Racial Equality
Ishrat Islam
8CE

Thesis Statements: Past segregation cases impacted the result of America's equality today.

Racial Equality
Malala Yousafzai once said, “I speak not for myself but for those without voice...those who have fought for their rights...their right to live in peace, their right to be treated with dignity, their right to equality of opportunity, their right to be educated.” Yousafzai stated this two years ago at the United Nation headquarters in New York City to honor Malala Day. Malala Yousafzai is a current equal rights activist who got shot by the terrorist group, the Taliban, at the age of 15 on October 9, 2012. She was standing up for the women’s right to have an education. With the near death experience, she still strives to achieve these goals all over the world, not just her hometown of Mingora, Pakistan. Malala is compared to many other equal rights activists like
Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Malcolm X. These influential people have made their mark in racial equality. In addition to people, four cases have impacted the result of America’s racial equality today. These four cases are
Plessy V. Ferguson, Little Rock Nine, University of
California Regents V. Bakke, and Brown V. Board of Education.
Segregation
has been in
America for over a century and has still been a problem today. Segregation is the action or state of setting someone or something apart from other people or things or being set apart. Although school are both culturally and racially diverse, there are still other issues with racial equality.
The Declaration of Independence written in July 4, 1776 stated “All men are created equal”. This statement was not grounded into the law of the United States until after the Civil
War. Almost a century later, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified and put an end to slavery.
Later on, the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, strengthened the legal rights of the freed slaves and that no state shall deprive them of the “equal protection of the law”. Lastly, the
Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, further strengthened their legal rights by prohibiting

states from denying anyone the right to vote due to race. From this point in time and forward, these amendments did not stop the discrimination of mainly African­American people. Homer Adolph Plessy, plaintiff , was a shoemaker living in New Orleans, Louisiana who claimed to be seven­eighths Caucasian. This is because he had seven white great­grandparents and only one black great­grandparent. On June 7, 1892, Plessy entered the East Louisiana
Railway and took the possession of the first class railroad car. With one modest action­ taking a seat in the “White Only” car ­ Plessy was challenging the entire system of racial segregation in the United States. After witnessing this, Detective Chris C. Cain took Plessy to jail at the Fifth
Precinct Station on Elysian Fields Avenue, New Orleans. He was imprisoned for violating the
Louisiana 1890 law which stated, “that all railway companies...shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races...No person or persons shall be permitted to occupy seats in coaches, other than the ones assigned to them, on account of the race they belong to.” The morning after, he was taken the official court of New Orleans where he was arraigned for “remaining in a compartment of a coach by race he...did not belong, to wit, a compartment of a coach assigned to passengers of the white race.” Records of this case show that if he presented traits of a usual African American person, he would have been denied a seat in first class from the beginning. According to the court, a person with a black identity is shown to be drunk or rowdy, dress dirtily, and have foul language. However, Plessy was described as “respectably and cleanly dressed, that he was not intoxicated nor affected by any noxious disease”. This counters