They therefore set the cases down for reargument in 1953, specifically asking both sides to address particular issues. The issue that had hung fire ever since the Civil War now had to be facedĭirectly: what place would African Americans enjoy in the American polity?Ī number of reports indicate that the justices, while agreed that segregation was wrong, were divided over whether the Court had the power to overrule Plessy. In 1952 the NAACP brought five cases before the Court specifically challenging the doctrine of Plessy v. The opinion gave the NAACP and its chief legal counsel, Thurgood Marshall, the hope that the justices were finally ready to tackle the basic question of whether segregated facilities could ever in fact be equal. Whatever else the justices knew about segregated facilities, they did know what made a good law school, and for the first time the Court ordered a black student admitted into a previously all-white school. Painter that a makeshift law school the state of Texas had created to avoid admitting blacks into the prestigious University of Texas Law School did not come anywhere close to being equal. That same day, the Court ruled in Sweatt v.
Oklahoma State Regents (1950), a unanimous Supreme Court had struck down University of Oklahoma rules that had permitted a black man to attend classes, but fenced him off from other students. (NAACP), the leading civil rights organization in the country, had never accepted the legitimacy of the "separate but equal" rule, and in the 1940s and 1950s had brought a series of cases designed to show that separate facilities did not meet the equality criterion. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
0 kommentar(er)
