Sep 28, 2026 Jeff Baxter 0 Comment Black schools Jim Crow South, Brown v Board of Education schools, civil rights education history, Jim Crow education inequality, Plessy v Ferguson education, school segregation history, segregated schools conditions, separate but equal history, Through His Lens documentary Other Projects The phrase separate but equal has a certain legal tidiness to it. Four words. A comma in the middle. The suggestion of balance, that what is divided can still be fair, that what is separated need not be unequal. It is the kind of language that works beautifully in a courtroom argument or in the press and fails completely when you walk through the door of a Black school in the American South in 1950 and look at what is actually there. What was actually ...
Read More Sep 20, 2026 Jeff Baxter 0 Comment Briggs v Elliott, Brown v Board of Education plaintiffs, civil rights history, civil rights plaintiffs stories, Clarendon County school segregation, Harry Briggs South Carolina, NAACP legal history, school desegregation cases, separate but equal history, Through His Lens documentary Other Projects Before there was Brown v. Board of Education there was a school bus. Or rather there wasn't one, and that absence set in motion a chain of events that would change the course of American history. In Clarendon County, South Carolina in the late 1940s the disparity between Black and white education was not subtle. It was written into the state constitution. Article 11 of South Carolina's 1896 Constitution stated plainly that separate schools shall be pro...
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