Unit 4C: Civil Rights Cloze Notes Brennan, Govt.
The 14th
Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause
š Section
1. 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.
Discrimination in America
š . :
separation of one group of people from another, usually based on gender or
ethnicity
š . :
Laws that separated people based on race (1876-1965)
š Required
the legal of public and private facilities, street cars,
hotels, restaurants, bathrooms, and water fountains.
š Separate
but Equal Doctrine: Jim Crow does not violate the because separate facilities for African
Americans were equal to those provided to whites.
Tides are Changing…
š Beginning
in 1938 (42 years after Plessy) Supreme Court began chipping away at the
“Separate but Equal” Doctrine.
š Missouri
ex rel. V. Canada
š Lloyd
Gaines denied admission to the all-white University of to study law, because of his ethnicity.
š Supreme
Court gave Missouri two choices: Admit Gaines or build a separate law school.
Segregation and
Integration
š De
Jure Segregation: segregation
š Schools
abolished this practice by
š De
Facto Segregation: Segregation that exists not by law, but by or situation
š . :
The process of a group into the mainstream of society
Unit 4C Civil Rights Civil Rights: Please turn to page 608 and 609 and
complete the chart
š Civil Rights: Revolves around the basic
right to be free from unequal based on certain protected characteristics
(race, gender, disability, etc.)
Civil
Rights Act of 1964
|
Civil
Rights Act of 1968
|
Voting Rights
š Several
measures put in place to prevent from voting
š Illegal
activities for voting requirements include:
š Literacy
š .
clause: former and descendants of slaves could not vote
š Poll
š 15th
amendment: Voting cannot be denied based on
š 19th
amendment: Voting cannot be denied to anyone based on
š 24th
amendment: prohibits both Congress and the states from creating a ,
which could prevent individuals from voting.
š 26th
amendment: prohibits the states and the federal government from setting a
voting age higher than
Affirmative Action
š Policy
that requires most to take positive steps to remedy the effects
of past discrimination.
š Policy
applies to all agencies of the federal, state and local governments, and employers who sell goods or services to
government
Reverse Discrimination
š Critics
of policy of affirmative action cites ,
meaning discrimination against the majority group.
Americans with
Disabilities Act
š Prohibits
and guarantees that people with disabilities
have the same opportunities as everyone else. The ADA is an " "
law for people with disabilities.
IDEA: Individuals with Disabilities Education Act
š The
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is a law ensuring services
to children with disabilities throughout the nation. IDEA governs how states
and public agencies provide early intervention, special education and related
services to more than 6.5 million eligible infants, toddlers, children and
youth with disabilities.
EEOC: Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
š The
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is responsible for federal laws that make it illegal to
discriminate against a job applicant or an employee because of the person's , . ,
religion, gender, national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic
information.
š It
is also illegal to discriminate against a person because the person complained
about discrimination, filed a charge of discrimination, or participated in an
employment discrimination investigation or lawsuit.
Many states in the south enacted laws,
called Jim Crow laws, which restricted African Americans’ civil rights. These
laws ranged from restrictions on voting, such as literacy tests and the poll
tax, to requirements that blacks and whites attend separate schools and use
separate public facilities.
On June 7, 1892, Homer A. Plessy
bought a train ticket for travel from New Orleans to Covington, Louisiana.
Plessy’s ancestry was one-eighth black and the rest white, but under Louisiana
law he was considered to be black and was required to ride in the blacks-only
railroad car. Plessy sat in the whites-only railroad car and refused to move.
He was promptly arrested and thrown into a New Orleans jail.
Judge John H. Ferguson of the District
Court of Orleans parish presided over Plessy’s trial for the crime of having
refused to leave the whites-only car, and Plessy was found guilty. The
Louisiana Supreme Court upheld Plessy’s conviction, and Plessy appealed to the
United States Supreme Court for an order forbidding Louisiana’s Judge Ferguson
from carrying out the conviction.
Plessy’s attorney argued that
Louisiana had violated his Fourteenth
Amendment right to equal protection
under the law. Lawyers for Louisiana argued that the law merely made the
distinction between blacks and whites, but didn’t necessarily treat blacks as
inferiors, since theoretically the law provided for “separate but equal”
railroad car accommodations.
On
May 18, 1896, the United States Supreme Court issued its decision. It upheld
the Louisiana law:
A statute,
which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races—a
distinction which is founded in the color of the two races, and which must
always exist so long as white men are distinguished from other race by
color—has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races.
Therefore the Court affirmed Plessy’s
sentence, namely a $25 fine or 20 days in jail. Further, the Court endorsed the
“separate but equal” doctrine,
ignoring the fact that blacks had practically no power to make sure that their
“separate” facilities were “equal” to those of whites. In the years to come,
black railroad cars, schools and other facilities were rarely as good as those
of whites.
Segregation
|
Legal separation
|
Jim Crow laws
|
·
Laws that
enforced segregation in the southern states
|
Plessy v.
(1896)
|
·
Supreme
Court case that established the “separate but equal” doctrine
|
Please take a
few minutes to answer the questions on the back.
1.
What
precedent was set by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson?
2.
Is
“Separate but Equal” really equal? Use evidence from the passage and your own
prior knowledge to support your opinion.
3.
Is
“equality” the same thing as “fairness”? Explain your answer.
4. Consider the
logic of the Court in determining that “separation” was not a violation of the
14th amendment. Can you find any logical flaw? Explain.
END OF ASSIGNMENT
Read the following case. The answer the prompt that follows.
Sometimes in history, events of great
importance happen unexpectedly to modest men. Such was the case with Oliver
Brown, whose desire that his children be able to attend the public school
closest to their home resulted in a fundamental transformation of race
relations in the United States.
Brown was born in 1919 and lived in
Topeka, Kansas where he worked as a welder for a railroad. Brown’s family
literally lived on the wrong side of the tracks: their home was close to the
Brown’s place of work, and the neighborhood bordered on a major switchyard—a
place where the trains changed tracks. Not only could the Brown family hear the
trains day and night, but because the Topeka
In September 1950, when his daughter
Linda was to enter the third grade, Brown took her to the whites-only school
and tried to enroll her. Brown had no history of racial activism, and outside
of work his only major activity was serving as an assistant pastor in the local
church. He was simply tired of seeing his daughter forced to go through the
switchyard to go to a school far from home because she was black. The principal
of the white school refused to enroll Brown’s daughter. Brown sought the help
of McKinley Burnett, head of the local branch of the NAACP – the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Burnett’s organization had wanted to
challenge segregation for quite some time, but until Brown came to them, they
had never had the right plaintiff at the right time. Segregation in public
schools and elsewhere, was a fact of life in Topeka Topeka
On March 22, 1951, Brown’s NAACP
lawyers filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas,
requesting an injunction forbidding Topeka from continuing to segregate public
schools. The court tried the case June 25 – 26, 1951. Brown and other black
parents testified to the fact that their children were denied admission to
white schools.
The Board of Education’s lawyers
retorted that since most restaurants, bathrooms and public facilities in Kansas
City also were segregated, segregated schools were only preparing black
children of the realities of life as black adults. Segregation pervaded every
aspect of life in Topeka
On August 3, 1951, the District court
issued its decision. The three judges noted that because the leading precedent was the Supreme Court’s
decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, they
could not rule for Brown. Plessy
legitimized the doctrine of “separate but equal” and had not yet been
overturned by the Supreme Court. Therefore, regardless of the experts testimony
that separate-but-equal schools were inherently impossible, the court felt
compelled to deny Brown and the other plaintiffs. The court made it clear,
however that it did not relish its role in upholding Topeka
On October 1, 1951, the plaintiffs
filed a petition for appeal to the United States Supreme Court. The plaintiffs
were granted their requests, and made the arguments. They reargued the case on
December 8, 1953. The Court published their opinion the following May.
According to the published opinion:
“Even in the
North, the conditions of public education did not approximate those existing
today. The curriculum was usually rudimentary; ungraded schools were common in
rural areas; the school year was three months a year in many states; and
compulsory school attendance was virtually unknown. As a consequence, it is not
surprising that there should be so little in the history of the Fourteenth
Amendment relating to its intended effect on public education”
Instead the Court endorsed the
plaintiff’s central thesis that segregation was inherently unequal no matter
how much effort the school system made to ensure that blacks and white schools
had equivalent facilities , staffing, books, buses and so forth. The Court
reviewed some recent cases in which it had cautiously made an exception to Plessy where certain graduate schools
were involved. In those cases, the Court said that segregation was unequal
because the black’s professional careers were hurt by the stigma of having
attended schools considered to be inferior, and where they did not have the
opportunity to make contacts or intellectual discourse with their white
counterparts. . With this support, the Court was ready to declare that all
segregation in public schools was unconstitutional:
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
the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of,
deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth
Amendment.
After nearly
60 years of legalized discrimination, the Court had thrown out Plessy v. Ferguson. It would take 20 years for the Court’s decision to be fully
implemented, however, long after Oliver Brown died in 1961. The process was
painful and often violent, frequently accompanied by federal intervention and
mass demonstrations.
After
you have finished reading, please take out a notebook paper. Using the passage
as a reference, summarize the case and its conclusion, including key points,
amendments, clauses, and direct quotations. You will need a minimum of six
sentences.
Little Rock Nine
The Little Rock Nine were the nine African-American students
involved in the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. Their
entrance into the school in 1957 sparked a nationwide crisis when Arkansas
governor Orval Faubus, in defiance of a federal court order, called out the
Arkansas National Guard to prevent the Nine from entering. President Dwight D.
Eisenhower responded by federalizing the National Guard and sending in units of
the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division to escort the Nine into the school on
September 25, 1957. The military presence remained for the duration of the
school year.
Before transferring to Central, the Nine attended segregated
schools for black students in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Carlotta Walls, Jefferson
Thomas, and Gloria Ray attended Paul Laurence Dunbar Junior High School, while
Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Thelma Mothershed, Terrence Roberts, Minnijean
Brown, and Melba Pattillo attended Horace Mann High School.
On May 24, 1955, the Little Rock School Board adopted a plan
for gradual integration, known as the Blossom Plan (also known as the Little
Rock Phase Program). The plan called for desegregation to begin in the fall of
1957 at Central and filter down to the lower grades over the next six years.
Under the plan, students would be permitted to transfer from any school where
their race was in the minority, thus ensuring that the black schools would
remain racially segregated, because many people believed that few, if any,
white students would opt to attend predominantly black schools. Federal courts
upheld the Blossom Plan in response to a lawsuit by the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
On September 4, 1957, the Nine attempted to enter Central but
were turned away by Arkansas National Guard troops called out by the governor.
When Elizabeth Eckford arrived at the campus at the intersection of 14th and
Park Streets, she was confronted by an angry mob of segregationist protestors.
She attempted to enter at the front of the school but was directed back out to
the street by the guardsmen. Walking alone, surrounded by the crowd, she
eventually reached the south end of Park Street and sat down on a bench to wait
for a city bus to take her to her mother’s workplace. Of her experience,
Eckford later said, “I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the
mob—someone who maybe would help. I looked into the face of an old woman and it
seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me.” Others of
the Nine arrived the same day and gathered at the south, or 16th Street, corner
where they and an integrated group of local ministers who were there to support
them were also turned away by guardsmen.
The Nine remained at home for more than two weeks, trying to
keep up with their schoolwork as best they could. When the federal court
ordered Gov. Faubus to stop interfering with the court’s order, Faubus removed
the guardsmen from in front of the school. On September 23, the Nine entered
the school for the first time. The crowd outside chanted, “Two, four, six,
eight…We ain’t gonna integrate!” and chased and beat black reporters who were
covering the events. The Little Rock police, fearful that they could not
control the increasingly unruly mob in front of the school, removed the Nine
later that morning. They once again returned home and waited for further
information on when they would be able to attend school.
Calling the mob’s actions “disgraceful,” Eisenhower called
out 1,200 members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division—the “Screaming
Eagles” of Fort Campbell, Kentucky—and placed the Arkansas National Guard under
federal orders. On September 25, 1957, under federal troop escort, the Nine
were escorted back into Central for their first full day of classes. Melba
Pattillo later wrote, “After three full days inside Central, I know that
integration is a much bigger word than I thought.”
After the Nine suffered repeated harassment—such as kicking,
shoving, and name calling—the military assigned guards to escort them to
classes. The guards, however, could not go everywhere with the students, and
harassment continued in places such as the restrooms and locker rooms. After
the 101st Airborne soldiers returned to Ft. Campbell in November, leaving the
National Guard troops in charge, segregationist students intensified their
efforts to compel the Nine to leave Central. The Little Rock Nine did not have
any classes together. They were not allowed to participate in extracurricular
activities at Central. Nevertheless, they returned to school every day to
persist in obtaining an equal education.
Although all of the Nine endured verbal and physical
harassment during their year at Central, Minnijean Brown was the only one to
respond; she was first suspended and then expelled for retaliating against the
daily torment by dropping her lunch tray with a bowl of chili on two white boys
and, later, by referring to a white girl who hit her as “white trash.” Of her
experience, she later said, “I just can’t take everything they throw at me
without fighting back.” Brown moved to New York City and graduated from New
Lincoln High School in 1959.
The other eight students remained at Central until the end of
the school year. On May 27, 1958, Ernest Green became Central’s first black
graduate. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. attended his graduation ceremony. Green
later told reporters, “It’s been an interesting year. I’ve had a course in
human relations first hand.” The other eight, like their counterparts across
the district, were forced to attend other schools or take correspondence
classes the next year when voters opted to close all four of Little Rock’s high
schools to prevent further desegregation efforts.
On a
separate piece of paper, please answer the following questions.
1. Define segregate. What does it mean?
2. What did the governor of Arkansas do?
What event followed?
3. Explain the lack of reaction the
school had towards defending the Little Rock Nine from the torment of their
peers.
4. Choose a situation in this passage
that you found most shocking. Explain why.
END OF ASSIGNMENT
4C Review Sheet
Directions:
Complete the review sheet.
1.
What
is the Equal Protection Clause?
2.
What
is the definition of “civil rights”?
3.
What
is affirmative action?
4.
What
is the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Of 1968?
5.
Explain
separate but equal.
6.
What
are Jim Crow Laws?
7.
Explain
the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson
8.
Explain
the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Ed
9.
What
is the 19th amendment?
10. What is the 24th amendment?
11. What is the 26th amendment?
12. What is the 15th amendment?
13. Explain the Supreme Court decision in Bakke v.
University of California Regents.
14.
Explain
the difference between segregation and integration
15. This
prohibits discrimination and guarantees that people with disabilities have the
same opportunities as everyone else
16. This is a law ensuring services to
children with disabilities throughout the nation.
17. This agency is responsible for
enforcing federal laws that make it illegal to discriminate against a job
applicant or an employee based on any factors.
18. This policy that requires most
employers to take positive steps to remedy the effects of past discrimination.
19. Explain the Supreme Court case of Dred
Scott v. Sanford
20.
Explain the Supreme Court
case of Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. US
v
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