The Jim Crow Laws and Racism in United States History by David K. Fremon Read Free Book Online Page A

His rank, however, did not mean he got respect from his white fellow soldiers. Poor treatment from whites made him determined to fight for racial justice.
    In 1929, Houston was named dean of the Howard University Law School. He took the lightly regarded law school and soon made it respectable. Houston once claimed, “a lawyer is either a social engineer or a parasite to society.” 2 He gathered some of the finest young black legal minds in the country, including a Baltimore native named Thurgood Marshall.
    Houston joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) legal staff in 1934. Five years later, he started the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The fund’s primary mission was “to render free legal aid to Negroes who suffer legal injustice because of their race or color and cannot afford to employ legal assistance.” 3 At first, the defense fund’s staff consisted of Thurgood Marshall and a clerk. It would soon record an impressive number of victories.
    Marshall’s strategy was to start with cases with the best chance of victory in the courts. He would use these wins as precedents to argue in later cases. Marshall looked for cases in the border Southern states. He felt whites in those states were less hardened about segregation than in Deep South states such as Mississippi and Alabama. He went after cases involving unequal pay for teachers. If school districts were forced to pay black teachers as much as whites, the added costs might encourage the districts to end segregation. He wanted cases involving college students, because whites might be less opposed to integration in colleges than in elementary schools.
    Marshall scored his first major victory in his native Maryland. Donald Murray, an African American, was denied admission to the University of Maryland’s law school because of his race. In 1936, the Supreme Court ordered the law school to admit Murray. Soon after, Marshall sued a Maryland school district that was paying black teachers less than whites.
    Herman Sweatt, a mail carrier, sought admission to the University of Texas law school. The university refused. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that black applicants must be admitted to law schools reserved for whites unless equivalent facilities were available to them.
    Texas hastily created a separate law school for blacks. But as had happened many times before, separate was not equal. The all-white University of Texas law school was considered one of the best in the nation. Its black counterpart, the Texas Law School for Negroes, hardly measured up. It started with four basement rooms, two professors, and no law library. On June 5, 1950, the Supreme Court decided Sweatt v. Painter in the plaintiff’s favor. The formerly all-white University of Texas Law School had to admit black students.
    The man largely responsible for victories such as Sweatt’s did not live to see Sweatt triumph. Charles Houston died on April 22, 1950. The decision in Sweatt’s favor would not have surprised him. Before he died, Houston predicted “there come times when it is possible to forecast results of a contest, of a battle, of a lawsuit long before the final event has taken place. And so far as the struggle for civil rights is concerned, the struggle is won.” 4
Brown v. Board of Education
    Although Kansas had remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War, segregation existed there, even in the capital of Topeka. Linda Brown was a victim of the segregation. She lived five blocks away from an all-white school. But she had to walk through a railroad yard, catch a school bus, and ride twenty-one blocks to her all-black school. Even though the schools were roughly equal in quality, Brown’s father, Oliver, felt Linda was denied the right to the best possible education.
    Topeka officials said the city was authorized to have segregated schools. In truth, the law declared that cities with more than fifteen thousand people could (but did not have to)