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David Tinsley

1.) This mandate ensures that all schools treat each student fairly regardless of race. Making sure that schools were desecrated and kept that way.

2.) This mandate was subjective and did not provide for schools outside of the public school systems. Although with this mandate being public law would not include private institutions.

3.) For the time and place that this mandate was put into place I feel it was social advancement. There needs to be updates and overhauls that are congruent with todays social and public education expectations and needs.

4.) There needs to be extensions that are more culturally appropriate for the ultra diverse school environment that we are presented with today.

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1. without this mandate, schools would not have as much diversity, which could cause students to struggle when they get older. This mandate was important in my school because we never made children feel different

2. One challenge with this mandate is that it is only mandated in public schools and not private

3. I agree with this mandate because I believe all schools should be equal

4. the only thing I would change would be to mandate it in all schools, and not just private schools

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1: The Brown v. Board of Education decision has ensured more racial diversity in schools, as they can no longer be segregated based on race. It not only had a positive impact on diversity, but was progress toward ending segregation as a whole.

2: The mandate applied only to public schools rather than all private schools as well.

3: I completely agree with this mandate due to the objective evils of segregation and discrimination based on race.

4: The execution of the mandate took longer than it should have. More specificity should have been included to ensure integration of all schools quicker.

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1. This mandate was crucially important in allowing all people, regardless of race, to get the same quality of education. Thanks to this mandate, I was able to grow up in an extremely diverse school system exposed to a variety of different cultures and perspectives that I would not have seen otherwise. This makes our children more tolerant, empathetic, and knowledgeable about life experiences different from their own.

2. This mandate left desegregation to lower courts, which meant that many schools still tried to find a way around desegregation.

3. Of course. Equal education is a fundamental human right.

4. I would have implemented stronger measures at the federal level to ensure that desegregation happened more quickly and with less political defiance.

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1. This mandate has played a major role in my community and school system. It allowed for more diversity and equality within each of the schools.

2. One of the challenges within this mandate was the criticism that African Americans faced when they began going to White schools. They were treated harshly and were unwelcome by the communities.

3. I wholeheartedly agree with this mandate and I believe that everyone, of any race or ethnicity, should have the same opportunities. Without this mandate, we would all be divided against each other.

4. The only thing I would change about this mandate would be to require that all schools participate, not just those public schools but private as well.

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Lillian Harmon

1. Without the mandate from Brown vs. Education, this could affect the school's diversity.

2. The only criticism is that this mandate only applies to public schools, not private ones.

3. I agree with this mandate because all schools are now equal and peaceful instead of segregated.

4. One change I would make is would apply this mandate to any type of school and not just public schools.

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David Quintanilla

1. Bowling Green is an extremely diverse community and their schools reflect that. Without the mandate from Brown vs Education these schools would not be diverse.

2. As everyone else is saying the only criticism with this mandate is that it only applied to public schools and that private schools were still allowed to segregate.

3. Yes, I agree with this mandate. Without it our schools would be so different, and I would have no idea how my life would be right now.

4. One change that should've been made to this mandate is that it should've applied to private schools as well.

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Tyler Case

1: This mandate was huge for education and communities, banning the segregation of African Americans in schools and was a massive stepping stone towards civil rights and towards tearing down racist beliefs and ideologies.

2: A critic that I echo with Kennedy and Addison is the mandate only applying to public schools. The mandate should have been nationwide, applying to all schools, including private schools, showing that racism has no place in education.

3: I agree with this mandate. Racism, separation of people and bigotry are all evil, terrible beliefs that do not belong in any sphere, let alone education, this was a big and necessary step for the equality of all people.

4. One change I would make to the mandate would be to require the desegregation of private schools as well as public schools. Racism should not have a place to retreat to when taken away, equality should be afforded to everyone, whether they decide on a public or private education, they should be afforded that without fear of discrimination or retaliation.

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Addison Gorday

1. The mandate impacts my school because it disallowed segregation in schools. If this mandate wasn't put in place, segregation in schools would still be allowed. For the community, it was a big step in the direction for overall desegregation in the U.S. This helped pave the way for civil rights.

2. I agree with Kennedy in that the mandate was only for public schools, resulting in private schools still being able to segregate students.

3. I fully agree with this mandate. This was a huge win for civil rights and it should've happened much sooner than it did.

4. If I could change anything I would've made it happen sooner, so equal opportunities could've been dealt earlier.

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Kennedy Welty

1- This mandate impacts the school because it diminished segregation and allowed African American children to learn in classrooms alongside white children. It impacted the community because this desegregation affected other segregation laws too.

2- A criticism I have is that it at first it only affected public schools, meaning that private schools were still segregated until 1976.

3- I agree with this mandate because it is important that everyone has an equal opportunity, especially to get educated.

4- If I could change one aspect, it would be to get the private schools involved faster in the mandate so that people have the option to choose whether their children attend private or public school.

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First and Last Name

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The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision mandated the desegregation of public schools and gave the executive branch a legal precedent for enforcing equal access to education.

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Separate But Equal Doctrine

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for Black people and whites were equal.

The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools and other public facilities as whites-known as "Jim Crow" laws -and established the "separate but equal" doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.

But by the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools, and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.

In the case that would become most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka's all-white elementary schools.

In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for Black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called "equal protection clause" of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The case went before the U.S. District Court in Kansas, which agreed that public school segregation had a "detrimental effect upon the colored children" and contributed to "a sense of inferiority," but still upheld the "separate but equal" doctrine.

Brown v. Board of Education Verdict

When Brown's case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. (Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall as the first Black Supreme Court justice.)

At first, the justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, with Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand. But in September 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, then governor of California.

Displaying considerable political skill and determination, the new chief justice succeeded in engineering a unanimous verdict against school segregation the following year.

In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place," as segregated schools are "inherently unequal." As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being "deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."

Little Rock Nine

In its verdict, the Supreme Court did not specify how exactly schools should be integrated, but asked for further arguments about it.

In May 1955, the Court issued a second opinion in the case (known as Brown v. Board of Education II), which remanded future desegregation cases to lower federal courts and directed district courts and school boards to proceed with desegregation "with all deliberate speed."

Though well intentioned, the Court's actions effectively opened the door to local judicial and political evasion of desegregation. While Kansas and some other states acted in accordance with the verdict, many school and local officials in the South defied it.

In one major example, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state National Guard to prevent Black students from attending high school in Little Rock in 1957. After a tense standoff, President Eisenhower deployed federal troops, and nine students-known as the " Little Rock Nine"- were able to enter Central High School under armed guard.

Impact of Brown v. Board of Education

Though the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board didn't achieve school desegregation on its own, the ruling (and the steadfast resistance to it across the South) fueled the nascent civil rights movement in the United States.

In 1955, a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and would lead to other boycotts, sit-ins and demonstrations (many of them led by Martin Luther King Jr.), in a movement that would eventually lead to the toppling of Jim Crow laws across the South.

Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, backed by enforcement by the Justice Department, began the process of desegregation in earnest. This landmark piece of civil rights legislation was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

In 1976, the Supreme Court issued another landmark decision in Runyon v. McCrary, ruling that even private, nonsectarian schools that denied admission to students on the basis of race violated federal civil rights laws.

By overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education had set the legal precedent that would be used to overturn laws enforcing segregation in other public facilities. But despite its undoubted impact, the historic verdict fell short of achieving its primary mission of integrating the nation's public schools.

Today, more than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the debate continues over how to combat racial inequalities in the nation's school system, largely based on residential patterns and differences in resources between schools in wealthier and economically disadvantaged districts across the country.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

Sources

History - Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment, United States Courts.
Brown v. Board of Education, The Civil Rights Movement: Volume I (Salem Press).
Cass Sunstein, "Did Brown Matter?" The New Yorker, May 3, 2004.
Brown v. Board of Education, PBS.org.
Richard Rothstein, Brown v. Board at 60, Economic Policy Institute, April 17, 2014.

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Brown v. Board of Education: Summary, Ruling & Impact | HISTORY

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional.

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#1 - How does this mandate impact your school or community?

#2 - What are some criticisms or challenges of this mandate?

#3 - Do you agree with this mandate?  Why or why not?

#4 - If you could change one aspect of this mandate, what would it be and why?