In 1896, the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson laid down the law on racial segregation and the boundaries of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
At the time, Louisiana had a racial segregation law requiring separate railway cars for blacks and whites. Homer Adolph Plessy refused to abide by the law and was arrested.
The Court decided to uphold the state law as constitutional, saying that the segregation did not abridge Plessy’s fundamental rights, so long as the separate facilities were equal. This spawned the separate-but-equal doctrine.
It wasn’t until the issue of education was called into constitutional question that matters of racial segregation in America changed. The 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education challenged the constitutionality of racial segregation in schools.
If the Court were to have ruled consistently with its prior ruling in Plessy, it would have upheld that the schools’ policies were fine so long as they were equal. However, fortunately the 1954 Court found a new way of interpreting an old problem.
They found that the doctrine of separate-but-equal was not possible in the education system. Part of the inherent process of education entails many intangible environmental and psychological factors. The Court, in the words of the Chief Justice Earl Warren, who wrote the opinion of the court, argued, “To separate [black students] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”
The decision, affirmed by the Court unanimously, laid the foundation for the future outlawing of all racial segregation.
Still, issues of equal public education opportunities remain difficult to this day.
Tanya McDowell, 33, a homeless woman from Bridgeport, Conn., was recently arrested and charged with felony larceny for attempting to send her son, Andrew Justin Patches, to a better kindergarten in Norwalk, Conn.
According to The New York Times, Ms. McDowell used her babysitter’s address to enroll her son in the school and “could face a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, if convicted, and could be ordered to pay more than $15,000 in restitution, roughly the cost of a year’s tuition in Norwalk schools.”
McDowell was motivated by the “gaping differences in educational quality from town to town or school to school.” Connecticut, in particular, has “the largest achievement gap between black and white students of any state in the country,” the Times reported.
Can we blame McDowell for only wanting the best for her child? Of course not. For many parents, the extent to which they will protect and provide for their children knows no bounds — including legal ones.
But practically speaking, where do we draw the line? At what point do we stop striving for equality in America — not just in education, but in every socio-economic sphere? Hopefully, never. It will be a long journey.
The only problem is that a kindergartener is no longer able to see his teachers and classmates, nor his mother, who was only trying to care for him in the best was she knew how.
We have come a long way from the Plessy days, but if you look close enough at the political and economic climate in America today, you can still see Jim Crow, treading water in the distance, trying not to drown in a country seeking desperately to move on. Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party remind us of it on a daily basis.
Contact Danny at djoconn1@asu.edu
