American Judicial System’s Role in Segregation
Imagine a world where someone is judged based on the color of his or her eyes. Public places separate into dark eyes and light eyes. Light-eyed people cannot speak with anyone that possesses dark eyes and vice versa. A light-eyed person walks down a public street and hears the whispers of the dark-eyed people. Their whispers are those of judgment, bias, and discrimination. That type of world existed not long ago; however, instead of judging based on eye color people were condemned based on the color of their skin. A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines demonstrates the social injustices of the time period, the 1940s. The discrimination was validated by the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson before being overturned…show more content… Board of Education. These cases surrounded a pivotal era not only in American history, but also in the fictional world of the novel.
Plessy v. Ferguson sanctioned segregation’s continuation in the United States. The ruling of the case stated, “A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races -- has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races... The object of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law” (Wormser). Therefore, the Supreme Court ruled that as long as two facilities were equal in their accommodations, then the segregation remained constitutional.
Conversely, facilities were separate, but far from equal as demonstrated in A Lesson Before Dying. Grant, a teacher, instructs African-American students. As demonstrated in the schoolhouse, which is actually a church, the African-American schools were not equal to the facilities of the whites. On page 53, Gaines states of the superintendent, “Dr.
