This Day in History: Brown vs. Board of Education

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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May 17, 2012

The Doll Test — Gordon Parks, photographer. Dr. Kenneth Clark conducting the “Doll Test” with a young male child, 1947. Gelatin silver print. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (62)

On this day in 1951, the U.S. Supreme Court declares segregation in public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Some of you may recall the Kenneth and Mamie Clark doll test, whereby children were shown two dolls- one black and one white-and asked which doll is ugly, which would they play with, etc. Black children overwhelmingly chose the white doll as the better doll. In 2006, filmmaker Kiri Davis did the experiment again in her film A Girl Like Me and received the same results.

Bearing all this in mind, do you believe desegregation helped children with their feelings of Black inferiority? Why or why not?

Learn how Jim Crow laws kept people segregated and how people struggled for justice.

More breaking Black news.

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