Brown vs. Board of Education and Freedom Summer - Research Paper Example

With “Jim Crow” laws there were established separate facilities for African American people, which were inevitably of a lower quality, standard of cleanliness, and poorly equipped in comparison to the facilities that “Whites” used. These standards were also maintained in the education system, with many African American families prevented from sending their children to public schools that were for “Whites” only, and the facilities that did exist for African Americans were inevitably of a lower standard and lacking qualified teachers, access to books and learning materials, failing to provide even the most basic facilities for the students.

Because the system of education was operated on a public or government organized basis and funded by tax dollars, the existence of this segregated society was a clear statement that racism was institutionalized by authority in the United States, and that these policies also furthered the discrimination, impoverishment, and deprivation of human rights for African Americans in the country. . Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and other organizers who worked together to end racism in America. Brown vs.

Board of Education The Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka Kansas (1954) Supreme Court decision represented a major attack on the “Jim Crow” system in the South and across America. In “Mississippi: A History” (2005), Westley F. Busbee, Jr. describes the uproar this decision caused in the racist “White” community, and how local politicians attempted to disband the public schools and reorganize them as private institutions while preserving the apartheid style of segregation. (Busbee, 2005) This response, and the violence unleashed in racist groups like the KKK to oppose anyone who challenged the segregation policies, would show the emotion and ignorance involved in the views of the racist South, as well as how difficult it would be to depose these views through civil rights activity.

Ultimately, President Eisenhower authorized the use of Federal troops to oversee the desegregation of public schools in the South with a symbolic show of force in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. (Busbee, 2005) The violent backlash by “White” racists against anyone who attempted to organize African American people to vote, to protest, or to demonstrate for civil rights set the stage for the great upheaval of the next decade in the region, that would see Stokely Carmichel, Bob Moses, Medgar Evars, and other leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the NAACP working in these areas to organize, educate, and promote reform in communities.

(Payne, 1997) Nevertheless, it is clear that historically these civil rights efforts were emboldened and given increased legitimacy in the U.S. and internationally through