Learn · read a page at a time
Page 20 of 21
Chapter 12 · Separate Was Never Equal
Page 1 of 1 in this chapter
From the page before
What does the 'exclusionary rule' do?
The answer: It keeps proof from a bad search out of the trial
Why: The 'exclusionary rule' means proof from a bad search cannot be used at trial. Weeks made it, for federal courts. The rule is the remedy that makes the right real.
Which case made the exclusionary rule bind STATE police?
The answer: Mapp v. Ohio
Why: Mapp v. Ohio took the rule to the states in 1961, through the Fourteenth Amendment. That is the step that reaches the police most people meet.
Police question a person they are holding, with no warning given. What happens to the answers?
The answer: They cannot be used to prove guilt
Why: Miranda means the warning comes first when you are held and asked questions. No warning? Then what you said in that room cannot be used to prove your guilt.
Separate was never equal
Three cases tell the story of school segregation in law — the promise that built it, the crack in the wall, and the ruling that brought it down.
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The Court upheld a Louisiana law that forced Black and white riders into separate train cars. The promise was 'separate but equal': a state could divide people by race, so long as the divided things were equal. They never were. For almost sixty years, that promise was the legal floor under Jim Crow.
Mendez v. Westminster (1947). Not a Supreme Court case — a federal appeals court in California, seven years ahead of Brown. Districts there put children of Mexican descent in separate schools. The Mendez family and four others sued, and won. The state then repealed its school segregation laws. The governor who signed that repeal, Earl Warren, would later write Brown as Chief Justice.
Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Every justice agreed, in one of the most read lines in American law: separate schools are 'inherently unequal' — unequal by their very nature. The equal half of Plessy's promise had never come. Brown said the promise itself was the harm. In public schools, Plessy was done.
The story did not end in 1954. The fight to make Brown real took decades, and this module does not cover it here. But the legal floor under 'separate but equal' was gone. It has not come back.
Before you turn the page
What did Plessy v. Ferguson allow?
What makes Mendez v. Westminster different from the other cases in this module?
What did Brown v. Board of Education hold about separate public schools?
Trying to recall a thing before you read it again is what makes it stick. That is why the question is here.
Nothing is scored. Nothing is saved. No one sees your answer, and there is no account to make.