#schoolsegregation

In 1950, Life assigned Parks to produce a story about school segregation, then an increasingly important issue in the nation’s discourse on civil rights. Parks chose to return to his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas, to find out what had become of his classmates from the segregated Plaza School. Part documentary, part nostalgia, this trip offered Parks a chance to reflect on how his understanding of a place changed with time and how segregation affected the lives of his classmates and friends.

Compare the two photographs of Parks’s former classmates. They ended up in different cities, Chicago and Detroit respectively. What else is different about their life paths? How might they each represent the effects of segregation?

Imagine you had the opportunity to return to your hometown 30 years from now. What might you expect to see? What would you photograph?

Photo: This image of an integrated classroom in the previously all white Barnard Elementary School in Washington, D.C., shows how the District's Board of Education attempted to act quickly to carry out the Supreme Court decision to integrate schools in the area. Thomas J. O'Halloran. School integration, Barnard School, Washington, D.C., 1955, Library of Congress. 

#Onthisday in 1954, the U.S Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that school segregation was declared unconstitutional. For more than a decade, Charles H. Houston, Dean of Howard University Law School, headed a team of lawyers that brought school desegregation cases in Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. After Houston’s death, Thurgood Marshall argued a joint appeal of these cases before the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. 

Part of their defense relied on the testimonies and research of social scientists during throughout their legal strategy. In the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark designed and conducted a series of experiments known as “the doll tests” to study the psychological effects of segregation on African American children. On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren issued a unanimous decision that racial segregation is unconstitutional, violating the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.