NAACP YOUNGSTOWN/MAHONING COUNTY OHIO TO CO-HOST 70th ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION OF BROWN vs. BOARD OF EDUCATION

NAACP YOUNGSTOWN OHIO TO CO-HOST 70TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION OF BROWN VS BOARD OF EDUCATION AS OHIO FACES ACADEMIC SEGREGATION IN INTEGRATED SCHOOLS

YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO, UNITED STATES, May 1, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The NAACP Youngstown/Mahoning County will co-host a celebration of the 70th Anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision on Friday, May 17th, 2024, from 3 to 7 p.m. at the Downtown YMCA 17 N. Champion St, Youngstown, OH 44503. The Keynote speaker will be Civil Rights Activist Joanne Bland, former National Voting Rights Museum director in Selma, Alabama.

Bland was a very active participant in the Civil Rights Movement from her earliest days and was the youngest person to have been jailed during any civil rights demonstration. “During my lifetime, I have witnessed and participated in some of our nation's most consequential civil rights battles. In the early '60s, I began my activism, with the SNCC (The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) organized for myself and other children and teens in my neighborhood and area to participate in the Civil Rights Movement,” said Bland.

The Youngstown City School District is a co-sponsor of this event and is encouraging everyone to pay tribute to one of the most crucial landmark Supreme Court Decisions of our lifetime.

Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, the pivotal Supreme Court decision that made school segregation unconstitutional, turns 70 years old on May 17, 2024. The road to desegregated education in the United States was a long and difficult one, and stands as a testament to the remarkable power, tenacity, and moral clarity of great African American trailblazers who refused to settle for the inherent injustice of “separate but equal.”

"Separate but equal" remained standard doctrine in U.S. law until the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The case began in 1951 as a class action suit filed in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas that called on the city's Board of Education to reverse its policy of racial segregation. It was initiated by the Topeka chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the plaintiffs were 13 African American parents on behalf of their children. The named plaintiff was Oliver L. Brown, a welder and an assistant pastor at his local church, whose daughter had to walk six blocks to her school bus stop to ride to her segregated black school one mile away, while a white school was located just seven blocks from her house.

The landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education declared that racially segregated schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and that segregation in public schools was “inherently unequal.” This was, in part, because the court argued that access to equitable, nonsegregated education played a critical role in creating informed citizens – a paramount concern for the political establishment amid the Cold War. With Brown, the justices overturned decades of legal precedent that kept Black Americans in separate and unequal schools. It is perhaps the single most important decision the Supreme Court has ever issued; its impact can be felt in education policy, critical race studies, constitutional theory (e.g., the 14th Amendment) and even in modern debates about Supreme Court reform.

James Brown
NAACP Youngstown
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