Brown v. Board of Education

Every day, eight-year-old Linda Brown wondered why she had to ride five miles to school when her bus passed the perfectly lovely Sumner Elementary School, just four blocks from her home. When her father tried to enroll her in Sumner for fourth grade,rift platinum the Topeka, Kansas, school authorities just said no. In 1951, Linda Brown was the wrong color for Sumner.

In July 1950, a year before Linda was turned away, segregated black troops from the 24th Infantry Regiment scored the first American victory of the Korean War when they recaptured Yechon. A few months after that, PFC William Thompson was awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism in Korea—the first black so honored since the Spanish- American War. (It’s hard to win combat awards when the Army will only let you peel potatoes and dig slit trenches.) In September 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Annie Allen,tera gold the first black ever cited by the Pulitzer Committee. And that month, American diplomat Ralph J. Bunche (1904–71) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation of the Palestinian conflict, the first black to win that honor.

For most of the country’s 15 million American blacks—in 1950, they were called Negroes—these accomplishments held little meaning. In the first place, a good many of those 15 million people couldn’t read about these achievements. Illiteracy among America’s largest racial minority (approximately 10 percent of the total population in 1950) was rift gold commonplace. Schools for blacks, where they existed, didn’t offer much in the way of formal education. The law of the land remained “separate but equal,” the policy dictated by the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. “Separate but equal” kept Linda Brown out of the nearby Topeka schoolhouse and dictated that everything from maternity wards to morgues, from water fountains to swimming pools, from prisons to polling places, were either segregated or for whites only. Exactly how these “separate” facilities were “equal” remained a mystery to blacks: If everything was so equal, why didn’t white people want to use them?