Thesis: The Civil Rights Movement would take over a century to really take hold in the United States and African Americans would not see truly equal rights for a very long time because the white majority in charge felt that keeping blacks down was for the common good.

  1. Analysis of how well the Constitution promotes one specific ideal or principle logically connected to my position on the issue

    1. The declaration of independence in 1776 said “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” Yet at the time these words were written, more than 500,000 black Americans were slaves.

    2. The 13th amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. Approved December 6, 1865

    3. The 15th amendment granted African American men the right to vote by declaring that the "right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." ratified on February 3, 1870

      1. The promise of the 15th Amendment would not be fully realized for almost a century. Through the use of poll taxes, literacy tests and other means, Southern states were able to effectively disenfranchise African Americans.

      2. It would take the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before the majority of African Americans in the South were registered to vote.

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  2. Provide an evaluation of how well the Constitution was upheld by a court case OR a government policy related to your position on the issue.

    1. Local governments constructed a legal system aimed at re-establishing a society based on white supremacy African American men were largely barred from voting. Legislation known as Jim Crow laws separated people of color from whites in schools, housing, jobs, and public gathering places.

    2. Denying black men the right to vote through legal maneuvering and violence was a first step in taking away their civil rights. Beginning in the 1890s, southern states enacted literacy tests, poll taxes, elaborate registration systems, and eventually whites-only Democratic Party primaries to exclude black voters.

    3. The laws proved very effective. In Mississippi, fewer than 9,000 of the 147,000 voting-age African Americans were registered after 1890. In Louisiana, where more than 130,000 black voters had been registered in 1896, the number had plummeted to 1,342 by 1904.

    4. In the pivotal case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially separate facilities, if equal, did not violate the Constitution. Segregation, the Court said, was not discrimination.

    5. The Supreme Court agreed to hear Brown v. Board of Education in June 1952. The Supreme Court producing a unanimous decision to overturn Plessy changed the course of American history.

      1. Earl Warren wrote the decision for the Court. He agreed with the civil rights attorneys that it was not clear whether the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment intended to permit segregated public education. The doctrine of separate but equal did not appear until 1896, he noted, and it pertained to transportation, not education.

      2. More importantly, he said, the present was at issue, not the past. Education was perhaps the most vital function of state and local governments, and racial segregation of any kind deprived African Americans of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment and due process under the Fifth Amendment.

    6. The African American freedom struggle soon spread across the country. The original battle for school desegregation became part of broader campaigns for social justice. Fifty years after the Brown decision, the movement has come to include racial and ethnic minorities, women, people with disabilities, and other groups, each demanding equal opportunity.

  3. A fair interpretation of a position on the issue that contrasts with your own. The case for the defenders of segregation rested on four arguments:

    1. The Constitution did not require white and African American’s to attend the same schools.

    2. Social separation of blacks and whites was a regional custom; the states should be left free to regulate their own social affairs.

    3. Segregation was not harmful to black people.

    4. Whites were making a good faith effort to equalize the two educational systems. But because black children were still living with the effects of slavery, it would take some time before they were able to compete with white children in the same classroom.

    5. Citing Plessy v. Ferguson, the defenders claimed that the equal protection clause of the Constitution did not require integration and that the states had already begun a good faith effort to make their facilities equal. Inequality between the races persisted, they explained, because African Americans still needed time to overcome the effects of slavery.