Essay Questions

Summarize the legal allusions that portray milestones in civil rights quest.

Martin Luther King elucidates, “The NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall, won major legal victories that weakened the prevailing “separate but equal” doctrine established by the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. The Supreme Court overturned this doctrine when it unanimously declared public school segregation unconstitutional in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of May 1954.” These revolutionary case laws validated that African-Americans would overwhelm the Jim Crow system ultimately. Separation cannot amount to unqualified equivalence; separation is identical to inequity. The NACCP’s resolution to appeal the Brown v. Board ruling paved the way for the amalgamation of children from diverse races in the schools.

What is the repercussion of segregation on parenting?

Segregation complicates African-American parenting. Martin Luther observes, “Every parent at some time faces the problem of explaining the facts of life to his child. Just as inevitably, for the Negro parent, the moment comes when he must explain to his offspring the facts of segregation. My mother took me on her lap and began by telling me about slavery and how it had ended with the Civil War. She tried to explain the divided system of the South—the segregated schools, restaurants, theaters, housing; the white and colored signs on drinking fountains, waiting rooms, lavatories—as a social condition rather than a natural order. Then she said the words that almost every Negro hears before he can yet understand the injustice that makes them necessary: “You are as good as anyone.” Here, Martin Luther’s mother illuminates the omnipresent discrimination which King is likely to come upon as he is developing. The mother has been a prey of segregation, and undoubtedly, her son would face the same discrimination. It would be problematic for a youngster to feel ‘ as good as anyone’ when the widespread bigotry makes it apparent that black is not ‘good’. Evidently, the socialization of black kids is principally influenced by segregation propensities which unconditionally delineate their lives.