Description

Many critical conversations surrounding African American civil rights, equality, and constitutional rights have occurred on the floor of a courtroom over the course of the last century. This necessary volume takes a hard look at the history of those cases and describes the stakes and developments of each case in detail. Readers will learn about how racial segregation was upheld under the doctrine of "separate but equal" in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case and how, almost a hundred years later, Brown v. The Board of Education successfully overturned the verdict, deeming state-sanctioned segregation as unconstitutional. This volume also discusses other monumental court decisions regarding slavery, civil rights, and affirmative action.