School Segregation and Brown v Board: Crash Course Black American History #33

In 1955, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that public schools should be racially integrated, and overturned the separate but equal doctrine established in Plessy v Ferguson decades before. This was made possible by a concerted legal effort spearheaded by the NAACP. Beginning in the 1930s, the NAACP’s legal defense fund (led by Thurgood Marshall at the time of the Brown Decision) pursued a strategy of bringing cases to court that would expand the civil rights of Black Americans. This multi-decade effort culminated in the Brown decision, with many other victories along the way.

Clint’s book, How the Word is Passed is available now!

VIDEO SOURCES

Rachel Devlin, A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America’s Schools. New York: Basic Books, 2018.
Justin Driver, The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind. New York: Pantheon Books, 2018.
Charles Ogletree, Jr. All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown V. Board of Education. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004.
James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Klarman, Michael J. “How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis.” The Journal of American History 81, no. 1 (1994): 81-118. Accessed July 29, 2021. doi:10.2307/2080994.

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