The sources and questions relate to Case Study 1: Civil rights movement in the United States (1954– 1965) – Nature and characteristics of discrimination: Segregation and education; Brown versus Board of Education decision (1954).

Source O

Tom Brady, a judge and a leader of the pro-segregation White Citizens’ Council movement, writing about his speech to the Indianola Citizens’ Council in his pamphlet A Review of Black Monday (28 October 1954).

The Supreme Court says, “You have got to sit a black boy down by a white girl to have it equal.” …

You can’t do it! You can’t put little boys and little girls together—blacks and whites and have them sing together, play together, dance together, and eat together, sit side by side, and walk arm in arm, and expect for the sensitivity of those white children not to be broken down. You can’t do it! Why? That is exactly what has happened in the north, [but] they have a sufficient number of whites to absorb, and perhaps assimilate, the blacks …

We can see what happens on the surface. We don’t know what happens to the brain of [a black] man … We don’t know what it takes to make his mind different from our mind.

This Supreme Court sets aside all the laws of biology! By putting these children together in schools we will abolish all racial differences that God made. I have a little field [at the] back of my home. I notice the blackbirds stay together … I notice the geese and the ducks stayed separate from each other and yet the Supreme Court would set aside these basic laws of God and of nature and compel these various individuals to mingle, just as you would blackbirds with partridges …

The sources and questions relate to Case Study 1: Civil rights movement in the United States (1954– 1965) – Nature and characteristics of discrimination: Segregation and education; Brown versus Board of Education decision (1954).

Source M

Earl Warren, US Chief Justice, delivers the decision of the US Supreme Court in Brown v Board of Education, 17 May 1954.

We cannot turn the clock back to 1896 when Plessy versus Ferguson [a court judgment that had ruled that it was legal to have segregated schools as long as those schools had equal facilities] was written. We must consider public education in the full light of its present place in American life throughout the nation … In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education … Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be available to all on equal terms.

We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in schools on the basis of race, even though the facilities may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does … To separate Negro students from others solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority … that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone …

We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are unequal.

[Source: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Opinion; May 17, 1954; Records of the Supreme Court of the United States; Record Group 267; National Archives]