Chapter 21 Section 1 – Civil Rights
What was the wartime experience of African Americans?
1. Thurgood Marshall was raised experiencing discrimination.
a. father - seward at an all-white country club
a. mother - teacher at an all-black school
b. Marshall was denied admission to the Maryland Law School because of his race.
2. There was an established unfairness in education, since governments spent 10 times as much money to educate a white child versus an African American one.
3. In 1950, Marshall and the NAACP won a victory in the case of Sweatt v. Painter. The Supreme Court ruled that law schools must admit black applicants.
4. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka– the parents of Linda Brown charged that their daughter’s rights were violated.
a. Linda was denied admission to an all-white school four blocks from her house.
b. She was forced to walk 21 blocks and through a railroad yard to get to the all-black school.
c. Thurgood Marshall took the case for the NAACP and the Brown family.
d. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously to strike down segregation in school as unconstitutional.
e. The basis of the decision had been the wording of Plessy v. Ferguson, which allowed segregation as long as the facilities were “separate but equal.”
f. It was obvious that the black schools and white schools were unequal, so therefore, they could not be separate.
g. Some states complied, but other state governors, especially those from Mississippi and Georgia, promised their white voters that they would do whatever they could to avoid the implementation of desegregation.
h. Read pages 708 and 709.
5. Within a year, more than 500 school districts desegregated, but in areas with a black majority, whites resisted desegregation and in some places the KKK reappeared.
6. Governor Orval Faubus wanted to support segregation in Arkansas.
a. Nine African American students were chosen to integrate Central High in Little Rock, Ark.
b. The governor ordered the National Guard to prevent the Little Rock Nine from entering the school, even though a federal judge ordered the school integrated.
c. The NAACP members called eight of the nine to offer to drive them to school.
d. They could not reach one of them, Elizabeth Eckford, since her family did not have a phone.
e. She was greeted by a crowd of angry whites who threatened to kill her.
f. Two friendly whites took her to a bus stop and stayed with her.
7. President Eisenhower decided to act.
a. He placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal control.
b. He also ordered the 101st Airborne Unit into the school to protect the students and prevent violence.
c. Students were still harassed in the halls: spit on, insulted, stabbed with pencils, & shoved.
8. At the end of the year, Governor Faubus shut down Central High rather than allow integration.
The Doll Study
The major piece of social
science evidence brought before the court in the case of Brown v. the Board
of Education of Topeka, Kansas was Kenneth Clark's study that used white
and black dolls to test racial awareness in children. Clark described one
particular experiment involving sixteen African-American children between the
ages of six and nine. The children were presented with white and black dolls
that were identical in every way except skin color. The children were then
asked a series of questions: which the doll they liked best, which doll was the
"nice" doll, which doll looked "bad," which doll looked
like a white child, which doll looked like a colored child, which doll looked
like a Negro child, and which doll "looks like you.”
Ten out of sixteen children preferred the white doll,
choosing it as the one they liked best. Ten out of sixteen children also chose
the white doll as the "nice" doll, and eleven chose the black doll as
the "bad" doll. These findings were consistent with results gained
from testing over 300 children, and this was interpreted to mean that black
children, by ages as young as seven or eight, have internalized negative
stereotypes about their own group. Clark concluded that the children in his
study, having been given inferior status in the society in which they lived,
had been "definitely harmed in the development of their
personalities."
The Clark study was far from
perfect. The existing research could not provide an answer as to whether
psychological damage experienced by black children resulted from segregated
schools rather than from families or everyday discrimination experienced
elsewhere; in fact, evidence existed that black children in integrated schools
experienced more psychological damage as a result of being looked down upon.
Nonetheless, the Clark study opened up the courts to a discussion of
psychological damage as legitimate grounds for legal action.
Using Kenneth Clark's doll study as a primary piece
of evidence, the court ruled that to separate children from others of similar
age and qualifications solely based on race generated a feeling of inferiority
as to the status of black children in the community that "may affect their
hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone." The detrimental
impact of segregation would be greater when it had the sanction of the law,
because the policy of separation was usually seen as denoting the inferiority
of the minority group. Segregation, then, was detrimental to the educational and
mental development of black children, and deprived them of some of the benefits
they would receive in a racially integrated school system. http://kpearson.project.tcnj.edu/media/docs/helen_walters.htm
Remember the landmark 1940s study by Kenneth Clark
that was later used to argue Brown v. Board of Education? Little girls
were shown a Black doll and a White doll and asked which one was the good doll,
which one was the pretty doll, which doll was "the right" color. In
overwhelming numbers, the little girls chose the White doll.
As sad as those
results were, they shouldn't have been surprising. It was before the Civil
Rights Movement. Those little Black
girls chose the White dolls because they had internalized the message society
had sent them every day of their lives in a thousand different ways about who
they were and who they were not. They were Black, and Black was not beautiful.
At least not then. White women,
however, were beautiful. Every movie they watched, every magazine they read,
every Miss America pageant they saw told them so.
Before the '60s,
even if a little Black girl wanted to play with a doll that looked like her,
chances were she couldn't. When the study was conducted, we had the same number
of mass market culturally affirming toys as we had Black Barbies: zero.
(Christie, Barbie's Black friend, wasn't created until 1968, and it took
another dozen years before Black Barbie was introduced.)
That study is the
most compelling illustration I know of how deeply and completely the things to
which we expose our children shape their hopes and dreams and, most
importantly, their sense of themselves and their possibilities.
The Doll Study reversed when, in the late '80s, Dr.
Darlene Powell-Hopson replicated it with one critical difference: before the
little girls were asked to choose between the dolls, they were told stories
about the Black ones, stories of their great beauty and power and splendor.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1077/is_n8_v50/ai_16898297