chool for slave refugees was founded during the war in Washington, D.C. W.E.B. DuBois, the famed Black historian, wrote, “There is no doubt that the thirst of the Black man for knowledge-A thirst which has been too persistent and durable to be mere curiosity or whim – gave birth to the public free school system of the South” (Ratvich 13). In the post slavery period, no goal, other than survival, was more important to the former slaves than that of receiving an education.The most critical court case affecting blacks at the end of the 19th century was Plessy vs. Ferguson. In 1890, the state of Louisiana passed a law “requiring railway companies carrying passengers in their coaches, to provide equal, but separate accommodations for the white and colored races” (Ratvich 16). Plessy, who was 1/8 black, refused to sit in the back section of a railroad car and was convicted of violating the law. He appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which issued its ruling in 1896. In an 8-1 decision, the court ruled that “legal segregation, as expressed in the doctrine of ‘separate but equal,’ could be legally practiced” (18).This decision, which was reached by the majority of justices, was partially based on an earlier case that had involved public school segregation. In 1850, in the case of Roberts vs. City of Boston, the Supreme Court Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that La Point 3the Boston school committee could prohibit black children from attending white schoolsby establishing separate, though not necessarily equal schools for blacks (23).In the 1920s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), developed a strategy to end school segregation. Their “dream team consisted of Thurgood Marshall (who was later to become the first black Supreme Court Justice), Charles Houston, William Hastie, James Nabrit, and Leon Ramson. They first sought out to chal...
