Brown v. Board Of Education And The End Of Segregation

By | November 29, 2016

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Nettie Hunt and her daughter Nickie sit on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court. Nettie explains to her daughter the meaning of the high court's ruling in the Brown Vs. Board of Education case that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. Source:

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The ruling officially put an end to the "separate but equal" policies in schools that had allowed for institutionalized segregation in line with the 1897 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling.

It’s been a long road since the days of inequality, since the days where the color of one’s skin being the key determining factor of one’s worth, since the days when the United States of America wasn’t only divided between the have and the have-nots but also the haves being primarily of one race whilst the have-nots being of African descent. African Americans have fought indefatigably to assume equal standing in every facet of human existence, but could this have been as a result of one man, Abraham Lincoln?

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Dred Scott. Source: Wikimedia Commons

In 1857 in a supreme court ruling Dred Scott v. Sandford, the supreme court ruled the Negros or blacks being the descendant of slaves, whether free or slaves were not Americans, denying an entire class of people the right and freedoms that were associated with being an American; could it be that Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation of Emancipation a mere seven years later, may have been the catapult that paved the way for Brown v. Board of Education which ruled in favor of ending segregation and discrimination in Education?