Brown v. Board of Education
First sentence
Listening to black people who dared publicly to challenge racism-and to optimistic white liberals-in the 1940s and early 1950s, we can see how they imagined the approach of a new, more egalitarian world of race relations in the United States: A black American corporal, 1945: I spent four years in the Army to free a bunch of Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and I'm hanged if I'm going to let the Alabama version of the Germans kick me around when I get home...
Description
The effects of desegregation and the legacy of the civil rights movement continue to influence American race relations more than thirty years after Brown v. Board of Education, arguably the most significant legal decision of the twentieth century. This brief volume reprints documents from and about the Brown case along with a number of relevant works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and the NAACP to illustrate the myriad responses - then and now - to the African American struggle for equality. A general introduction analyzes the case's legal precedents and situates the case in the historical context of Jim Crow discrimination and the burgeoning development of the NAACP. Photographs, a collection of political cartoons, a chronology, questions for consideration, a bibliography, and an index are also included.