Should The President Truman's Decision To Desegregate Segregation?

Well, one way they are connected is because Rosa Parks wouldn’t give her seat up to a white man, in To Kill a Mockingbird Tom Robinson was accused of rapping a white woman which he really didn’t do. Back then everyone was treated differently all the white and black people were separated. When you go one a school bus first 10 rows were saved for the white kids or adults and all the black people had to sit in the back or on the other side of the bus. No matter what the situation was between Rosa Parks and the white man, Rosa Parks was taken to court over her not giving her seat up to a white man. Tom Robinson was taken to court over a white woman accusing him of rapping her, she thought it would be nice to have Tom come over when he would walk by and have him fix something in her house.

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (U.S. 1896) gave states the legal right to require persons of different races to use separate but equal segregated facilities. But that ruling was struck down in the landmark case of Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483 (U.S. 1954), In that case the court held that separate but equal public schools based on race is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and is unconstitutional. In upholding that decision, Cooper v. Aaron held that state governments must comply with Supreme Court rulings and court orders based on the its interpretation of the

Rosa Parks stood up for what she believed, or rather, sat down for what she believed. On the evening of December 1, 1955, Parks, an African American, chose to take a seat on the bus on her ride home from work. Because she sat down and refused to give up her seat to a white passenger, she was arrested for disobeying an Alabama law requiring black people to relinquish seats to white people when the bus was full. (Blacks also had to sit at the back of the bus.) Her arrest sparked a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system.

After Brown Vs Board all southern schools were ordered to desegregate “with all deliberate speed” and many schools did not desegregate such as the high school in Little Rock, Arkansas; nine black students wished to attend and were harassed by whites including Melba Pattillo who had acid poured on her face and was stabbed. After the white resistance would not disappear, partly due to Orval Faubus’s lack of support for the black students, Eisenhower sent in federal troops to escort the black students to and from class. This showed involvement as this was the first time a president had directly got involved with the civil rights campaign and showed he public and the rest of the south that racism would not be tolerated and desegregation needed to happen. Another way president showed support was JFK. In 1963 JFK addressed Civil rights in a speech calling it a moral issue.

In the 1950’s through the 1960’s if one was an African-American one would have to walk three to four miles in the scorching heat to go to their all black school. Jim Crow laws were designed to segregate African-Americans and whites. Before, May 17.1954, the court would use the phrase “separate but equal” to justify excluding blacks from white facilities and services. In one Supreme Court case called Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, the Chief Justice and the other eight Associate Justices on the Supreme Court ruled that all U.S. schools had to integrate. Some schools integrated while other schools did not.

As New York Times v. Sullivan began in 1960 and continued through 1964, the South overflowed with racial tensions. Just one month before the Times published “Heed Their Rising Voices” in 1960, a student-sit-in at a Woolworth lunch counter sparked the sit-in movement that spread throughout the Deep South. Not long after that, the Freedom Riders boarded buses across the Southern States in ‘62 and faced violence from the Ku Klux Klan, which only provoked more protests. This situation attracted the attention of both the media and the Court. The “Heed Their Rising Voices” ad boldly summarized: “Again and again the Southern violators have answered Dr. King’s peaceful protests with intimida-tion and violence.” This quotation exhibits the frustrated environment that segregationists created in the South, and establishes the setting of New York Times v. Sullivan.

Although Brown v. Board of Education verified the unconstitutionality of the segregation of public education, the act of integration was not immediately instituted. As a result, in the year 1955, the Court met again to discuss on how to end segregation. This was one year after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Four days later, Chief Justice Warren declared Brown II. This decision commanded the federal district courts to execute desegregation with “all deliberate

1) attacked civil rights protestors using “clubs, cattle prods, and tear gas) (Scott, 2014, para. 1). The protest was a particularly peaceful protest, where civil rights protesters “the marchers had planned to walk the 50 miles to Montgomery, the state capital, as part of a long-building protest against the denial of basic voting rights to Southern blacks” (Scott, 2014, para. 1). Tupac Shakur’s lyrics in “Changes” supports the happenings from Selma when he says “Cops give a damn about a negro?

The Freedom Rides was a series of bus rides to the Deep South to protest against segregation laws. They believed that they should test the Supreme Court ruling of Boynton v. Virginia and Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia. These declared segregation in interstate bus and rail stations unconstitutional. The South ignored these laws, and the federal government did nothing to stop them. The first ride took place on May 4, 1961.

The Mongomery Bus Boycott, which took place on December 5, 1956 and lasted until December 20, 1956. What this exactly was is when African Americans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregated seating. The most prominant name of this time that made the boycott what it is today is Rosa Parks. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, refused to give up her seat to a white man while on a Montgomery bus. Thus, resulting in her getting arrested and fined.

In 1955, December 1st, another key figure Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. Four days later on December 5th, African Americans refused to ride buses. It lasted for 381 days. The US Supreme made the Montgomery bus systems to desegregate. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis Tennessee on April 4, 1968.

Changes were taking place all over America. In “An Act of Courage,” a woman, Rosa Parks, began to change the segregation of blacks and whites on buses. One day in December, “Rosa Parks, an African American, was arrested that day for violating a city law requiring racial segregation of public buses.” (“An Act of Courage”). The bus driver asked Mrs. Parks to move from her seat