African American History – Brown V. Board of Education

While African Americans were slowly gaining rights owed to them they were still being denied opportunities because of their race. The Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education would change many things for African Americans and that is something that many white segregationists feared. Brown v. Board of Education shed light on injustices that African Americans were facing during the 1950s. This case specifically inspired a chain reaction for people who felt they were being refused an education because of the color of their skin.

An African American family by the name of the Browns challenged the segregation policies of their school district in Topeka, Kansas when their daughter was refused enrollment to a local school but instead was required to take a bus to a blacks-only school further away from where they lived. A number of other black families joined the lawsuit which the Supreme Court combined with other similar suits from other areas of the United States. Lawyers for Brown v. Board of Education were sent from the NAACP which stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Its mission was to protect the educational, social, and economic rights of minorities throughout the United States.

At first they had no luck with the court deciding that segregation was not a violation of the fourteenth amendment. After that ruling the Brown family decided to appeal it. The process of the case went back and forth as to why black students should or shouldn’t be segregated from white students went on for about three years until a decision was made on the matter. Others believed that it wasn’t important enough to be a Supreme Court case and should have been handled by the state.

In the end the Brown family won their case with the courts stating that it was unconstitutional and it paved the way for minorities to be treated as equals and was influential in the Civil Rights Movement as well. Throughout this annotated bibliography I will be including articles that were significant not only to the case but also the Civil Rights Movement and how it changed before and after.