ‘separate but equal’ facilities” (www.newworldencyclopedia.org). However, the NAACP got the Supreme Court to review the Plessy vs. Ferguson court decision because most public schools, in the mid-1950s, were separate but lacked in equal resources and facilities. Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka (1954) resulted in the overturning
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In response to the decision, “96 of the 128 southern senators and representatives in Congress signed a so-called Southern Manifesto castigating the Supreme Court’s reasoning in the Brown case” (Shi and Mayer 281). The Southern Manifesto seemed to have some key arguments to their defense of the previously segregated school system. One argument regarded a misuse of judicial power in the court case. It argued that neither the Fourteenth Amendment nor the rest of the Constitution mentioned education and using it as a defense for the Brown vs Board of Education case affected “the system of education maintained by the states” (Shi and Mayer 281). Therefore, the states felt that the court decision interfered with the state controlled entities. The second argument stated that interpretation of the ‘separate but equal’ principle by the state “is founded on elemental humanity and common sense, for parents should not be deprived by Government of the right to direct the lives and education of their own children” (Shi and Mayer 281). In this quote, the southern states are saying that the Government is interfering with the preferences that parents have for …show more content…
However, the opposition that many whites had over the Supreme Court
decision was due to the reasoning that ‘separate but equal’ did not violate the Constitution. The decision to integrate schools caused resistance from southern whites because they also felt as though it diminished the power that the state had to regulate the educational system and the rights of the parents to determine the learning environment of their children. Federal Intervention for the integration of schools was necessary for the rights of African Americans and for the protection of the foundation of American
In response to the decision, “96 of the 128 southern senators and representatives in Congress signed a so-called Southern Manifesto castigating the Supreme Court’s reasoning in the Brown case” (Shi and Mayer 281). The Southern Manifesto seemed to have some key arguments to their defense of the previously segregated school system. One argument regarded a misuse of judicial power in the court case. It argued that neither the Fourteenth Amendment nor the rest of the Constitution mentioned education and using it as a defense for the Brown vs Board of Education case affected “the system of education maintained by the states” (Shi and Mayer 281). Therefore, the states felt that the court decision interfered with the state controlled entities. The second argument stated that interpretation of the ‘separate but equal’ principle by the state “is founded on elemental humanity and common sense, for parents should not be deprived by Government of the right to direct the lives and education of their own children” (Shi and Mayer 281). In this quote, the southern states are saying that the Government is interfering with the preferences that parents have for …show more content…
However, the opposition that many whites had over the Supreme Court
decision was due to the reasoning that ‘separate but equal’ did not violate the Constitution. The decision to integrate schools caused resistance from southern whites because they also felt as though it diminished the power that the state had to regulate the educational system and the rights of the parents to determine the learning environment of their children. Federal Intervention for the integration of schools was necessary for the rights of African Americans and for the protection of the foundation of American