Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had held that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal". The Court's unanimous decision in Brown, and its related cases, paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement, and a model for many future impact litigation cases.
Charleston is a city in Franklin County, Arkansas, United States, and along with Ozark is one of the two county seats of Franklin County. It is part of the Fort Smith, Arkansas-Oklahoma Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 2,494 at the 2010 census, down from 2,965 in 2000.
Sheridan is a city in and the county seat of Grant County, Arkansas, United States. The community is located deep in the forests of the Arkansas Timberlands. It sits at the intersection of US Highways 167 and 270.
Hoxie is a city in Lawrence County, Arkansas, United States. It lies immediately south of Walnut Ridge. The population was 2,780 at the 2010 census.
Dale Leon Bumpers was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 38th Governor of Arkansas (1971–1975) and in the United States Senate (1975–1999). He was a member of the Democratic Party. He was counsel at the Washington office of law firm Arent Fox LLP, where his clients included Riceland Foods and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Gebhart v. Belton, 33 Del. Ch. 144, 87 A.2d 862, aff'd, 91 A.2d 137, was a case decided by the Delaware Court of Chancery in 1952 and affirmed by the Delaware Supreme Court in the same year. Gebhart was one of the five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision of the United States Supreme Court which found unconstitutional racial segregation in United States public schools.
Daisy Bates was an American civil rights activist, publisher, journalist, and lecturer who played a leading role in the Little Rock Integration Crisis of 1957.
Massive resistance was a political strategy created by American politicians Harry F. Byrd and James M. Thomson aimed at getting Virginia officials to pass laws and policies preventing public school desegregation, particularly after Brown v. Board of Education. Many schools and an entire school system were shut down in 1958 and 1959 in attempts to block integration.
Segregation academies are private schools in the Southern United States that were founded in the mid-20th century by white parents to avoid having their children attend desegregated public schools. They were founded between 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, and 1976, when the court ruled similarly about private schools.
Watson Chapel School District No. 24 (WCSD) is a public school district serving the communities of Pine Bluff and Sulphur Springs within Jefferson County, Arkansas, United States. Headquartered in Pine Bluff, Watson Chapel School District employs over 300 faculty and staff to provide educational programs for students ranging from kindergarten through twelfth grade and enrolls more than 2,200 students.
Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430 (1968), was an important United States Supreme Court case involving school desegregation. Specifically, the Court dealt with the freedom of choice plans created to avoid compliance with the Supreme Court's mandate in Brown II in 1955. The Court held unanimously that New Kent County's freedom of choice plan did not adequately comply with the school board's responsibility to determine a system of admission to public schools on a non-racial basis. The Supreme Court mandated that the school board must formulate new plans and steps towards realistically converting to a desegregated system. Green v. County School Board of New Kent County was a follow-up of Brown v. Board of Education.
Dollarway School District No. 2 (DSD) was a school district headquartered in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, United States. With over 1,600 students and employing more than 300 educators and staff, the district had three active school campuses at the end of its life.
The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. They then attended after the intervention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The Mansfield school desegregation incident is a 1956 event in the Civil Rights Movement in Mansfield, Texas, a suburb of the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex.
The Gould School District was a school district that operated public schools in Gould, Arkansas. Its territory is now a part of the Dumas School District.
Dollarway High School was a comprehensive public high school in northwest Pine Bluff, Arkansas that served grades 9 through 12. It was one of three public high schools in Pine Bluff and was a part of the Pine Bluff School District effective July 1, 2021. Prior to that point it was the only high school managed by the Dollarway School District. Within the state, the school is often referred to as Pine Bluff Dollarway. It closed as of fall 2023.
In the United States, school integration is the process of ending race-based segregation within American public and private schools. Racial segregation in schools existed throughout most of American history and remains an issue in contemporary education. During the Civil Rights Movement school integration became a priority, but since then de facto segregation has again become prevalent.
White America, Inc., was an organization founded in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in February 1955. The organization was created following the desegregation of schools in Arkansas, to attempt to prevent "any attempts by Negroes to enter white schools" in the state. The group joined two other militant white supremacist organizations in September 1955 to attempt to intimidate the local school board of Hoxie to reverse its decision to integrate its schools.
Townsend Park High School was a segregated, all-black high school in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, operated by the Dollarway School District. As a result of the lawsuit Dove v. Parham, it was eventually merged into Dollarway High School.
Prior to the civil rights movement in South Carolina, African Americans in the state had very few political rights. South Carolina briefly had a majority-black government during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, but with the 1876 inauguration of Governor Wade Hampton III, a Democrat who supported the disenfranchisement of blacks, African Americans in South Carolina struggled to exercise their rights. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation kept African Americans from voting, and it was virtually impossible for someone to challenge the Democratic Party, which ran unopposed in most state elections for decades. By 1940, the voter registration provisions written into the 1895 constitution effectively limited African-American voters to 3,000—only 0.8 percent of those of voting age in the state.
