Separate No More: The Long Road to Brown v. Board of Education

Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools. 7 pages.
A companion lesson to the Eyes on the Prize segment on school desegregation.

Book — Non-fiction. By John A. Stokes with Lois Wolfe. 2007. 128 pages.
First person description of the student led movement to desegregate schools in Prince Edward County.

Book — Non-fiction. By Peter Irons. Foreword by Howard Zinn. 2006. 588 pages.
A detailed and critical history of the Supreme Court.

Film. By William Elwood. 1990. 56 minutes.
The little known story of Charles Hamilton Houston who paved the road to Brown v. Board.

Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, in the case of nine-year old Chinese-American Martha Lum, her exclusion on account of race from school was justified.

When Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez, two California farmers, sent their children to a local school, their children were told that they would have to go to a separate facility reserved for Mexican American students.

Barbara Johns (16-years-old) led her classmates in a strike to protest the substandard conditions in Prince Edward County, Virginia.

After decades of organizing and strategic efforts by parents, teachers, lawyers, and more — the U.S. Supreme Court issued the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education on school segregation.

Rather than desegregate, the Prince Edward County, Virginia Board of Supervisors refused to appropriate money from the County School Board to the public schools.

The Supreme Court ruled that schools in the U.S. had to desegregate “immediately,” instead of the previous ruling of “with all deliberate speed.”