Plessy 5. Ferguson

Introduction

People who commit crimes are often thought to be "bad" people or people who are engaged in deleterious behavior. This lesson looks at two carve up crimes in society to frame police-breaking as a sometimes more complex issue. The starting time crime that students will examine is that of Homer Plessy, who violated Louisiana's Separate Car Human activity and whose appeal of his arrest to the Supreme Court resulted in the codification of the "divide but equal" laws that were enacted in many states. The 2nd crime that students will examine is Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus refusal to integrate Little Stone High School after the Supreme Court'due south ruling in Brown 5. Board of Educational activity in 1957. Students will choose i of the crimes and draw out the events of each in a four-frame comic strip.

Background

Plessy five. Ferguson (1896): In 1890, Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, requiring black and white patrons to sit in separate sections of railcars on intrastate railroads. Homer Plessy, in a pre-meditated deed of disobedience, boarded a train in New Orleans and announced that he was neither white nor inclined to move to a department for African Americans. For this he was arrested and convicted of violating the Deed. He appealed his conviction all the fashion to the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled that, as long as the accommodations were equal, states could legally enforce segregation. This decision stood until a unanimous Supreme Court verdict overturned it in 1954 in the Brownish v. Lath ruling.

Little Rock, Arkansas (1957): In 1954, the Supreme Court decided unanimously that local laws mandating segregated schools were unconstitutional. In Chief Justice Earl Warren's words, "in the field of public instruction, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

A second ruling in 1955 announced that the integration of America'due south public schools should accept identify "with all deliberate speed." Thus, the Little Rock school board created a program to phase in integration commencement in 1957 with Cardinal High School. Facing re-ballot and running against agog segregationists, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to deny nine African American students (dubbed the Lilliputian Rock Nine) archway to Key High School, though it had been mandated by Brownish and past a federal judge. In response to his intransigence, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne and used federal power to force Piffling Rock to integrate Central High School. In the end, Faubus was non punished and went on to win reelection.

Materials

  • Political cartoon: Negro expulsion from railway car, Philadelphia. Artist unknown, Library of Congress
  • Secondary source drawing of the events of Plessy, Syracuse University
  • Document: Supreme Court upholding the Louisiana court's decision, Smithsonian
  • Epitome of an African American woman drinking from a h2o fountain labeled "colored simply," The Gordon Parks Foundation
  • Secondary source explanation of Plessy five. Ferguson, Jim Crow Stories, PBS
  • Images of Picayune Rock integration, 1957, American Experience, PBS
  • Little Rock Loftier School Integration Project, Court Documents, University of Maine, Farmington
  • Fundamental High: A Await Back, ArkansasOnline.com
  • Timeline of events of the Little Stone integration struggle, National Park Service
  • Chart newspaper
  • Worksheet with four boxes in which students tin can depict their comic strip (PDF)
  • Essay question worksheet (PDF)

Essential Question

Is it always just to break the law? How did Homer Plessy and Orval Faubus intermission the police force? What are some of the differences between what they did and how they were punished?

Objectives

  • Students volition be able to analyze political cartoons.
  • Students will exist able to place and explicate the issues of Plessy v. Ferguson and of the integration of Petty Stone'due south Key High School.
  • Students volition be able to analyze the complex issues backside breaking laws.

Motivation

Show students the political cartoon depicting a black passenger existence forced to exit a railcar. In their notebooks, take them answer the questions:

  • What is happening in this political drawing?
  • Who is breaking the police?

The teacher volition phone call on students to share what they accept written. Inform students that the class will explore how railcar segregation became constabulary and why people violated that law.

Procedure

  1. Afterward the motivation, students volition read the caption of the Plessy case at the PBS website, linked in a higher place. It tin be printed and duplicated, or, if students are accessing it via the internet, they can choose to watch the short video prune on the page that adds some information to the printed text. Enquire students to take brief notes with a partner every bit they read.
  2. Students will share their notes with the class and the teacher will record them on nautical chart paper and hang the paper on the wall so that all students have a common understanding of the case.
  3. Students volition view a secondary source drawing from Syracuse University (linked higher up) that will serve to reinforce the content from the reading.
  4. Students will view a motion-picture show of an African American adult female drinking from a water fountain labeled "colored only" (linked above). The teacher will make clear to the grade that this was legal because of the Plessy example in which the Supreme Court decided that as long as accommodations were equal, segregation on the basis of race was legal.
  5. Students volition appoint in a grade give-and-take in which the instructor will ask:
    • Should all laws exist followed?
    • Practise people have the correct to choose what laws they will follow? Why or why not?
    • Should Homer Plessy be considered a criminal? Should he be considered a hero?
    • Does Plessy'south premeditated planning to intermission the law brand his criminal offence more than or less heinous? Why?
  6. The instructor will inform students that they are going to wait at some other case in which a person planned to break a police: Orval Faubus resisting the legally mandated integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
  7. Briefly explain that in 1954, in a case chosen Dark-brown v. Board of Pedagogy, the Supreme Courtroom struck downwards the "separate but equal" conclusion that had been in effect since the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in 1896. Read students the quotation from Chief Justice Earl Warren: "in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate just equal' has no identify. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Thus, all schoolhouse districts in the United States would have to exist integrated and have students of unlike races attend schoolhouse together.
  8. Pass out sets of images of the events in Little Rock (come across links above) to students in their reading pairs. Ask students to write downwardly what they call back happened in Niggling Rock based on the pictures. Afterwards 10 minutes, take the pairs share their hypotheses with the form. Write down the correct analyses on another canvass of nautical chart paper and post it.
  9. Have pairs analyze the timeline at the National Park Service website linked above and add three new facts to the story they created from the Petty Rock images. Again, have the pairs share their stories and add the new facts onto the chart paper.
  10. Students volition engage in a class discussion in which the teacher volition ask:
    • Who broke the constabulary?
    • Why do you retrieve that Orval Faubus broke the law against segregation in schools? How did that impact white and blackness residents of Trivial Stone?
    • What should his penalization have been?
    • How does this crime compare to that of Homer Plessy?
  11. Students in their pairs will choose one of the "crimes" and draw a four-frame comic strip that depicts its of import events.

Extension

Students volition write a brusque essay on a topic of their option:

  • Are all crimes equal?
  • If laws are unfair, should we break them?Why or why non?
  • Are at that place crimes for which we should not be punished? If so, what are they? If not, why not?