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Transcript of Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

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Transcript of Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

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SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) (USSC+)

Argued December 9, 1952

Reargued December 8, 1953

Decided May 17, 1954

APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF KANSAS*

Syllabus

Segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation, denies to Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment -- even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors of white and Negro schools may be equal.

(a) The history of the Fourteenth Amendment is inconclusive as to its intended effect on public education.

(b) The question presented in these cases must be determined not on the basis of conditions existing when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, but in the light of the full development of public education and its present place in American life throughout the Nation.

(c) Where a State has undertaken to provide an opportunity for an education in its public schools, such an opportunity is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.

(d) Segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race deprives children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal.

(e) The "separate but equal" doctrine adopted in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, has no place in the field of public education.

(f) The cases are restored to the docket for further argument on specified questions relating to the forms of the decrees.

Opinion

MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN delivered the opinion of the Court.
These cases come to us from the States of Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. They are premised on different facts and different local conditions, but a common legal question justifies their consideration together in this consolidated opinion.

In each of the cases, minors of the Negro race, through their legal representatives, seek the aid of the courts in obtaining admission to the public schools of their community on a nonsegregated basis. In each instance, they had been denied admission to schools attended by white children under laws requiring or permitting segregation according to race. This segregation was alleged to deprive the plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment. In each of the cases other than the Delaware case, a three-judge federal district court denied relief to the plaintiffs on the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine announced by this Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537. Under that doctrine, equality of treatment is accorded when the races are provided substantially equal facilities, even though these facilities be separate. In the Delaware case, the Supreme Court of Delaware adhered to that doctrine, but ordered that the plaintiffs be admitted to the white schools because of their superiority to the Negro schools.

The plaintiffs contend that segregated public schools are not "equal" and cannot be made "equal," and that hence they are deprived of the equal protection of the laws. Because of the obvious importance of the question presented, the Court took jurisdiction. Argument was heard in the 1952 Term, and reargument was heard this Term on certain questions propounded by the Court.

Reargument was largely devoted to the circumstances surrounding the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. It covered exhaustively consideration of the Amendment in Congress, ratification by the states, then-existing practices in racial segregation, and the views of proponents and opponents of the Amendment. This discussion and our own investigation convince us that, although these sources cast some light, it is not enough to resolve the problem with which we are faced. At best, they are inconclusive. The most avid proponents of the post-War Amendments undoubtedly intended them to remove all legal distinctions among "all persons born or naturalized in the United States." Their opponents, just as certainly, were antagonistic to both the letter and the spirit of the Amendments and wished them to have the most limited effect. What others in Congress and the state legislatures had in mind cannot be determined with any degree of certainty.

An additional reason for the inconclusive nature of the Amendment's history with respect to segregated schools is the status of public education at that time. In the South, the movement toward free common schools, supported by general taxation, had not yet taken hold. Education of white children was largely in the hands of private groups. Education of Negroes was almost nonexistent, and practically all of the race were illiterate. In fact, any education of Negroes was forbidden by law in some states. Today, in contrast, many Negroes have achieved outstanding success in the arts and sciences, as well as in the business and professional world. It is true that public school education at the time of the Amendment had advanced further in the North, but the effect of the Amendment on Northern States was generally ignored in the congressional debates. Even in the North, the conditions of public education did not approximate those existing today. The curriculum was usually rudimentary; ungraded schools were common in rural areas; the school term was but three months a year in many states, and compulsory school attendance was virtually unknown. As a consequence, it is not surprising that there should be so little in the history of the Fourteenth Amendment relating to its intended effect on public education.

In the first cases in this Court construing the Fourteenth Amendment, decided shortly after its adoption, the Court interpreted it as proscribing all state-imposed discriminations against the Negro race. The doctrine of "separate but equal" did not make its appearance in this Court until 1896 in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, supra, involving not education but transportation. American courts have since labored with the doctrine for over half a century. In this Court, there have been six cases involving the "separate but equal" doctrine in the field of public education. In Cumming v. County Board of Education, 175 U.S. 528, and Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78, the validity of the doctrine itself was not challenged. In more recent cases, all on the graduate school level, inequality was found in that specific benefits enjoyed by white students were denied to Negro students of the same educational qualifications. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337; Sipuel v. Oklahoma, 332 U.S. 631; Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629; McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637. In none of these cases was it necessary to reexamine the doctrine to grant relief to the Negro plaintiff. And in Sweatt v. Painter, supra, the Court expressly reserved decision on the question whether Plessy v. Ferguson should be held inapplicable to public education.

In the instant cases, that question is directly presented. Here, unlike Sweatt v. Painter, there are findings below that the Negro and white schools involved have been equalized, or are being equalized, with respect to buildings, curricula, qualifications and salaries of teachers, and other "tangible" factors. Our decision, therefore, cannot turn on merely a comparison of these tangible factors in the Negro and white schools involved in each of the cases. We must look instead to the effect of segregation itself on public education.

In approaching this problem, we cannot turn the clock back to 1868, when the Amendment was adopted, or even to 1896, when Plessy v. Ferguson was written. We must consider public education in the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the Nation. Only in this way can it be determined if segregation in public schools deprives these plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws.

Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.

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.

In Sweatt v. Painter, supra, in finding that a segregated law school for Negroes could not provide them equal educational opportunities, this Court relied in large part on "those qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness in a law school." In McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, supra, the Court, in requiring that a Negro admitted to a white graduate school be treated like all other students, again resorted to intangible considerations: ". . . his ability to study, to engage in discussions and exchange views with other students, and, in general, to learn his profession." Such considerations apply with added force to children in grade and high schools. To separate them 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 effect of this separation on their educational opportunities was well stated by a finding in the Kansas case by a court which nevertheless felt compelled to rule against the Negro plaintiffs:

Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.

Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority. Any language in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary to this finding is rejected.

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. This disposition makes unnecessary any discussion whether such segregation also violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Because these are class actions, because of the wide applicability of this decision, and because of the great variety of local conditions, the formulation of decrees in these cases presents problems of considerable complexity. On reargument, the consideration of appropriate relief was necessarily subordinated to the primary question -- the constitutionality of segregation in public education. We have now announced that such segregation is a denial of the equal protection of the laws. In order that we may have the full assistance of the parties in formulating decrees, the cases will be restored to the docket, and the parties are requested to present further argument on Questions 4 and 5 previously propounded by the Court for the reargument this Term The Attorney General of the United States is again invited to participate. The Attorneys General of the states requiring or permitting segregation in public education will also be permitted to appear as amici curiae upon request to do so by September 15, 1954, and submission of briefs by October 1, 1954.

It is so ordered.

* Together with No. 2, Briggs et al. v. Elliott et al., on appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of South Carolina, argued December 9-10, 1952, reargued December 7-8, 1953; No. 4, Davis et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia, et al. , on appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, argued December 10, 1952, reargued December 7-8, 1953, and No. 10, Gebhart et al. v. Belton et al., on certiorari to the Supreme Court of Delaware, argued December 11, 1952, reargued December 9, 1953.

Transcription courtesy of the U.S. National Park Service'sBrown V Board Of Education National Historic Site website. Special note regarding document transcripts

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Transcript of Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

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SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S.

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Quick Facts
"My father pondered, 'Why? Why should my child walk four miles when there is a school only four blocks away?'""Sometimes I wonder if we really did the children and the nation a favor by taking this case to the Supreme Court. I know it was the right thing for my father and mother to do then, but after nearly 40 years we find the Court's ruling unfulfilled.""I was a very young child when I started walking to school. I remember the walk as being very long at that time. In fact, it was several blocks up through railroad yards, and crossing a busy avenue, and standing on the corner, and waiting for the school bus to carry me two miles across town to an all-black school."

Name

Linda Brown

Occupation

Civil Rights Activist

Birth Date

February 20, 1942

Death Date

March 25, 2018

Education

Washburn University, Kansas State University

Place of Birth

Topeka, Kansas

Place of Death

Topeka, Kansas

AKA

Linda Brown Smith

Linda Brown Thompson

Linda Brown

Linda Brown was the child associated with the lead name in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, which led to the outlawing of U.S. school segregation in 1954.

Who Was Linda Brown?

Linda Brown was born on February 20, 1942, in Topeka, Kansas. Because she was forced to travel a significant distance to elementary school due to racial segregation, her father was one of the plaintiffs in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, with the Supreme Court ruling in 1954 that school segregation was unlawful. Brown continued living in Topeka as an adult, raising a family and continuing her desegregation efforts with the area's school system. She passed away on March 25, 2018, at age 76.

Early Life and Historic Case

Linda Brown was born on February 20, 1942, in Topeka, Kansas, to Leola and Oliver Brown. Though she and her two younger sisters grew up in an ethnically diverse neighborhood, Linda was forced to walk across railroad tracks and take a bus to grade school despite there being a school four blocks away from her home. This was due to the elementary schools in Topeka being racially segregated, with separate facilities for black and white children.

In 1950, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People asked a group of African-American parents that included Oliver Brown to attempt to enroll their children in all-white schools, with the expectation that they would be turned away. Oliver attempted to do so with Linda, who was in third grade at the time and barred from enrollment at Sumner Elementary. The strategy was for the civil rights group to file a lawsuit on behalf of the 13 families, who represented different states.

With Brown's name happening to alphabetically top the list of plaintiffs, the case would come to be known as Brown v. Board of Education and be taken to the Supreme Court. The lead attorney working on behalf of the plaintiffs was future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Winning 'Brown v. Board of Education'

An aim of the case was to bring down the precedent set up by the 1896 decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, which sanctioned the idea of "separate but equal" facilities for racial divisions. In 1954, this aim was achieved when the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education, disavowing the notion of "separate but equal" and concluding that segregated facilities deprived African-American children of a richer, fairer educational experience.

Life After Historic Case

By the time of the ruling, Linda Brown was in junior high, a grade level that had been integrated before the 1954 court ruling. The family moved to Springfield, Missouri, in 1959. Oliver Brown died two years later, and his widow moved the girls back to Topeka. Linda Brown went on to attend Washburn and Kansas State universities and had a family. She went through a divorce and later became a widow after her second husband's death, before her marriage to William Thompson in the mid-1990s. She also worked on the speaker circuit and as an educational consultant.

By the late 1970s, Brown spoke of feeling exploited by the amount of media attention given to the case, with there being limited awareness that she was a human being as opposed to a lofty historical figure. Nonetheless, she continued to speak out on segregation and reopened the Topeka case with the American Civil Liberties Union in 1979, arguing that the district's schools still weren't desegregated. It was eventually ruled by the Court of Appeals in 1993 that the school system was indeed still racially divided, and three new schools were built as part of integration efforts.

Death

Brown passed away in her longtime hometown of Topeka on March 25, 2018. Although her family wouldn't comment, Kansas Governor Jeff Colyer paid tribute to the woman who sparked one of the landmark cases in American history:

"Sixty-four years ago a young girl from Topeka brought a case that ended segregation in public schools in America," he tweeted. "Linda Brown's life reminds us that sometimes the most unlikely people can have an incredible impact and that by serving our community we can truly change the world."

Fact Check

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Linda Brown, the child at the center of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case, has died. The case dismantled federal education laws that allowed segregated schools for black and white students, although Brown never got the chance to attend unsegregated school.

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Charles Hamilton Houston (September 3, 1895-April 22, 1950) was a black lawyer who helped play a role in dismantling the Jim Crow laws and helped train future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. Known as "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow", he played a role in nearly every civil rights case before the Supreme Court between 1930 and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Houston's brilliant plan to attack and defeat Jim Crow segregation by using the inequality of the "separate but equal" doctrine (from the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision) as it pertained to public education in the United States was the master stroke that brought about the landmark Brown decision.

"This fight for equality of educational opportunity (was) not an isolated struggle. All our struggles must tie in together and support one another. . .We must remain on the alert and push the struggle farther with all our might."

Born in Washington, D.C., Houston prepared for college at Dunbar High School in Washington, then matriculated to Amherst College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1915.

From 1915 to 1917, Houston taught English at Howard University. From 1917 to 1919, he was a First Lieutenant in the United States Infantry, based in Fort Meade, Maryland. Houston later wrote:

"The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back."

In the fall of 1919, he entered Harvard Law School, earning his Bachelor of Laws degree 1922 and his Doctor of Laws degree in 1923. In 1922, he became the first African American to serve as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

After studying at the University of Madrid in 1924, Houston was admitted to the District of Columbia bar that same year and joined forces with his father in practicing law. Beginning in the 1930s, Houston served as the first special counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and therefore was involved with the majority of civil rights cases from then until his death on April 22, 1950.

He later joined Howard Law School's faculty, establishing a long-standing relationship between Howard and Harvard law schools. While at Howard, he was a mentor to Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown v. Board of Education and was later appointed to the Supreme Court.

Houston used his post at Howard to recruit talented students into the NAACP's legal efforts (among them Marshall and Oliver Hill, the first- and second-ranked students in the class of 1933, both of whom were drafted into organization's legal battles by Houston).

By the mid-1930s, two separate anti-lynching bills backed by the NAACP had failed to gain passage, and the organization had won a landmark victory against restrictive housing covenants that excluded blacks from particular neighborhoods only to see the achievement undermined by subsequent legal precedents.

Houston struck upon the idea that unequal education was the Achilles heel of Jim Crow. By demonstrating the failure of states to even try to live up to the 1896 rule of "separate but equal," Houston hoped to finally overturn the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that had given birth to that phrase.

His target was broad, but the evidence was numerous. Southern states collectively spent less than half of what was allotted for white students on education for blacks; there were even greater disparities in individual school districts. Black schools were equipped with castoff supplies from white ones and built with inferior materials. Black facilities appeared to be part of a crude segregationist satire - a design to make black education a contradiction in terms.

Houston designed a strategy of attacking segregation in law schools - forcing states to either create costly parallel law schools or integrate the existing ones. The strategy had hidden benefits: since law students were predominantly male, Houston sought to neutralize the age-old argument that allowing blacks to attend white institutions would lead to miscegenation, or "race-mixing". He also reasoned that judges deciding the cases might be more sympathetic to plaintiffs who were pursuing careers in law. Finally, by challenging segregation in graduate schools, the NAACP lawyers would bypass the inflammatory issue of miscegenation among young children.

The successful ruling handed down in the Brown decision was testament to the master strategy formulated by Houston.

Houston was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African Americans.

Houston was posthumously awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1950 and, in 1958, the main building of the Howard University School of Law was dedicated as Charles Hamilton Houston Hall. His importance became more broadly known through the success of Thurgood Marshall and after the 1983 publication of Genna Rae McNeil's Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights.

Houston is the namesake of the Charles Houston Bar Association and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, which opened in the fall of 2005. In addition, there is a professorship at Harvard Law named after him.
Related Articles:

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NAACP | NAACP History: Charles Hamilton Houston

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Charles Hamilton Houston (September 3, 1895-April 22, 1950) was a black lawyer who helped play a role in dismantling the Jim Crow laws and helped train future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. Known as "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow", he played a role in nearly every civil rights case before the Supreme Court between 1930 and Brown v.

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Teaching Tolerance asked a number of commentators, activists, educational leaders, politicians and others to respond to a series of open-ended questions about the legacy and impact of Brown v. Board.

Here is the complete text of interview questions and responses. Not all questions were asked of all participants.

How did Brown affect your own education?
Jean AbiNader, board member of the Arab American Institute and former president of the U.S. Arab Chamber of Commerce
I attended high school and college in the 60s when Brown v. Board had already had a defining impact on the curriculum and environment in the schools. It was clear by that time that African Americans were to be treated without discrimination and, more importantly, in liberal schools, as people with experiences that were central to our understanding of the U.S. as a nation and a society.

I studied political science as an undergraduate and specialized in intercultural communications. There was a heavy emphasis on correcting the "false" themes of U.S. history that emerged after the reconstruction period. Much of our work tied together our dissent against the war in Vietnam with the social upheavals connected with "black power," the war on poverty, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and other seminal events/trends of the times.

Cheryl Brown Henderson, daughter of the late Rev. Oliver Brown, namesake of Brown v. Board, and co-founder of the Brown Foundation

Unlike the companion cases in Brown, African Americans in Topeka were not facing the stark disparities found in Southern school districts. In Kansas, only elementary schools in first class cities, those of 15,000 or more, were racially segregated. Secondary education was integrated. Consequently the transition to integrated schools was without drama.

I began my formal schooling in the fall of 1955 in the wake of this change. The only glaring difference was that unlike my mother and sisters I have been educated Kindergarten through graduate school without being taught by a person of color. The lessons learned from that experience were largely about understanding that education is something one does for oneself. I encountered racial bias on the part of white educators.

However, above all else in the wake of Brown I leaned that individual academic achievement has nothing to do with the race or ethnicity of who a student is sitting next to. Individual academic achievement, like other presumed indicators of success, is based on a multitude of variables, race and ethnicity are only factored in if they are used to withhold resources and opportunities.

I was in my junior year of college, at Jackson State University, in 1954. The psychological impact of Brown v. Board impacted me directly, as it did every other African American in the United States... there was tremendous jubilation, a feeling of finally having arrived ... a feeling that we had overcome a great burden, and that now, the world of opportunity was opening up for us. So, the impact of it for me was more psychological than otherwise.

I'm the oldest of five children. When Brown was decided, my oldest sister was in college, my two younger sisters were in high school and my brother was in middle school. So Brown broadened the opportunities for them in terms of the schools that they could attend.

But keep in mind, the Brown v. Board action was as much uplifting as it was legally enabling, and although my sisters and brothers chose to go to schools that were predominantly of African American heritage, they at least had a choice.

The landmark ruling had little if any direct effect on my own education, as I was out of school by that time. Growing up in Texas, I had experienced only segregated classrooms, from my elementary years through my public college education.

I do remember that at the time of the ruling, the discussions I heard tended to follow the question of "How will it work?" as segregated schooling was the only kind of schooling we had known.

Brown v. Board of Education actually used a precedent-setting case, Mendez v. Westminster Board of Education. This case came out of Orange County, Calif., about six years prior to the Brown case.

Thus, California was desegregated ahead of the rest of the nation. By the time I got to school, they were fairly integrated.

I was born in 1954, the year of the Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision. My life has been very much influenced by that court decision. This is apparent to me because while I come from a long line of African American educators (I am a fourth-generation college professor), my generation is the only generation to have been educated entirely in predominantly white schools.

I have had educational choices throughout my education that were not available to my parents or the generations that preceded them.

What Brown actually did for me personally was to open the possibility that I could attend the big beautiful school that was 11 blocks from my house. The one, Central High School, with a stadium, a gym, was rumored to house science labs, and everything else. It opened the possibility that I might experience new textbooks.

Brown made me think I could attend Central, because it was there, and I had a right to go to the school of my choice. Brown also forced the reluctant President Eisenhower to act to protect me from the unruly mobs surrounding Central High School, by sending federal troops.

To the best of my knowledge, the decision did not affect my own formal education. I was in junior high school on Long Island in New York at the time. While our schools were not segregated by law, they were segregated de facto because of residential patterns.

So, I attended schools where the student body was overwhelmingly Jewish and there were no black students at all. In fact, of my high school graduating class of 216 students, 211 were Jewish.

Only as an adult have I come to realize how this de facto segregation deprived me of the richness a diverse study body brings in terms of culture, perspective and experiences.

Since I was born in 1954 my whole education is tied to Brown case. I attended public schools in Brooklyn, New York during the 1960s. Those schools were very integrated. It was before the massive white flight from the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. I went to schools with Jewish children, Irish children, Italian children and a stunning range of immigrant children from around the world.

But as each year went by the number of white children in the schools declined as the neighborhood became more and more black and brown. That led to arguments between white administrators and black parents as well as a decrease in the number of middle class families in the schools. But those schools gave my sister, my brother and me a very good basis for going on to higher education.

My family (emigrated) from Panama when my sister was about to start high school. Attending those integrated schools in Brooklyn, my sister was able to get such a good education that she went to a top college, Swarthmore and then Harvard. My brother also went to a top school and then NYU Law School. My grades allowed me to earn a scholarship to a private high school and then I followed my brother's footsteps and went to Haverford College.

How, if at all, has Brown v. Board changed opinions about the myth of racial inferiority?

Julian Bond, longtime civil rights activist, former Georgia legislator, and chairperson of the NAACP

Brown has probably done much to diminish feelings of racial superiority, but there's not any evidence I know of that it did so. For African Americans, it reinforced pre-existing assumptions they had of equality with Whites, and gave sanction from the nation's highest court that their long-denied serve for equality was just and right.

The Brown v. Board decision not only opened doors for minorities to attend white-only schools, but it also helped dispel the myth of racial inferiority as minorities became successful because of expanded educational opportunities.

For people who experienced the changes after Brown v. Board and who had the chance to attend desegregated schools and confront their racial stereotypes, they have modified their views. For those who have not benefited from Brown v. Board and desegregated education, myths of racial inferiority persist.

The theory of racial inferiority, espoused by Whites, provided a backdrop for their sense of entitlement and privilege which to be realized, required the imposing of arbitrary restrictions on African Americans.

These restrictions included withholding access to formal education, political participation, land ownership, paid employment and in some cases denying the right to legal marriage. Ongoing acts of violence against African Americans made for reluctance to challenge this artificial hierarchy.

Much like the Truman administration's decision to integrate the Armed Forces, the Brown decision played a pivotal role in addressing the country's image abroad. We could not hold ourselves up as a world leader speaking with a moral voice, when U.S. policy makers were engaged in human rights abuses at home.

Brown began the process of changing attitudes and beliefs about the value of all people by forcing the country to take a critical look at itself.

Finally, within the last decade scholars are researching and writing publications that examine the effects this presumption of privilege has had on generations of Whites in this country.

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Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.

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We ain't asking for anything that belongs to those white folks. I just mean to get for that little black boy of mine everything that any other South Carolina boy gets. I don't care if he's as white as the drippings of snow.

The Rev. J.W. Seals, Summerton, SC, 1953

It is, on its face, a story of separateness.

It is the story of two little girls walking through a railroad switchyard in 1950s Topeka, Kansas, lunch bags in hand, unable to attend a nearby white school, making their way to the black bus stop beyond the tracks.

And it is the larger story of countless other African-American children walking great distances, against great odds, to reach their own segregated schools as buses filled with white children passed them by.

But it is, at its heart, a story of togetherness, of courageously good-hearted and open-minded black and white people-and others-working together toward a constitutional ideal.

"When you look at Brown you are looking at a moment so powerful it is the equivalent of the Big Bang in our solar system," says historian and commentator Juan Williams. "It led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It led to sit-ins and bus rides and freedom marches. And even today, as we argue about affirmative action in colleges and graduate schools, the power of Brown continues to stir the nation."

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the separate but equal doctrine in American public schools.

The 11-page decision-much shorter than other major decisions of the era, and written by Chief Justice Earl Warren in purposefully unemotional language-was firm and clear: "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 decision was unanimous. Reaction was not. Newspaper editorials variously praised and condemned the decision. White Southerners vowed opposition. Predictions of ugly resistance came true.

Color lines, certainly, had already been crossed by 1954. Jackie Robinson, for example, had made history on the baseball field the previous decade.

But for those who resisted integration, watching a sport was very different from sending a child to school. Because opposition was fierce, those who fought for integration faced tremendous hardships. Often they lost jobs, were denied credit and were ostracized in white-and sometimes even black-society.

The half-century since Brown has been a series of gains and losses, from segregation to integration and on to a new kind of segregation. Other movements-feminism, the fights for other minority rights, LGBT rights, the rights of people with disabilities-were aided, bolstered and fueled by Brown. And while Brown focused on schools, it also helped in the fight for desegregation of everything from public golf courses to public buses.

On one hand, Brown remains the hallmark of the promise of equality for this nation. On the other, Brown's promise remains, if not broken, certainly unfulfilled.

The road to Brown

It's fitting that Linda Carol Brown and younger sister Terry Lynn had to walk along railroad tracks for their daily journey to school, fitting that so many other children determined to have an education journeyed such long paths to school. The route to Brown was similarly long and arduous, court cases linked together, steaming forward to a destination countless miles away.

The NAACP's Legal Defense Fund pulled the train. In the mid-20th century United States, the NAACP was the most powerful civil rights organization, with membership growing tenfold in the 1940s, to nearly half a million.

And Thurgood Marshall served as conductor, the lead NAACP attorney for Brown and the mastermind behind much of its strategy. Marshall would later become the nation's first African-American Supreme Court justice.

Brown itself was made up of five separate but similar court cases in four states and the District of Columbia, representing tens of families:

Briggs v. Elliott in South Carolina;

Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County in Virginia;

Gebhart v. Belton (a collection of cases itself, sometimes cited as Belton v. Gebhart or Bulah v. Gebhart) in Delaware;

Bolling v. Sharpe in the District of Columbia (which ended up with a separate court decision); and

The actual Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in Kansas.

These cases had been working their way through state and federal courts for several years. Details varied and strategies differed, but each case attacked the forced segregation of black students.

Other cases- Cumming v. Richmond (Ga.) Board of Education, Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, Sweatt v. Painter, and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education-were precursors to Brown, earlier attempts at integration and equal rights. (See timeline.)

And two 19th-century Supreme Court cases had created the laws that Brown sought to overturn:

1896's Plessy v. Ferguson, which opened the door to state-sanctioned racial discrimination across the South.

And 1857's Dred Scott v. Sanford, which ruled that black people, enslaved or free, were "so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

Reacting to Brown: Hope and hatred

When the Brown decision was announced, the Chicago Defender, a long-standing African-American newspaper, printed this: "Neither the atom bomb nor the hydrogen bomb will ever be as meaningful to our democracy as the unanimous declaration of the Supreme Court that racial segregation violates the spirit and the letter of our Constitution."

While fear of reprisal kept many black people from celebrating publicly, the decision still inspired tremendous emotion. James T. Patterson's book, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy, describes one reaction:

Sara Lightfoot, a 10-year-old black girl, vividly recalled the moment that news of Brown reached her house. "Jubilation, optimism and hope filled my home," she wrote later. "Through a child's eye, I could see the veil of oppression lift from my parents' shoulders. It seemed they were standing taller. And for the first time in my life I saw tears in my father's eyes."

But not all African Americans celebrated. Some worried that desegregation would further alienate black people in white society; that it would lead to the elimination of jobs for black school teachers; that it would do little to eliminate the racism in people's hearts and minds.

Zora Neale Hurston, a noted African-American author, put it this way: "How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them?"

Among white people, many in the North and West, unaffected by the ruling, still saw it as positive. Conversely, white southern leaders and southern newspapers loudly and angrily denounced the decision.

Consider the May 18, 1954, editorial in the Jackson, Miss., Daily News:

Human blood may stain Southern soil in many places because of this decision, but the dark red stains of that blood will be on the marble steps of the United States Supreme Court building. White and Negro children in the same schools will lead to miscegenation. Miscegenation leads to mixed marriages and mixed marriages lead to the mongrelization of the human race.

Georgia Gov. Marvin Griffin said, "No matter how much the Supreme Court seeks to sugarcoat its bitter pill of tyranny, the people of Georgia and the South will not swallow it."

Such harsh words foreshadowed the difficulty of implementing Brown.

"With all deliberate speed"

Brown was actually decided in phases. After striking down Plessy and declaring segregation unconstitutional, the Warren Court handled the issue of implementation separately. Brown II, as it has come to be known, was handed down more than a year later, on May 31, 1955.

In that decision, the Supreme Court sent all cases back to lower courts, asking states to desegregate their schools "with all deliberate speed."

An earlier draft of the ruling had used the words "at the earliest practicable date," but that language was struck down, in part as an appeasement to the anticipated resistance of the South. Using the more open-ended "deliberate speed" wording, Brown set no deadlines and left much of the decision-making in the hands of local school officials.

From 1955 to 1960, federal judges would hear more than 200 school desegregation cases. Border states reached 70 percent integration within about two years. Southern states, from grade to graduate school, were hardly changed:

In 1956, Autherine Lucy, a black woman seeking admission to the University of Alabama, was called vile names and pelted with rotten eggs by angry white people. Officials excluded her from campus, then expelled her. The university remained all white until the early 1960s.

In 1957, bloody riots erupted as nine black students attempted to enter Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. President Eisenhower, a reluctant player in the extended battle, eventually surrounded the school with 1,100 soldiers from the U.S. Army and the Arkansas National Guard. Troops stayed all year.

In 1960 in New Orleans, armed marshals shielded 6-year-old Ruby Bridges as she passed an angry crowd of 150 white people who threw tomatoes and eggs.

And by 1964 in Prince Edward County, Virginia-a full decade after Brown-not a single black child had been admitted to a white school. In fact, the county defiantly closed its public schools for five years rather than integrate them.

"Sleepwalking back to Plessy"

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally gave some teeth to Brown. That act, supported by the executive branch, empowered the federal government to cut funding to schools that continued to segregate their students and gave the U.S. Department of Justice authority to file lawsuits seeking desegregation of schools.

As Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote at the time, "There has been entirely too much deliberation and not enough speed in enforcing the constitutional rights which we held in Brown."

But even then, integration was fought in a variety of ways. Using the fact that, legally speaking, Mexican Americans were considered "white," schools in Texas and other states created "integrated" schools of Mexican Americans and African Americans, leaving all-white schools unchanged.

It wasn't until 1971 that widespread integration began. That's when a North Carolina case- Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education -allowed school systems to bus students as a way of integrating schools in segregated neighborhoods. Busing remains a volatile issue, but this decision is the one that prompted the highest levels of integration.

The number of black students attending majority-white schools in the South rose from 2 percent in the mid-1960s to nearly 45 percent in the late 1980s, the peak of school integration.

But success brought other changes. The mid-1980s also saw the first lifting of federal court sanctions, allowing schools to return to racial segregation. By 1991, integration levels had returned to pre-1971 levels.

Gary Orfield of Harvard University's Civil Rights Project put it this way: "We are, in essence, sleepwalking back to Plessy."

The 1970s through the 1990s also spotlighted new forms of segregation, fueled by a history of so-called "white flight" from cities to suburbs, particularly in the North and Midwest. By the opening of the 21st century, the nation's most segregated public schools were found not in the South but in Illinois, New York and New Jersey.

There, and in other areas across the country, black and Latino students live in segregated, urban neighborhoods and attend overcrowded, under-funded, low-achieving schools, while most of their white counterparts attend affluent, nearly all-white schools in suburban America.

Separate and unequal continues: More than 80 percent of black and Latino segregated schools are in high-poverty areas, compared with 5 percent of segregated white schools.

Today, the arguments are about affirmative action and the disparities created by the use of property taxes to fund schools. Just last year, the Supreme Court offered a split decision on affirmative action admissions to college, upholding race-based admissions at the University of Michigan's Law School but striking down a similar process used for Michigan's undergraduates.

The issues have changed, but the fundamental question remains: How equal are American educational opportunities?

So many things

In the end, Brown is as simple as equality and as complex as justice.

Brown is the courage of Barbara Johns, a 16-year-old girl in Farmville, Virginia, who in 1951 led a black student walkout of 450 young people, shaming adults into taking up the cause of integration. As one of the Brown lawyers explained at the time, "We didn't have the nerve to break their hearts."

It is the activism of Esther Brown, a white Jewish woman who, along with the NAACP, fought school segregation in several Kansas cities, becoming herself a target of white hatred.

It is the persistence of McKinley Burnett, the Topeka NAACP president who, well before the Brown case, tried to persuade the Topeka Board of Education to integrate its schools.

It is the hindsight of Kenneth Clark, a psychologist who testified in Brown about the harm done to black children by segregation. Forty years after Brown, Clark wrote that the United States "likely ... will never rid itself of racism and reach true integration. While I very much hope for the emergence of a revived civil rights movement with innovative programs and dedicated leaders, I am forced to recognize that my life has, in fact, been a series of glorious defeats."

It is all those children of color, in so many states, moving with determination and hope toward the promise of equal education.

And it is those two little girls in Topeka, walking on the packed earth of a railroad switchyard, reminding us all that education in this free land is less free for some children than it is for others, the journey longer, more fraught with pitfalls, then and now.
Photograph by Carl Iwasaki/Time-Life Pictures

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NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

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Brown v. Board: Celebrate 60 Years of the Landmark Decison

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Brown v. Board of Education was the Supreme Court decision that opened the doors for equal education in America. Ending the "separate but equal" doctrine, Brown v. Board changed the United States forever.

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C-Span Video - Linda Brown Thompson speaking at the Brown v. Board of Education Anniversary

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C-Span Video - Linda Brown Thompson speaking at the Brown v. Board of Education Anniversary

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University of Michigan, January 12, 2004

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Clip Of Brown v. Board of Education Anniversary This clip, title, and description were not created by C-SPAN. User-Created Clip June 28, 2017 University of Michigan, January 12, 2004 Participants talked to students about the decision in Brown v. Board of Education and the impact of the decision on...

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Library of Congress - Charles Hamilton Houston &  World War I

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Library of Congress - Charles Hamilton Houston &  World War I

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Lemuel Shaw (1781-1861). Courtesy Social Law Library, Boston. Rejecting Benjamin Roberts' contention that the Boston School Committee's racial segregation policy was unconstitutional, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw maintained that racial prejudice "is not created by law, and probably cannot be changed by law." In doing this, the court established a precedent that other state supreme courts later adopted.

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1% Black Teachers in Kansas City schools

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1% Black Teachers in Kansas City schools

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Charles King remembers in his third year teaching a parent called him aside and told him to be more authentic, to let some of his roots show because the black students in that urban Houston school needed to know he was one of them.

The encounter changed the way that King, now 39 and the head of a Kansas City teacher training program, would deal with students the rest of his teaching career. For the first time he realized the importance "and the power" of being a black man in a classroom.

Last month, the Urban League of Greater Kansas City's report on "The State of Black Kansas City" concluded that schools here are "still separate and unequal" and called into question the lack of men of color teaching in district and charter school classrooms.

"Studies have found that teachers of color can improve the educational experience of all students, and compared with their white peers, they are more likely to have higher expectations of students of color, confront issues of racism, develop more trusting relationships with students (particularly those who share a cultural background) and that teachers of color tend to serve as advocates and cultural brokers," the Urban League said.

It also said that some of the latest research found that assigning a black male student to a black teacher in the third, fourth or fifth grades significantly - nearly 30% - reduced the probability that the child would drop out of high school. It's a statistic of great interest to public school leaders who for decades have searched for ways to improve the graduation rate for minority students and close their achievement gap with white schoolmates.

"The impact that black male teachers have on student outcomes is leaps and bounds above any other demographic group," King told The Kansas City Star.

So now the race to hire men of color as teachers is on, said Charles Foust, superintendent in Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools, where black men make up 2.5% of the 2,038 teachers and Hispanic men comprise 1.3%.

It's not just a Kansas City area phenomenon. Education experts say it has been well documented that black students, who are regularly cited for lagging behind academically, perform better when taught by teachers of the same race.

"Kids do better when they're taught by teachers who look like them. That's just the way it is," said David Kretschmer, an education professor at California State University, Northridge.

Kretschmer helps lead the Future Minority Male Teachers Across California Project, which for the last three years has been recruiting, preparing and retaining male teachers of color at the elementary level throughout the state. "We need more men of color in American classrooms, period," he said. "There is a cultural impact and it's shared. A teacher of color has an easier time understanding the cultural background of the students in their classroom."

Yet more than 80% of teachers in U.S. public school classrooms are white, and most - 77% - are female. Among the other 20% who are teachers of color, black men are a mere 2%, even though nearly half of the nation's schoolchildren are students of color, according to the U.S. Department of Education. And by 2024 it's estimated that children of color will make up 56% of the student population.

Of the more than 66,000 teachers in Missouri this year, only 1.2% are black men. Black females fair better at 3.7%. But the portion who are Hispanic - male or female - is less than 1%. In Kansas, the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that of the state's more than 36,000 teachers, more than 95% are white and 1.6 % are Hispanic. The portions that are black are so small they aren't even quantified.

Having a black male teacher flips the script for black male teens, said Pernell Barrett, a 17-year-old senior at Center High School. Three years ago, 12% of the teachers in the Center district were black, 3% of them black men. This school year, 16% of the teachers are black, and 4% are black men. The district, like others across the area, is looking to increase those numbers.

Barrett remembers his first encounter with his English teacher, Troy Butler, one of Center's black male teachers. "It was my freshman year," Barrett said. "I didn't know him, but he came up to me and was like, how are you doing, how's your family? He just kept it real. It was like he just looked at me and he saw me, you know?" Even though Barrett has good relationships with most of his white teachers, it wasn't the same.

That hallway encounter, his teacher said, was like the brother to brother nod he says happens when two black men from anywhere pass each other any time, any place. It is an unspoken familiarity that Butler says goes a long way in a school setting between teacher and student or principal and student to improve the performance of young black male students.

"I think that the more that our faculty and our staff look like the kids that they serve the better it is for everybody," Butler said. "Those relationships can help other teachers. Those relationships can help all the students. Even the white students like having someone who is an authority figure who does not look like them."

"Representation matters," said Edgar Palacios, president and CEO of the Latinx Collaborative, which has focused on diversity in education. "All the data shows that teachers of color tend to have higher expectations of students of color. But this is not just about students of color. Because all students have better education outcomes when surrounded by a more diverse population of teachers."

Seneca Benjamin, 17, is another one of Butler's students at Center High School. He aspires to become an engineer and said his inspiration to be successful came from watching the four black male teachers he's had since elementary school. "I look at someone who looks like me and I see myself. I see that they came from the same place I came from, from the hood, the ghetto, and they are doing something. They are not those guys I see on the news who did a crime," Benjamin said. "It is good to see that people have made it out."

King, whose Kansas City Teacher Residency program trains people switching careers to work in classrooms, explains it this way: "I almost liken it to when people saw President Obama elected for the first time," he said. "More black children believed that 'Now I can be president than ever before.' That's what we're talking about. When you don't see that enough in your community, whether it be at home or at school, kids don't believe it's for them.

"Sure they hear it, right? But to them it's like, 'I hear you telling me I can go to college. I hear you telling me I could be academically successful, but there's no one in my school building, outside of, like, the kitchen staff, the cleaning crew, that is representative of what we deem is success.'"

The Morning Rundown

In 2014, the U.S. Department of Education reported that black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than white students. Butler believes there may be some connection to a cultural disconnect.

The absence of role models of color, Butler said, "creates a certain distance from authority. That can create defiance or can create, even among the teachers, a certain sense of distance that makes them not connect with students. So it can have a lot of unintended consequences for students and staff."

It's not that schools don't want to hire men of color. Quite the contrary, King said. Those candidates are highly sought after, but there just are not enough of them.

"I think a lot of stereotyping around teachers is what keeps men from entering the profession," said Palacios,

Schools of education at colleges around the country are not graduating enough men of color from their programs, King said.

For men, he said, particularly men of color, "being a teacher is not seen as the profession for family support. Right? And so we have to rebrand what it means to be an educator and beyond the monetary aspect."

Education leaders need to talk up teaching, said King. He's a Morehouse University graduate who hadn't thought much about a career in education until an educator steered him toward Teach for America, which began in the 1990s to recruit and train college scholars to become teachers.

"We have not talked to enough African American boys about teaching as a possibility and about seeing it as a pathway for where they are most needed," King said. "So we need to be having more conversations with them at the K 12 level about how we need teachers and how they can be the difference makers and change makers for the next generation."

Butler said he recently asked the seniors in the English class he teaches at Center High School, where most students are African American, "Hey anyone want to be a teacher?" Not one hand was raised. "I think it is because they don't see themselves in the teachers and they just have not seen it as a possibility," Butler said.

"When they see themselves reflected in certain professions then they tend to think, 'Hey I want to do that, or I think I can do that.' Versus if you never really had teachers of color it is never something that crosses your mind as something that you would want to do."

Area school district leaders say they are making an effort to change that narrative.

The KCK, Raytown, North Kansas City and Lee's Summit school districts have launched grow-your-own teacher programs that direct high school students toward the profession. Of the 32 students in the North Kansas City program, more than half are students of color.

In Raytown, tuition for qualified students is paid if they graduate from a college education program and then teach in the Raytown district.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman charter school has a two-year teacher residency program. After the first year, it helps candidates complete online course work to obtain Missouri teaching certification. To date, more than 60% of teachers from that program hired at the charter are people of color, and 26% are black men.

In Lee's Summit earlier this year, the district's first African American superintendent left after a dispute with the all-white school board over its reluctance to pay for equity training for teachers. Some teachers told The Star they were worried the very public race-related dispute would scare away future minority teacher candidates.

African American teachers in Lee's Summit, including one of the 11 black male teachers in the district, are working on recruiting.

Ovie Oghenejobo, a black psychology teacher, recruited about 40 students into his International Baccalaureate class its first year and had 60 sign up the following year. He is one of the teachers tapped by district administrators to encourage teachers of color to come to Lee's Summit.

"In the case for more diverse teachers, researchers call one phenomenon the 'role model effect,' where positive role model effects were found after having just one black teacher," said Kelly Wachel, district spokeswoman.

"Ovie is such a connector and he is certainly a valuable role model for our students." On top of recruiting, district leaders are advertising with historically black colleges and universities, and with local hip-hop and R&B radio programs.

The KCK district is partnering with Kansas State University, University of Kansas and MidAmerica Nazarene University to place new teaching graduates in KCK classrooms. It's paying off, Foust said. Two young men of color - one black and one Hispanic - from MidAmerica Nazarene have just started with the district.

Sometimes getting young men to agree to pursue a career in education "takes some convincing," said Kretschmer, the education professor.

But even if colleges succeed in attracting more men of color to their education programs and school districts succeed in upping their hiring game, keeping those new hires on staff is yet another challenge.

Other teachers do play a part in the retention of men of color, King said.

Teachers want to feel comfortable, an integral part of their work environment, without feeling like a stereotype, Palacios said. "There is this idea that men tend to take on discipline roles in schools and men of color are often asked to return to positions as teachers that were traumatic situations for them as a student - handling disruptive students, talking to the troubled athlete." Palacio said that when these men are asked to treat students how they were once treated, a lot of times they don't stick around.

Education research teams at Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley are studying best practices for retaining teachers of color. One suggestion is networking groups, where they come together to discuss work and its challenges.

Palacio said the 2% figure for men of color in U.S. schools "has been the same for quite a while, even though there is a lot of effort around recruitment and retention."

A little more than 10 years ago, the Great Recession disrupted the growth. Now, Palacios said, "with all the negative rhetoric" at the national level, "these are difficult times for black and brown men to walk into the school environment to teach."

That hasn't stopped Butler, who began working with kids when he was 18 and worked in a juvenile offender facility in Wichita for five years before moving to Kansas City. After six years teaching in the Center district, he became an assistant principal at the high school. He left two years ago for the Shawnee Mission district, where he was an assistant principal at a middle school.

Now he's back in the classroom at Center High School, and he said he's trying to change lives.

"I know these kids," Butler said. "I know a lot of them outside of school and I know their parents. I know them well enough to say to them, 'I know your mama doesn't let you act like that,' and so I'm going to hold them to a higher standard. I expect them to do better."

And when he was buying new books for the English department, he chose two by black American journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates "because I realized as an English teacher that these textbooks that we have been using for years, our students aren't in them. That's because they weren't really written for them, they were written just for the average American student and didn't include a lot of African American perspective."

Butler said he believes that for a lot of his students, "it will be the first time that they read a book in an English class at school and know that this is 100% about me and about my experience. And that is a big shift for a lot of teachers."

He said the classroom is where representation matters most. "I think it is important for me to advocate for that. For our kids."

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The Urban League of Greater Kansas City's report on "The State of Black Kansas City" said KC schools are "still separate and unequal"

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Last month, the Urban League of Greater Kansas City's report on "The State of Black Kansas City" concluded that schools here are "still separate and unequal" and called into question the lack of men of color teaching in district and charter school classrooms.

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Written by Charles Payne

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Written by Jason A. Grisson and Christopher Redding

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The History Of Policing in the United States

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The History Of Policing in the United States