Because of the Fifteenth Amendment, this had to be done indirectly through such means as literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and other devices. The first was legislation aimed at disenfranchising blacks.
Spurred on in part by the withdrawal of federal troops and federal civil rights enforcement from the South, southern states toward the end of the nineteenth century began passing increasingly discriminatory legislation aimed at blacks. A number of African American men also held political office in the region.īy the turn of the century, the relatively egalitarian atmosphere of the post–Civil War era was beginning to radically change. From the late 1860's through the 1890's, there was widespread voting on the part of black men in the South.
The Constitution had been amended to forbid slavery (Thirteenth Amendment), establish black citizenship and the equal treatment of people before the law ( Fourteenth Amendment), and provide equal voting rights for men of different races ( Fifteenth Amendment). The Civil War and Reconstruction had brought considerable political, social, and legal change to the nation, particularly the South. Brown was the first decision authored by new Chief Justice Earl Warren and presaged a more activist era in the Court’s history.īrown must be understood within the broader context of the history of race relations in the United States, particularly the history of Jim Crow in the southern states. The decision served as a catalyst for the modern Civil Rights movement. It reversed the Court’s earlier “separate but equal” position in Plessy v. Brown would prove to be a pivotal case in the Supreme Court’s history. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case that pronounced state-mandated segregation in public schools unconstitutional, was a consolidation of six cases that challenged legally mandated school segregation in Delaware, the District of Columbia, South Carolina, Virginia, and Topeka, Kansas.
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