LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Segregation in the U.S.: African Americans
built 233 days ago
On March 2, 1945, five Mexican-American fathers (Gonzalo Mendez, Thomas Estrada, David Melendez, William Guzman, Frank Palomino, and Lorenzo Ramirez) challenged the practice of school segregation in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. They claimed that their children, along with 5,000 other children of "Mexican" anscestry, were victims of unconstitutional discrimination by being forced to attend separate "Mexican" schools in the Westminster, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and El Modena school districts of Orange County. Senior District Judge Paul J. McCormick, sitting in Los Angeles, presided at the trial and ruled in favor of Mendez and his co-plaintiffs on February 18, 1946, finding segregated schools to be an unconstitutional denial of equal protection. The school district appealed to the California Supreme Court, then presided by Chief Justice Earl Warren, who would later become Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court and preside over Brown vs. Board of Education. Several organizations joined the appellate case as amicus curiae, including the NAACP, represented by Thurgood Marshall and Robert L. Carter. More than a year later, on April 14, 1947, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court's ruling, but not on equal protection grounds.
Source:
While virtually all northern states that had not already banned Jim Crow practices rushed to enact state versions of the invalidated national Civil Rights Act, most southern states during the 1880s and 1890s passed laws requiring segregation. The Supreme Court held up the southern laws in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), accepting assurances that separate accommodations would be equal. Freed of legal restraints, some southern cities and states went on to prescribe separate drinking fountains, restrooms, entrances to public buildings, and even Bibles for use in court. More significantly, they disfranchised the vast majority of African Americans through literacy and property tests and discrimination against blacks who could pass such tests.
Source:
Brown v. Board of Education was a landmark decision in American justice, opening a new era of civil rights struggle in the U.S. The fight for civil rights soon spread across the country in broader campaigns for social justice. Fifty years after the Brown decision, the movement has come to include racial and ethnic minorities, women, people with disabilities, and other groups, each demanding equal opportunity.
Source:
Racial segregation in the United States is the racial segregation of facilities, services, and opportunities such as housing, education, employment, and transportation along racial lines. The expression refers primarily to the legally or socially enforced separation of African Americans from other races, but can more loosely refer to voluntary separation, and ... to separation of other racial or ethnic minorities from the majority mainstream society and culture.
Source:
Contrary to popular belief, there was little residential segregation of blacks in U.S. cities after the Civil War. This all changed... as African-Americans migrated to northern cities from the rural south.
Source:
It would be very helpful for your child if you, or any members of your family would share any personal remembrances of segregation in the '30s, '40s, or '50s. Children have many questions about this period of American history. They wonder about the Ku Klux Klan, who they were, why they were so racist. They are concerned about injustice that was prevalent during that era. "Why couldn't black kids and white kids play together? Could they walk on the same side of the street?
Source:
MORE ABOUT
African Americans