Blog #3: Brown vs. Board of Education

     Brown vs. Board of Education of 1954 was a landmark court case in U.S. history, one of the first steps towards social justice and eliminating racial discrimination in America. Up until that year, colored children were denied admission to public schools near their homes because of their race. Among them was eight-year-old Linda Brown, who had requested to attend a public elementary school near her home in Topeka, Kansas. Since the nearby school she applied for was a “white” school, the board of education denied her request and registered her to a colored school over twenty blocks from her home. Her parents filed a lawsuit against the school board, which eventually reached the Supreme Court level to “determine whether the segregation of schools was at all constitutional.” Brown argued that the separate schools based on race were harmful to African American children, while the school board argued that the facilities were “equal” by Plessy vs. Ferguson standards from 1896. However, all nine Supreme Court judges ruled in favor of Brown. The official verdict given by Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall decided against racial segregation on the grounds that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guaranteed all citizens equal protection of the law. From that moment onward, racial segregation in schools and other public facilities was declared both unconstitutional and unlawful.
     Although racial discrimination still continued, the ruling at Brown vs. Board of Education had a monumental impact, setting off the social justice movement of the 1950s and 1960s. If the Court’s ruling had never happened, the social justice movements that had followed would likely have been delayed, and without the verdict, the United States would not be as culturally diverse or representative of freedom and opportunity.

References:

http://brownvboard.org/summary/
http://www.infoplease.com/us/supreme-court/cases/ar04.html

Connections to Doubt: What role does gossip play in TKAM? (Blog #2)

     In the movie Doubt, the priest uses an analogy to embellish on his sermon: that if you were to stand on top of a tall building, rip apart a pillow, and let every feather be carried away by the wind, you would find it a very difficult, if not impossible, task to retrieve each and every one of those feathers and bring them back to their original source. He particularly made it a point that "it cannot be done." By this analogy, the priest meant to convey the irreversible and wicked nature of gossip. Once the feathers are blown away from their original source and carried in all directions by the wind, it is almost impossible to take them back; in the same way, once the seeds of gossip are spread, they are almost impossible to get rid of -- even if the person who started it all tries to stop it. Gossip has the ability to ruin a person's reputation in a way that can't be retracted.
     This irrevocable gossip the priest talks about in Doubt also plays a huge role in defining characters and driving the plot forward in To Kill A Mockingbird. Like the priest's analogy of the person who first ripped apart the pillow and released thousands of feathers, Ms. Stephanie Crawford is the one who started most of the gossip in Maycomb, and is consistently the most avid gossipmonger of the county. So far, the main objects of her gossip have been Arthur ("Boo") Radley and his reclusive family. When he was younger, Boo had gotten in trouble with the law and his father had grounded him in the house as a punishment. He wasn't seen again for fifteen years until he supposedly attacked his father with a pair of scissors on the porch -- an event Ms. Crawford claimed to have witnessed from her property. The townspeople were convinced that Boo was crazy, but Mr. Radley refused to let him be admitted to an asylum, so again Boo was kept shut in his home. As the Radleys' neighbor, Ms. Crawford naturally spread rumors about Boo. According to her accounts, Boo Radley sometimes peeked into her windows at night. Later other rumors spread among the schoolchildren that Boo ate squirrels or cats for dinner and poisoned berries on his property so that people who tried to eat them would die. Although none of these ridiculous theories had been actually backed up by factual evidence, they were enough to degrade Boo's reputation as some kind of crazy pet-eating maniac. Moreover, the town gossip was left largely unchecked since Boo hadn't been seen out of his house in years. Thus, Boo's image was left to the townspeople's imagination as a six-foot-tall, scarred, yellow-teethed, and drooling phantom -- all based upon unfounded rumors. As a result, the schoolchildren in the community, including Jem and Scout Finch, were afraid of being near the creepy Radley house, thinking that they would be kidnapped or killed if they went by. Some kids avoid the street altogether and take a long route home rather than pass the house unaccompanied by an adult.
     However, from what the author shows readers by his actions, Boo really isn't the evil person the town gossip makes him out to be. Defying Ms. Crawford's nonsensical claims, Ms. Maudie recalls that Boo had always been polite to her when he was little. Moreover, his good nature is demonstrated when Boo tries to mend Jem's pants. Also, when Ms. Maudie's house catches on fire in the middle of the night and the entire neighborhood goes out to help, Boo does too without anyone noticing. He puts a blanket around Scout when she is shivering. From this, readers can infer that Boo is really not a monster, despite all the gossip.

Who is Harper Lee?

     Although Nelle Harper Lee has only written one novel, To Kill A Mockingbird (TKAM), she still stands as one of the most influential authors in America, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom of the United States for Literature in 2007. Born and raised in Monroeville, Alabama, her book deals with the issues of racism and prejudice she observed during her childhood. She was the youngest of four children of Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee – names that you might have noticed were incorporated into her work. Similar to the character Atticus in TKAM, her own father was a lawyer who served in the Alabama State Legislature from 1926 to 1938, and she herself was like the main character, Scout: an avid reader and tomboy in her childhood. Lee initially developed her interest in English literature during high school. In college, entered a law program but soon found that her true calling was to write. She left college early for New York, hoping to follow her dream. She struggled for several years, working as a ticket agent for two airlines before her friends helped her achieve her goal. In Christmas 1956, Mr. and Mrs. Brown gave her the boost to become a writer – supporting her for one year so that she could work on writing a novel fulltime, and helping her find an agent, Maurice Crain. Thanks to all their support, Harper Lee was able to publish her manuscript, which has since become one of the most widely-read pieces of American literature.

References
http://www.harperlee.com/bio.htm
http://www.biography.com/articles/Harper-Lee-9377021
http://www.nndb.com/people/572/000025497/