School Desegregation

2018 ◽  
pp. 11-53
Author(s):  
Elaine Allen Lechtreck
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Little Rock ◽  
Clemson University ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Central High

On 17 May 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled unanimously in Brown v The Board of Education that segregated public schools are unconstitutional. This chapter describes massive resistance organized by politicians and white supremacist groups throughout the South. Crises are described at Clinton High in Tennessee, Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, the Universities of Mississippi and Alabama, Tuskegee High School in Alabama, and Clemson University in South Carolina as well as the courage of the Reverends Turner, Boggs, Cartwright, Ogden, Campbell, Gray, Davis, Sellers, Morris, Cousins, Lyles, Jackson, and Webster at these locations. It includes statements in support of the decision by the governing boards of major religious denominations, twenty-eight young ministers of the Mississippi Methodist Conference, and contributors to South Carolinians Speak, a booklet on moderation. Later the Supreme Court backed away from enforcing school integration. Scholars Wright, Jacoway, Wolters, Bell, Higgins, and Snider comment.

Brown v. Board of Education

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Racial Minorities ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Limited Power

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down as unconstitutional state-mandated racial segregation in public schools, which at the time was policy in seventeen states. Brown v. Board of Education marked the culmination of a decades-long litigation campaign by the NAACP. White-controlled states across the South responded by launching a “massive resistance” campaign of defiance against Brown, which was followed by decades of struggles, inside and outside the courts, to desegregate the nation’s schools. Brown also signaled the new and often controversial direction the Supreme Court would take under leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren—one that read the rights protections of the Constitution more broadly than its predecessors and was more aggressive in using these rights to protect vulnerable minorities. Brown is nearly universally celebrated today, yet the terms of its celebration remain contested. Some see the case as a call for ambitious litigation strategies and judicial boldness, whereas others use it to demonstrate the limited power of the courts to effect social change. Some find in Brown a commitment to a principle of a “colorblind” Constitution, others a commitment to expunging practices that oppress racial minorities (often requiring race-conscious policies). Brown thus remains what it was in 1954: a bold statement of the principle of racial equality whose meaning the nation is still struggling to work out.

The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and Religion

1967 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 657-674 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Carroll
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
National Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Local School ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Liberty Of Conscience ◽  
Bible Reading

The Supreme Court of the United States, whose decisions not only define constitutional law but vitally affect national policy, has long held both an honored and a controversial place in American life. In no area do its decisions bring it more honor or more controversy than in the field of religion; for, as a member of the First Congress under the Constitution said, “the rights of conscience are, in their nature, of peculiar delicacy, and will little bear the gentlest touch of governmental hand. … Thus, the same decision of the Court may be hailed by some as a great landmark in the struggle for religious liberty, and denounced by others as a serious invasion of liberty of conscience. For although it may be pleasant to dream of religion insulated from governmental touch, the dual membership of citizens in the state and in religious bodies insures that conscience and government will touch at some points with inevitable friction, and, to the conscience so touched, it makes little difference whether the governmental hand is that of a local school board, the Congress, or the Supreme Court of the United States.The Court has recently been attacked as antireligious, or at least as callous to our religious heritage, because of its decisions invalidating a state-prescribed prayer and state-prescribed Bible reading in public schools. The first of these decisions prompted the more excited outcry, but the two, at first singly and then together, have precipitated a renewed debate about the proper constitutional relationship between the state and religion.

scholarly journals Forty Years of Death: The Past, Present, and Future of the Death Penalty in South Carolina (Still Arbitrary after All These Years)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Blume ◽  
Lyndsey S. Vann
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Gender Bias ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Looking Back

11 Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy 183 (2016)Forty years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States deemed constitutional new death penalty laws intended to minimize the arbitrariness which led the Court to invalidate all capital sentencing statutes four years earlier in Furman v. Georgia. Over the last four decades the Court has — time and again — attempted to regulate the “machinery of death.” Looking back over the Court’s work, many observers, including two current Supreme Court justices, have questioned whether the modern death penalty has lived up to expectations set by the Court in the 1970s or if, despite 40 years of labor, the American death penalty continues to be administered in an unconstitutionally arbitrary manner. This Article presents data from South Carolina’s forty-year experiment with capital punishment and concludes that the administration of the death penalty in that state is still riddled with error and infected with racial and gender bias. It is — in short — still arbitrary after all these years. The authors maintain that the only true cure it to abolish South Carolina’s death penalty, although they do argue that lesser steps including additional safeguards and procedure may limit, but will not eliminate, some of the arbitrariness and bias which are present in the current imposition of South Carolina’s most extreme punishment.

Constitutional Law in 1941–1942: The Constitutional Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the October Term, 1941

1943 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-289
Author(s):  
Robert E. Cushman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Attorney General ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chief Justice ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Constitutional Decisions

The vacancies on the Supreme Court caused by the retirement of Mr. Justice McReynolds and Chief Justice Hughes were filled by President Roosevelt during the summer of 1941. When the Court convened in October, Mr. Justice Stone, originally appointed by President Coolidge, became Chief Justice. Chief Justice White was the only other associate justice to be promoted to the Chief Justiceship. Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, and Attorney General Robert H. Jackson of New York took their seats as associate justices. Thus seven justices have been placed on the Court by President Roosevelt. Any idea, however, that these Roosevelt appointees conform to any uniform pattern of thought is belied by the fact that in the 75 cases in the 1941 term turning on important questions of either constitutional law or federal statutory construction, there were dissents in 36, and 23 of these dissents were by either three or four justices. No act of Congress has been declared unconstitutional since May, 1936, when the Municipal Bankruptcy Act was held invalid. Since 1937, the Court has overruled 20 previous decisions, mentioning them by name, while it has modified or qualified a number of others.

The Supreme Court in the Era of Bifurcated Review IV

2019 ◽  
pp. 600-690
Author(s):  
G. Edward White
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Sexual Preference ◽  
Equal Protection ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Equal Protection Clause ◽  
Oliver Wendell Holmes ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The 1950S

Equal protection arguments were once described by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as the “last resort” of persons making constitutional claims. The court’s reliance on the Equal Protection Clause was slight until the 1950s, in part because “equal protection” was understood only to implicate legislature classifications that were “partial” rather than general.” After the use of the Equal Protection Clause to invalidate racial segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education, equal protection arguments became a staple of cases involving racial, gender, and sexual-preference discrimination.

Access: 1954–1983

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Albjerg Graham
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Training Sequence ◽  
Drop Out ◽  
Dropping Out ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Public High School ◽  
The Supreme Court

“I’ll Never go to School with a Nigger!” Dickie, an eighth grader in my social studies class, shouted vehemently as we began to discuss the Brown v. Board of Education case prohibiting segregation in public schools that the Supreme Court had decided a year before, in 1954. Dickie was right; he never did, dropping out of school two years later, before his Virginia public high school began desegregation. I was flabbergasted and appalled by Dickie’s assertion, only gradually coming to realize that my new profession, teaching, was heading on a rocky road to improvement. In September 1955, as a new, navy bride, I began teaching in still segregated Deep Creek High School serving the predominantly low-income white community of the Dismal Swamp in southeastern Virginia. Prepared as I had been by the mushy adjustment curriculum of my Indiana public schools (lots of attention to my deficient social skills, not much to strengthening my intellect), I had zipped through college. I added the teacher training sequence after I became engaged in order to have a saleable skill when I married on graduation day. My five education courses, most of which I thought academically and professionally worthless, required that I memorize the Seven Cardinal Principles, still the reigning dogma, and I did, believing they represented the fuzzy thinking I associated with public education. I lived in a totally white world, never having had a black friend, fellow student, or teacher. Under Virginia law at that time Deep Creek High School was also a totally white high school world, though surrounded by a black community. The drop-out rate was high: 140 students in eighth grade but only 40 high school seniors. When Dickie made his assertion about segregation, I was astounded both by the language and by the sentiment. We did not use such a term in my household, and, innocent that I was, I thought the Supreme Court had decided the year before in Brown v. Board of Education that public schools could not be legally segregated by race.

Recent Restrictions upon Religious Liberty

1942 ◽  
Vol 36 (6) ◽  
pp. 1053-1068 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor W. Rotnem ◽  
F. G. Folsom
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
The United States ◽  
Considerable Proportion ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roger Williams

Within the last five years, the Supreme Court of the United States has added decisions of greater importance to the case law of religious freedom than had been accumulated in all the years since the adoption of the Bill of Rights. The importance of two of these recent decisions rests upon the subordination of freedom of action based on sectarian beliefs to the restrictions of society as a whole. In one of the two cases, the law of society was a board of education order that school children participate in the flag salute exercise on pain of expulsion from the public schools; in the other, it was peddlers' license tax ordinances. Because neither of these decisions has been accepted as a firmly rooted precedent, it will be well to examine them in the light of the history of the federally secured right of religious freedom and in the light of the immediate public reactions to them.A considerable proportion of the early emigration to the thirteen original colonies was undoubtedly due to a desire to escape religious persecution in England and on the Continent. Those colonists, however, were as insistent that their own particular form of religion be adhered to as their oppressors had been. The story of Roger Williams, who was expelled from the colony of Massachusetts because of his non-conformist views and who established the colony of Rhode Island as a sanctuary of religious tolerance, and that of Ann Hutchinson, who also was exiled from the Bay Colony for a like reason, are monuments to the intolerance of the Puritans.

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