Brown vs. The Board of Education

For the third mock trial in class this year litigation teams 1 and 2 did Brown vs. The Board of Education. In this legal case ended up shooting down the idea of separate but equal that was created about a hundred years earlier by the Supreme Court case, Plessy vs. Ferguson. In a unanimous 9-0 decision by the Supreme Court the idea of separate but equal was deemed unconstitutional. The plaintiffs were thirteen African American parents that represented their twenty children (but were headed by Oliver Brown a parent of one of the children in the class) who argued that this idea of separate but equal was indeed segregation and the African American kids were not getting treated equally to their white counterparts. The African American kids would go to a school several towns over even though there was a perfectly good school less than a mile from their house, but because this school was for all whites their students could not attend that school. It did not stop there however as the school that the kids did in fact go to was run down and was not nearly as pristine as the all white school.

As it played out in class, team 2 took the side of the plaintiff and argued the morality of separate but equal. They stated that only white people thought it would be good for the culture to create separate but equal but it in fact did the exact opposite as it added a divide of cultures and made the blacks think that they are less or worse than the whites. It was this idea that the white "culture" would be better off if they didn't incorporate African Americans into it. The defense (The Board of Education) played by team 1 did comeback saying that what they were doing did not violate the 13th and 14th Amendment and as well they argued that if blacks were in school with white kids they could be bullied much worse because of who they were and the color of their skin. These were very valid comebacks and made sense but it did not do enough to help them win the case as the final decision was in favor of Brown and the school kids.