preview

The Segregation Of The United States

Good Essays

In Spite of the devastating history of segregation in the United States. A lot has changed in the past fifty years since segregation ended. The United States shifted from arresting African Americans for using “white only” facilities to integrated schools all over the country. Influential individuals such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr helped pave the way for African Americans to live as equals to along with their white counterparts in the United States of America. What is Segregation
In 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled that it was constitutionally legal to segregate African Americans with their white counterparts. In the court case of Plessy v. Ferguson an African American man in Louisiana named Homer Plessy refused to follow the mandated Jim Crow laws which enforced that African Americans have to sit in a designated area when riding on a train. Plessy argued that his fourteenth amendment right was violated equal-protection clause, which “prohibits the states from denying “equal protection of the laws” to any person within their jurisdictions”(Duignan, 2016). However, when Plessy’s case moved to the Supreme Court they ruled“ the object of the Fourteenth Amendment was to create "absolute equality of the two races before the law," such equality extended only so far as political and civil rights (e.g., voting and serving on juries), not "social rights" (e.g., sitting in a railway car one chooses) (McBride, n.d. ). As a result, Plessy v. Ferguson

Get Access