Good Essay About The Brown Decision

It was in 1951 when it all began. Oliver Brown was fed up seeing his young daughter having to walk a mile to school when there was a good school just a few blocks away she could attend - provided she was white. After the Plessy v. Ferguson Decision of 1896, there was the adoption of the ‘separate, but equal’ doctrine where the whites and the blacks were to live separately. However, this led to further discrimination as it led to the relegation of the blacks to an inferior status. It is because of this issue that Oliver Brown approached the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) who then went to court to file this complaint. After three-year litigation, the court ruled that the doctrine was inherently unequal and that the law should be abolished. This became a landmark victory to all blacks and to all whites who believed in equality to all Americans.
Before the Brown decision, the black population had a hard time. After the drafting of the constitution in 1787, there was hope of equality of all but this turned out not to be the case as, for example, women could not vote, and the African Americans had many inequities. Those, especially in the southern state were taken as slaves and denied all their liberal rights, including that to education. After the Dred Scott decision in1857, the country was torn into two camps, those who supported and those objecting to slavery. This turn of events was even believed to be a major stepping-stone to the occurrence of the American civil war.
Also during the Reconstruction Period, there was the Plessy v. Ferguson Decision of 1896, which then brought about the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine. Here, the blacks and whites were to be separated from each other in almost every way: schools, hotels and even residences. This, however, only served to continue the discrimination until the brown decision of 1951. It was here that the real fight for African American freedom began. In the 1960s, there were protests and much violence despite the pleas of non-violent black leaders like Martin Luther King Junior.
It was then in the mid 1970s that the fight began to bear fruit. The courts abolished all laws supporting segregation and the black people were now being accepted into the community. The fight had cost many lives and there was property damage of about a billion dollars but it was finally seen to pay off as, in the spirit of the Constitutional draft, 'all people are equal under the eyes of God ,' and all Americans owe it to the Brown decision.