History of School Segregation and Slavery

School segregation was a big thing back then. Black children didn’t have good or free education. Some schools didn’t even allow blacks to attend their school. A lot of blacks couldn’t go to school because of money or either they were not accepted to the city to become a citizen. A poll from the Los Angeles Times shows that there are at least 32 negroes per 47,573 non-blacks. These statistics show us that an average white city would have at least 0.

0006% of the black population. This means that there were not that many free slaves and that most blacks would become enslaved.

Slavery was very common in the South. Agriculture was great in the South because of the rich soil in the South. The South also had long growing seasons which made it easier and better to grow plants. That’s why in the South, slavery was more common than in the North. People in the North didn’t want any slaves because they didn’t see slaves as an investment. In the North, they had terrible soil and short growing seasons which makes it harder to grow plants. In the 1830s and 1840s, a new crop called cotton spiked up in value. However, cotton was really hard to crop. Each slave was expected to pick 200 pounds of cotton each day. In a normal growing season, a slave can pick up to 17,000 pounds of cotton. Slaves were also expected to clean the cotton. Each slave was expected to clean at least 1 pound each day by hand. During that time, the need for slaves dropped because of the time it took to produce cotton. However, that changed when in 1793, the cotton gin was invented. The cotton gin would clean cotton 50 times faster than doing it by hand. In the 1800s, the demand for slaves rose dramatically. The prices of slaves also increased. The cotton would be the cash crop and the source of the South’s economy.

Now, everyone did not agree with the idea of school segregation and slavery. One of the famous cases was Brown v. Board of Education. This case involved an American lawyer, serving as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. His name was Thurgood Marshall. Brown v. Board of Education stated that school segregation was unconstitutional. Thurgood Marshall wanted to get some rights for the blacks to get free and unsegregated education. A similar case, Plessy v. Ferguson stated that racial segregation laws in public facilities were unconstitutional. The case, Plessy v. Ferguson first started when in 1892, when in an African - American train, Plessy would refuse to sit in a car for blacks. Brown v. Board of Education, however, only applied to public schools. The Brown v. Board of Education case did not apply to private schools. White parents who sent their kid to private schools would provide a way to educate their children separate from blacks.

School segregation was almost everywhere. In our local community, Pasadena, about a couple decades ago, school segregation was very common where blacks and whites would be separated for education. Of course, usually, blacks going to school were afraid to go to school because they wouldn’t feel it as a safe place to learn for them. Education at this time was also not free. Only blacks who actually had the money to receive education would be the blacks who would receive a good education. In a poll in the Los Angeles Times, it shows that in Pasadena, there were 8,872 blacks in the city. In South Pasadena, there were only 26 blacks because Pasadena wasn’t a city only for whites. Pasadena also welcomed whites but they were no free blacks in Pasadena. Laws would still apply to blacks while they would be living in the city. However, South Pasadena was different. South Pasadena would be a city known as a sundown town. A sundown town is a city usually for whites because, before sundown, blacks in the sundown town would have to leave or they would probably be arrested or kicked out of the city. These cases, Brown v. Board of Education, for example, would help blacks get the free and public education they need.

In the end, we all know that black schools didn’t get as much as support from the government than the white schools did. White schools had better teachers, better education, and better equipment to play with. A source stated that white schools received $25 million in funding while black schools only received about 1/10 of that amount. Black schools roughly got around only $2.4 million in funding. Black children didn’t get the right and good education they needed for the future. This is why blacks wanted some change for giving blacks their rights and to get their freedom and live their life just like whites did.

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