A New Kind of Democracy? Political and Cultural Developments in the 1960s 403minorities.
The first cracks in the system of segregation came after World War II.
Jackie Robinson broke the “color line” when he became the first black Major
League Baseball player with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Then President
Harry Truman desegregated the military by executive order in July 1948. Still,
change was slow, and African Americans and some White allies took the cause
to the courts, culminating in one of the more famous and important cases in
Supreme Court history, Brown v. Board in 1954. Linda Brown was a small child
denied entry into a White school in her neighborhood in Topeka, Kansas so
her parents sued. The Court unanimously held for Brown, overturning the
doctrine of “separate but equal” that had been established in 1896 and declar-
ing that “separation was inherently unequal,” meaning that separate facilities
such as schools would never be equal–schools for Whites would always be
newer, have better resources, pay teachers better and so on. The Brown deci-
sion was a huge blow to segregation and a huge victory for civil rights, but
the court did not demand that all schools in the American South, the region
where apartheid was practiced, had to open their doors to Black children.
FIGuRE 8-2 A “white only” taxi cab in Albany, Georgia, representative of
the segregated South, 1962