The Negro educational review最新文献

{"title":"A Bi-Generational Narrative in the Brown v. Board Decision","authors":"W. B. Harvey, A. Harvey","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv17260cf.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv17260cf.11","url":null,"abstract":"Part I - Life as a Brown Baby Part II - Brown vs. Board of Education: A Contemporary Analysis It would be a slight exaggeration to say that I clearly remember the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, since I was only six years old at the time this landmark legal edict was handed down. But precocious child that I was, I was about to complete second grade, and like every other little colored child in the state of North Carolina, I was in a racially segregated school at the time. What made school a special place for me was that it was across the road from the campus of Elizabeth City State Teachers College, which was the alma mater of my second grade teacher, and most of the other teachers in my town, including my father. We didn't actually go on the college campus very often - sometimes there was a special field trip to see a play, or listen to a debate. But most of the time, we just stared in awe and admiration at those cool college kids who dashed here and there, back and forth, in a world that we could only imagine. Just seeing those earnest young men and women inspired some of us to reach for similar heights. A college education was a rarity in North Carolina at the time, even for white people. So being in such close proximity to an institution of higher learning - one that I could legitimately aspire to attend - provided me with a sense of the possible that shaped my life at a very early point. Even at six though, I was keenly aware of segregation and what it meant. Our world, though nurturing and supportive, was also very tightly defined. Having attended kindergarten and first grade in a Catholic school that was two blocks from our house, I had been taught by white nuns. I remember them as being nice to me, encouraging and supportive, which is pretty important when you are the smallest person in your class. I also remember though, that in the parent-teacher meetings, when my mother went to check on the progress of my sister and I, that the interaction pattern was just a little different with the nuns than it was with the other people in my neighborhood. It was the same interaction pattern that I noticed when, with my mother, or father, or even my grandmother, we ventured out of our neighborhood to go downtown or to the supermarket - circumstances when we would encounter white people, whom I noticed were always in charge. Southern children, especially colored children, were brought up to be polite and always respectful of their elders. When we addressed them, we said sir and ma'am as an acknowledgement of their age and experience. It confused me then, when on a trip to the five-and-ten with my grandmother, she endeavored to get the attention of the white girl behind the counter by raising her hand and saying to her, \"Please ma'am, could you give me some help.\" Of course I didn't say anything at the time-it wouldn't have been proper-but on the walk home, I asked Grandma why she said ma'am to someone so much younger than she, someone who accor","PeriodicalId":88326,"journal":{"name":"The Negro educational review","volume":"56 1","pages":"43-49"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41406708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Minority Status, Oppositional Culture, & Schooling","authors":"J. Ogbu","doi":"10.4324/9780203931967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203931967","url":null,"abstract":"@contents: Selected Contents: Table of Contents Foreword Roslyn A. Mickelson Preface John U. Ogbu A Note from Marcellina Ada Ogbu Acknowledgments Marcellina Ada Ogbu PART ONE: HISTORY AND FRAMEWORK Chapter 1: The History and Status of a Theoretical Debate John U. Ogbu Chapter 2: Collective Identity and the Burden of \"Acting White\" in Black History, Community, and Education John U. Ogbu Chapter 3: Ways of Knowing: The Ethnographic Approach to the Study of Collective Identity and Schooling John U. Ogbu Chapter 4: Multiple Sources of Peer Pressures Among African American Students John U. Ogbu Chapter 5: Language and Collective Identity Among Adults and Students in a Black Community John U. Ogbu Chapter 6: \"Signithia, You Can Do Better Than That\": John Ogbu (and Me) and the Nine Lives Peoples Signithia Fordham PART TWO: COLLECTIVE IDENTITY, BLACK AMERICANS, AND SCHOOLING Chapter 7: High School Students of Color Talk About Accusations of \"Acting White\" David A. Bergin and Helen C. Cooks Chapter 8: Black Students' Identity and Acting White and Black Linwood Cousins Chapter 9: Reexamining Resistance as Oppositional Behavior: The Nation of Islam and the Creation of a Black Achievement Ideology A.A. Akom Chapter 10: What Does \"Acting White\" Actually Mean? Racial Identity, Adolescent Development, and Academic Achievement Among African American Youths Margaret Beale Spencer and Vinay Harpalani Chapter 11: \"Excellence\" and Student Class, Race, and Gender Cultures Lois Weis","PeriodicalId":88326,"journal":{"name":"The Negro educational review","volume":"109 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70599911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South","authors":"Theodore Carter DeLaney","doi":"10.5860/choice.45-2789","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.45-2789","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":88326,"journal":{"name":"The Negro educational review","volume":"116 1","pages":"94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71119008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Differences in School Discipline among U.S. High School Students: 1991-2005.","authors":"John M Wallace,&nbsp;Sara Goodkind,&nbsp;Cynthia M Wallace,&nbsp;Jerald G Bachman","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The present study uses large nationally representative samples of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian American, and American Indian students to examine current patterns and recent trends (1991 to 2005) in racial, ethnic, and gender differences in school discipline. We found that Black, Hispanic, and American Indian youth are slightly more likely than White and Asian American youth to be sent to the office and substantially (two to five times) more likely to be suspended or expelled. Although school discipline rates decreased over time for most ethnic groups, among Black students school discipline rates increased between 1991 and 2005. Logistic regression analyses that controlled for racial and ethnic differences in socio-demographic factors suggest racial and ethnic differences in school discipline do not result from racial and ethnic differences in socioeconomic status. Future research and practice efforts should seek to better understand and to eliminate racial, ethnic and gender disproportionality in school discipline.</p>","PeriodicalId":88326,"journal":{"name":"The Negro educational review","volume":"59 1-2","pages":"47-62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2678799/pdf/nihms50094.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"28164445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"what are the Ultimate Meaning and Significance of Brown v. Board of Education?","authors":"S. Cook","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv17260cf.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv17260cf.5","url":null,"abstract":"Introduction Much of the country has participated in the 50th anniversary celebration of Brown v. Board of Education, a decision handed down by the Supreme Court on May 17, 1954. This historic, landmark, controversial, and revolutionary case nullified and reversed so much of the content, character, and spirit of American constitutional history, jurisprudence, and moral philosophy on the status, rights, and privileges of blacks and helped to catalyze, mobilize, and energize the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Revolution. It was fraught with deep and heavy symbolism and significance-moral, social, constitutional, political, and cultural. It is not easy to grasp the full dimensions of the \"radical\" and \"revolutionary\" decision. A completely new legal era, with fresh ethical and constitutional presuppositions and juristic vision, integrity, and higher possibilities, was born. The crowning jewel or element was the discovery or rediscovery and application of the great, precious, basic, and perennial ideal and sense of justice in the context of the African-American journey. Equality is the cornerstone of the edifice of justice. A distinguished professor of constitutional law and law school dean, Gene R. Nichol, makes the following observation on the uniqueness and far-reaching significance of Brown: Brown is surely the most central, defining, culture-altering decision ever handed down by a U. S. court. It not only bolstered an unfolding, muscular civil rights movement; it provided direct lineage for the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It initiated a framework of constitutional equality that has dealt steady blows to formal, legal discrimination across an impressive array of fronts in our national life. ... The Supreme Court's powerful rejection of state-imposed racial apartheid helped change the nation (Nichol, 2004). Justice and the Human Person Justice is one of the most precious, primordial, luminous, unique, and universal claims of the human person. It is, the ancients taught us, one of the most basic and perennial values of civilization and indeed the rational, moral, and natural order and structure of being. Whatever the definition, no one wants to be treated unjustly. Justice may be defined, for example, in Aristotelian terms as the disposition to give each person his due or proportion, or as a contemporary philosopher, John Rawls, as \"fairness,\" or in an endless variety of other ways, but whatever definition is offered, each person wants \"justice.\" There are aristocratic and democratic as well as oligarchic and hierarchical conceptions of justice. Ultimately, the moral claim to justice is generally rooted in the doctrine of the intrinsic dignity and value of the human person, each and every person-an inheritance of his/her common humanity. This is the democratic and humanistic ideal of justice. Equality is a regulative principle of justice, and so is liberty or freedom. A higher and more creative justice ","PeriodicalId":88326,"journal":{"name":"The Negro educational review","volume":"56 1","pages":"3-10"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68781694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Big Disconnect between Segregation and Integration","authors":"Vincene Verdun","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv17260cf.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv17260cf.15","url":null,"abstract":"I. Introduction The hearts and minds of the American people have been won over on the issue of segregation.1 Flash back over the fifty years since the landmark decision, Brown v. Topeka,2 which ended legal school segregation, and reflect on the long and arduous effort to convert attitudes away from the longstanding acceptance of race segregation. It took a monumental civil rights movement, marked by marches, sit-ins, hoses, billy-clubs, beatings, dogs, bombings, murders, arrests and the myriad of memories and rememories we hold of the American Civil Rights Movement to achieve widespread acceptance of the ultimate wrongness of segregation.3 Today, only the most extreme groups, residing on the very fringes of polite society, herald the ideology of segregation of the races.4 American corporations, in preparation for their role in the global marketplace with an increasingly multi-racial consumer base, have been strong supporters of diversity for decades, and many submitted amicus briefs supporting affirmative action in Grutter v. Bollinger (The University of Michigan) .5 Recently, in The New York Times Magazine, several corporations collaborated on a lengthy article designed to extol the virtues of diversity and integration.6 Integration has been embraced as an unassailable structure in our society.7 The dilemma we confront as a society, is that while an overwhelming majority of Americans would cringe at the idea of a racially segregated America, America remains racially segregated and racial equality is more ideal than real.8 Even though there is almost no legal segregation in America, most Americans live in segregated neighborhoods,9 attend segregated schools10 and churches,11 play on segregated beaches, vacation in segregated hotels and resorts and many have segregated workplaces.12 There is an apparent theoretical disconnection in America between the evils of segregation and the virtues of integration. Our society accepts segregation as bad, but it also views forcing individuals to forego any personal liberty for the sake of integration and equity as unfair and illegal.13 Thus we have the \"Big Disconnect\" between the legal and social wrong of segregation and the means of achieving integration, whether that comes in the form of school integration plans or affirmative action. This article will take a look in broad strokes over the past fifty years at how America has progressed legally, ideally and really from the pre-Brown society that accepted the legal segregation of the races, to the post-Grutter society, which has sacrificed racial integration, and accepted racial inequality in the process. The United States Supreme Court (The Court) decisions from the popular affirmative action battlegrounds of education, business and employment will be used to demonstrate how the law and attitudes of the American people support the perpetuation of a segregated and unequal society, while extolling the virtues of integration. On several occasions in the past fi","PeriodicalId":88326,"journal":{"name":"The Negro educational review","volume":"1 1","pages":"67-82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68781613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Continuing Spirit of the Brown Decision of the Supreme Court","authors":"C. Willie","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv17260cf.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv17260cf.6","url":null,"abstract":"Richard Kluger, author of Simple Justice (1975), is correct in stating that Brown deserves \"a high place in the literature of liberty\" (Kluger 1975: X). Historian John Hope Franklin has written that \"Perhaps no public question in the United States in the twentieth century aroused more interest at home and abroad than the debate about the constitutionality of segregated public schools\" (Franklin 1974: 421). Brown, indeed, became both an exhilarating and a troubling experience for citizens of a nation-state whose government is guided by a Constitution. The Declaration of Independence, adopted unanimously July 4, 1776 by the second Continental Congress, declared that \"all...are created equal.\" And the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States ratified in 1789 indicated that this nation was founded \"to create a more perfect union,\" \"to establish justice...[and] to promote the general welfare...\" (Harvard Classics 1938: 150-155). And the Fourteenth Amendment proscribes all state-imposed discrimination against any citizen of the United States. Brown was exhilarating to citizens of this nation who recognized it as a way of achieving these goals mentioned above. Brown was troubling to citizens who classified it as judicial activism that ignored the authority of the legislative and executive branches of government. They pointed out that the Constitution empowered three separate but interdependent units of government to serve as checks and balances on each unit (Harvard Classics 1938: 180-198). Actually, the Brown v. Board of Education decision of the U.S. Supreme Court descended upon this nation as a way of checking the pervasive injustice rendered by public educational institutions on people of color, particularly African Americans. The injustices resulted from laws, regulations and other public policies promulgated or facilitated by actions of legislative and executive branches of government. Thus, Brown was a legitimate limitation on discriminatory activities facilitated by policies of government that violated the Constitution. In 1896, the Supreme Court in its Plessy vs. Ferguson decision permitted public agencies to separate people of different races, if the separate accommodations were equal. In the Brown decision, the Court rejected the Plessy opinion because the segregated public accommodations for black people and white people were unequal. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored people (NAACP) fashioned a litigation strategy beginning in 1938 designed to demonstrate in courts of law that separate educational facilities and policies in local communities for black and white populations were never equal. The Brown decision in 1954 was the outcome of several court cases argued by NAACP lawyers. I, personally, experienced the inequality of secondary schools in Dallas, Texas, the city of my birth where I grew up. Before 1940, all blacks in this big city attended one high school, The Booker T. Washington High School located in N","PeriodicalId":88326,"journal":{"name":"The Negro educational review","volume":"56 1","pages":"11-17"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68782151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Not So Strange Path of Desegregation in America’s Public Schools","authors":"Philip T. K. Daniel","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv17260cf.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv17260cf.14","url":null,"abstract":"Introduction The [Brown] decision ... became the archetype of a landmark decision. Landmark decisions are, at bottom, designed through reference to constitutional interpretations and supportive legal precedents to address and hopefully resolve deeply divisive social issues. They are framed in a language that provides at least the appearance of doing justice without unduly upsetting large groups whose potential for noncompliance can frustrate relief efforts and undermine judicial authority. For reasons that may not even have been apparent to the members of the Supreme Court, their school desegregation decisions achieved over time afar loftier place in legal history than they were able to accomplish in reforming the ideology of racial domination that Plessy v. Ferguson represented. (Bell, 2004). This passage from the book Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform by Derrick Bell provides a fitting description of the life of racial equality in America's public schools, and Bell's own early career illuminates the sequence of judicial events. Bell started his legal career in the Civil Rights Division of the United States Justice Department. In the years 1960-65 Professor Bell was an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund supervising the litigation of desegregation cases for that organization. In 1966 he reunited with the Justice Department aiding in the enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act \"authorizing the termination of federal funds to school districts ... in noncompliance\" with early federal court desegregation decisions. (Bell, 2004 p.3) Today, Mr. Bell is an ardent critic of those same decisions he helped to enforce, claiming that court ordered desegregation is a \"fiction,\" that racial discrimination against people of color is as ingrained in American society as apple pie, and that school districts are inappropriate places to seek racial reform. So goes the journey of school integration as the legal status of discriminatory acts against students on the basis of race is rooted firmly in the United States Constitution, especially the concept of equal protection of the laws found in the Fourteenth Amendment. The journey of desegregation has been circular following the swings of social eras involving more than one hundred and fifty years of litigation. Except for a few significant cases, state and local government officials and members of school boards have been afforded power in determining authority to circumvent desegregation decrees based on the Tenth Amendment of the United States Constitution declaring, \" [t]he powers not delegated to the [federal government] by the Constitution ... are reserved to the states.\" (U.S. Constitution, Amend. X) Specifically, racial discrimination in schools has had a history largely supported by judicial decisions under the rubric of states rights. Those in the racial majority in the South and the North have steadfastly resisted any change in the status ","PeriodicalId":88326,"journal":{"name":"The Negro educational review","volume":"56 1","pages":"57-66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68781976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Frasier v. UNC—A Personal Account","authors":"Ralph K. Frasier","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv17260cf.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv17260cf.9","url":null,"abstract":"LeRoy Benjamin Frasier, Jr. Ralph Kennedy Frasier and John Lewis Brandon, Plaintiffs vs. The Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina (University of North Carolina) Gordon Gray, President University of North Carolina (James Harris Purks, Acting President) Corydon P. Spruill, Dean of the General College of the University of North Carolina (Cecil Johnson, Successor) Clifford Lyons, Dean of the Undergraduate School of Arts and Sciences (J. Carlyle Stitterson, Successor) and Lee Roy Wells Armstrong, Director of Admissions University of North Carolina , Defendants \"No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty..... without due process of law nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law.\" - Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Every newspaper, most magazines and especially, the bar journals, have paused this year to recognize the most important U.S. Court ruling of the past century and perhaps of all time. Certainly, for African Americans, the decision has caused greater changes in our lifetime than any other. Prior to 1954, 17 states had laws requiring segregation of some aspect of society - law enforcement, housing, marriage, adoption, education, healthcare, burial, transportation, employment, entertainment, food service, hotels. Most of the 17 required segregation in all of those categories. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas began the change of the mindset of the entire country which had accepted or, at least tolerated, the rationale of the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that \"separate facilities for the races are permissible.... so long as the facilities were equal.\" Plessy recognized, as fact, that segregation was required because of fears, prides and prejudices which were rampart in the South and latent in the North. Segregation sought to prevent dilution of blood or dissipation of faith - the instinct for self preservation. \"Negroes do not have the capacity to absorb white education. Desegregation will result in lowering the intelligence of whites....\" Brown reversed Plessy and turned the underlying rationale upside down. Much of the 2004 writing focuses on the trend toward re-segregating the races in public education. Jane Hancock Jones, a young African American lawyer from Columbus, Ohio, writing in the Spring issue of Columbus Bar Briefs analyzes trends in Columbus schools and concludes that we are back to the '50s. Unfortunately, the court did not set a timetable for enforcement and directed desegregation with \"all deliberate speed\" - interpreted as a euphemism for delay. In 1954, one hundred members of Congress issued the Southern Manifesto encouraging massive resistance and pledging the \"use of all lawful means to bring about a reversal.\" The U.S. Attorney General, Herbert Brownell, called together the Southern State attor","PeriodicalId":88326,"journal":{"name":"The Negro educational review","volume":"56 1","pages":"83-90"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68782456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Observing the Fiftieth anniversary of the 1954 United States Supreme court School desegregation decision in Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas","authors":"Charles U. Smith","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv17260cf.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv17260cf.7","url":null,"abstract":"As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Brown v the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas U. S. Supreme Court public school desegregation decision on (hereafter the Brown Decision), I was tempted to refer to it as a \"celebration of the Golden Anniversary of the legal end to racial segregation in the public schools of the United States.\" When the decision was rendered, on May 17, 1954, I was so elated that I was confident that 50 years later public school racial desegregation would be a thing of the past and a truly \"golden celebration\" would be highly appropriate. And while I still am convinced that the Brown Decision was a necessary and fundamental prerequisite for human dignity, race relations, personal/social adjustment, equal educational access, and progress toward the American Ideal, events that have emerged and continuing efforts to obscure, evade, emasculate, and override the Decision, demand that we have an \"observance\" rather than a \"celebration\" in its \"golden\" year. I There can be no doubt that the Brown Decision was one of the Court's most important, judicially ground-breaking, precedent-setting ones, with far-reaching impacts on the U. S. Congress, lower federal and state courts, state legislatures, the Presidency, federal agencies, private corporations and businesses, and of course, all levels of public and federally assisted educational institutions. To put all of this into proper perspective, I think that it is imperative that we examine, at least briefly, philosophies, societal patterns and court rulings that established, regulated, and limited the roles, status, and behavior of Negroes (blacks) in the United States, prior to the Brown ruling. It is generally accepted that Negro slavery was introduced into the United States colonies at Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. This slavery, though, was not confined to the southern and border states but reached visible and significant numerical levels as far north as New York City (Singer, 2003). There is also documented evidence that some Negroes (blacks) served as indentured servants, but it has been clearly shown that the overwhelming majority of Negroes brought from Africa to the colonies from the early 1600s to the 1800s were held as property, and existed in total involuntary servitude - for approximately two and a half centuries. II The most notable efforts to modify the slave system and upgrade the status of Negroes was the Dred Scott lawsuits, brought to establish himself and his family as free (non-slave) persons. Dred Scott was born a slave and was owned by Peter Blow in St. Louis, Missouri. Scott subsequently had several owners/masters. From 1830 to 1842 Scott, who married Harriet Robinson, also a slave, spent time in Illinois and Wisconsin, both non-slave states, in service to his then owner Dr. John Emerson, a military surgeon. In 1842 the Scott family returned to St. Louis with Dr. Emerson and his wife, and Emerson died in 1843. In 1846, the Scotts sued Mrs. Emerson for thei","PeriodicalId":88326,"journal":{"name":"The Negro educational review","volume":"56 1","pages":"19-32"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68782411","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}