Thurgood Mashall - Attorney for Brown v. Board of Education case and the first African-American appointed to the Supreme Court.

Black History Month provides our country with the excellent opportunity to recognize those that tirelessly worked to ensure a better future for generations to come. As an African American with an interest in law, this month provides me with the opportunity to reflect upon just how far our country has legislatively come to inclusively encompass “liberty and justice for all.”

• 1654-1865: Slavery, which is forced labor where people are considered to be property of others, was a legal institution within the boundaries of much of the present United States.
• September 22, 1862: President Abraham Lincoln issued the Executive Order, as Commander in Chief, of the Emancipation Proclamation, in which its first executive order was to declare freedom of all slaves in all states.
• January 1, 1863: The second executive order of the Emancipation Proclamation specifically named 10 states that were to abolish slavery.

Immediately following the Civil War, the Reconstruction Amendments were adopted between 1865 and 1870 to abolish slavery (13^th Amendment), broadly define citizenship (14^th Amendment, which overruled the Dred Scott v. Sanford ruling of 1857 that excluded slaves and their descendants from Constitutional rights), and grant voting rights regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” (15^th Amendment).

Although slavery took its rightful place as a part of American history, no longer revealing the hypocrisy of a nation that declared its independence from the British Empire in 1776 by stating “all men are created equal,” changing the mindsets and behavior of people proved to be a challenging feat unto itself.

• 1876-1965: Jim Crow Laws were instated as state and local laws that mandated “separate but equal” public facilities and government services, like education, between America’s blacks and whites, which legally upheld racial segregation.
• 1883: The Supreme Court ruled in Pace v. Alabama that Alabama’s anti-miscegenation statute prohibiting mixed-race marriages was constitutional.
• 1890-1908: Southern states of the former Confederacy created constitutions with provisions that disenfranchised most African Americans and poor whites by implementing discriminatory regulations like poll taxes and educational and character requirements.
• 1904-1965: There were a series of attempts to overturn states’ discriminatory voting practices, but none of them successfully re-established the 15^th Amendment voting rights for African Americans.
• 1924: The Virginia Legislature passed the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 requiring that a racial description of every person be recorded at birth, and made marriage between white persons and non-white persons a felony. This also instituted the colloquial “one-drop rule,” which refers to a person with any trace of African ancestry as black.
• May 17, 1954: With the monumental case of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court deemed that education of black children in separate public schools from their white counterparts was in fact unconstitutional.
• 1957: The Governor of Arkansas called the National Guard to deny entrance of nine African American students into Little Rock Senior High School in defiance of the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that ordered school integration. President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the National Guard, ordered them to return to their barracks, and then deployed elements of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to protect the students’ return to school.
• 1962: James Meredith won a lawsuit that allowed him admission to the University of Mississippi in September of 1962. He attempted to enter campus on September 20, on September 25, and again on September 26, only to be blocked by Mississippi Governor Ross R. Barnett, who proclaimed that “no school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor.” The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held both Barnett and Lieutenant Governor Paul B. Johnson, Jr. in contempt, with fines of more than $10,000 for each day they refused to allow Meredith to enroll. Meredith, escorted by U.S. Marshals, entered the campus on September 30, 1962, and white students rioted that evening in protest.
• 1964: Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a landmark piece of legislation in the United States that extended voting rights and outlawed racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public.
• 1964: The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a cohabitation law of Florida that was a part of the state’s anti-miscegenation laws, was unconstitutional in McLaughlin v. Florida. This decision overturned the Pace v. Alabama ruling.
• 1965: The National Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed discriminatory voting practices that disenfranchised African Americans throughout the United States.
• 1967: The United State Supreme Court decided in Loving v. Virginia that Virginia’s Racial Act of Integrity of 1924 was unconstitutional, and further overturned the Pace v. Alabama decision.
• 1972: The Gates v. Collier decision was the first court intervention in the supervision of prison practices. It deemed that the trustee system, which was a strict system of discipline and security in some Southern states, and inmate abuse constituted cruel and unusual punishment and were in violation of Eighth Amendment rights.

The United State’s transformative legal history of African Americans truly exhibits the unceasing efforts of those that fought for justice and equality for all.

Main Source: Wikipedia

Posted by Adrienne on February 22, 2010 at 5:40pm.