Separate But Equal Essay

In the movie “Separate but Equal” this movie take place in 1950 in Clarendon County, South Carolina.This where black children must walk as much as five or six miles to get to and from their run-down, segregated elementary school called Scott’s Branch Elementary. The black people started losing their jobs, and the KKK started to threaten them. The white people were doing everything in their power to make the black people feel inferior and to punish them for going against the whites. The superintendent of Clarendon County schools even took away the Rev. DeLane’s principal job.The father of one of the students, an auto mechanic named Harry Briggs, decides he’s had enough. Sick of seeing his young son trudge home too tired to do his homework, he enlists the boy’s teacher to implore the local superintendent of schools to provide a bus.The case first went to a federal court in …show more content…
As Separate But Equal shows, that small but significant incivility helped to inspire a series of legal petitions and decisions in Clarendon County and elsewhere that eventually resulted in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision desegregating America’s schools.The original plea that the NAACP made was based on the fact the school system of South Carolina needed more busses for one of their black schools. The NAACP claimed that under the law this was separate but not equal. They did however throw in, as almost a footnote, the fact of segregation as a whole was unconstitutional. The first trial in South Carolina the plaintiffs brought their case to the judge immediately caught the fact that in South Carolina if you are dealing with a constitutional issue such as segregation it requires a three-judge panel. The decision was one of a 2-1 split in which the state ruled against the plaintiffs. There is an interesting point to be made