Before
1954, both law and custom mandated strict racial segregation throughout
much of the nation. That began to change with Brown v. Board
of Education, the landmark decision that overturned the pernicious
“separate but equal” doctrine. In declaring that legally
mandated school segregation was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court
played a critical role in helping to dismantle America’s own
version of apartheid, Jim Crow.
This new study of Brown—the title for a group of cases drawn
from Kansas, Virginia, South Carolina, Delaware, and the District
of Columbia—offers an insightful and original overview designed
expressly for students and general readers. It is concise, up-to-date,
highly readable, and very teachable. The authors, all recognized authorities on legal history and civil
rights law, do an admirable job of examining the fight for legal
equality in its broad cultural and historical context. They convincingly
show that Brown cannot be understood apart from the history of caste
and exclusion in American society. That history antedated the very
founding of the country and was supported by the nation’s highest
institutions, including the Supreme Court whose decision in Plessy
v. Ferguson (1896) supported the notion of “separate but
equal.” Their book traces the lengthy court litigations, highlighting the
pivotal role of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People and including incisive portraits of key players,
including co-plaintiff Oliver Brown, newly appointed Chief Justice
Earl Warren, NAACP lawyer and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood
Marshall, and Justice Felix Frankfurter, who recognized the crucial
importance of a unanimous court decision and helped produce it.
The authors simply but powerfully narrate their story and show that
Brown not only changed the national equation of race and caste—it
also changed our view of the Court’s role in American life. As we prepare to commemorate the decision’s fiftieth anniversary
in May 2004, this book invites readers to appreciate the lasting
importance of what was indisputably a landmark case.
The eagles have blue wings it looks cool and weird at the same time! They look kinda brownish today its weird how they go from grey to brown! They look dead but they are really asleep i hope. They are so peaceful and quiet well they are now but when they get older they will make lots of ruckiss. In June and July they will be flying in and out of the nest until its time for them to go off on their own life's. http://www.alcoa.com/locations/usa_davenport/en/info_page/eaglecam.asp
Andrea,
ReplyDeleteInstead of writing about Brown v BOE, you wrote about a book about the case. Also you need to look at capitalization and punctuation.
word count: 418
score : 18/25
mommy