preview

Desegregation Of Brown V. Board Of Education

Decent Essays

Efforts to desegregate neighborhoods traces back to the 1954 Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education. In recent times, in an attempt reduce both overcrowding and segregation, the NYC Department of Education presented a plan to rezone the Upper West Side. In a similar display of rage as those opposed to Brown v. Board Education demonstrated, parents threatened to take legal action to stop this plan. Parents from the well off neighborhoods were unwilling to give up the schools that they felt entitled to due to their choice of residence, but this came at the cost of the children from the other neighborhoods that are consistently disadvantaged by disparities in the quality of schools. Efforts to rezone neighborhoods to achieve better …show more content…

Segregation in the north occurred in more subtle ways than in the south, and in order to understand why black neighborhoods in these areas are often so segregated and poorer than white neighborhoods despite the absence of Jim Crow, it is useful to look at the history that has deliberately created this. Racial zoning was not uncommon in the early to mid 20th century, and other zoning practices that didn’t use explicitly racist language obscured their racial implications. For example, different areas were designated as residential, industrial, commercial, etc. and depending on what the area was deemed, different developments and services were provided to them. The white family neighborhoods were deemed first residential and the black neighborhoods were deemed industrial zones. Consequently, pollution creating factories and the construction of undesirable places such as taverns and liquor stores were built there and converted black neighborhoods into slums. Additionally, housing discrimination that made it more difficult for blacks to participate in loan insurance programs more or less excluded them from buying homes and many were limited to living in apartments with rent higher than whites would have to pay for the same space. As a result, more tenants would occupy the same space to make rent which led to overcrowding and pressure to pay rent made it increasingly difficult for blacks to leave

Get Access