School Integration is More Than Counting Kids by Race …
The 14th Amendment, on its face, appears to remove all barriers to equality under the law for all Americans, emphasize all.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
For almost a hundred years the constitutionally guaranteed rights of Afro-Americans were abrogated at the highest levels. Supreme Court decision after decision shredded the guarantees of the 14th Amendment (See Lawrence Goldstone, Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 2011). In Plessy v Ferguson (1896) the court held,
“The object of the [14th] Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.”
For decades as established by the stare decsis, (precedent), “separate but equal” was the law of the land.
Finally, in 1954 the Court reversed Plessy in a unanimous decision,
We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom CONTINUE READING: School Integration is More Than Counting Kids by Race … | Ed In The Apple
