It Was Never Meant to Be Equal
The first forms of slavery came to the shores of North America in 1501. Since that time, African Americans have had to close an economic gap that took hundreds of years to create. (10) Generation after generation of enslaved African Americans were split from one another and forced to live in unspeakable conditions, while white American families, those owning slaves and those who didn’t, were able to get an early start to obtaining wealth for themselves and future generations. Finally, in 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation was ratified by the United States Congress, outlawing slavery in the United States. (11) With that, people of color were finally registered to compete in a race for prosperity. Almost four hundred years behind, they had to make every effort to catch up while still having to navigate unjust roadblocks along the way.
Yet nice words and some legislation were not enough by themselves to create meaningful change. There were several more steps before the nation was able to stomach the idea of black boys sitting next to white girls in classrooms. The court system, along with many of the people it served, made every effort to make sure that classrooms were not integrated. Following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 on the basis that discrimination by individuals or private businesses was constitutional. Moreover, in 1890, Louisiana passed the first Jim Crow law requiring separate accommodations for Whites and Blacks. In 1896, the Supreme Court authorized the legal use of segregation tactics in Plessy v. Ferguson. In this case, the court found that Louisiana's "separate but equal" law was in fact constitutional. In a 7-1 ruling, built on notions of white supremacy and black inferiority, it provided legal justification for Jim Crow laws in southern states. Hence the idea of separate but equal not only supported the idea of white superiority, but it would also lead to some African Americans questioning their own worth as well.
Although many people would make the argument that “separate but equal” was in fact equal, the facts of the matter tell a very different story, beginning in 1900-1901 when $1.48 was spent for each white child but $1.38 was spent on each negro child. (12) Although this was a gap, it was an extremely small one at the beginning. In the 1917-1918 school year, that number had reached $3.08 for white students but only one dollar for African American students. By 1932, the gap had widened even further to $19.40 for whites but $9.24 for every black child. These trends in spending have impacts on student resources such as books, teachers and the maintenance of the school buildings. (13)
While Plessy v. Ferguson made the assertion that they planned to keep public facilities equal for all Americans, the data shows that there was never any intention to do so by the states. Without federal intervention, they didn’t have to take any real action to see things through. In 1940, 45 percent of the black K-5 schools only had one teacher teaching the entire school. Moreover, in that same year, black schools only received 43 percent of what whites had in terms of salary, resources and overall budget. For teacher training, the average years of college education for African Americans in 1940 was 2.7 and the average training for whites was 3.8. While these trends don’t seem like much, one must remember that African American educators were charged with the task of catching up to the non-dominant class and doing so with fewer resources, educators, finances and political capital. (14)
Brown was not an isolated case. Paul Green explains that while Brown was the major case brought to the Supreme Court, the argument was multi-tiered as it had connections to several other lower court cases, each of which challenged the practices of legal segregation of public schools. (15) Among these cases was South Carolina (Briggs v. Elliott, 1952), Virginia (Davis v. County School Board, Prince Edward County, Virginia, 1952), Delaware (Gebhardt v. Belton, 1952), Washington D.C., (Boiling v. Sharp, 1954) and Kansas (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954).
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