Vivica D. Smith Pierre

I was born just four years after Brown v. Board of Education (1958) in Los Angeles, California. I am a product of public education Post-Brown, attended public schools from about 1963 to 1976 for early childhood, elementary and secondary education with students from diverse race/ethnic and gender backgrounds.

The Transformative Worldview

Dred ScottIn the 1857Dred Scottcase, the United States Supreme Court ruled that slaves were not citizens of the United States. (RG 267, Washington DC)

Plessy v. Ferguson

1890, state of Louisiana the Supreme Court ruled “equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored, races”:

“Homer Adolph Plessy, the plaintiff in the case, was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black…On June 7, 1892, he purchased a first-class ticket for a trip between New Orleans and Covington, La., and took possession of a vacant seat in a white-only car. Duly arrested and imprisoned, Plessy was brought to trial in a New Orleans court and convicted of violating the 1890 law. He then filed a petition against the judge in that trial, Hon. John H. Ferguson, at the Louisiana Supreme Court, arguing that the segregation law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which forbids states from denying "to any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws," as well as the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery.

The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that while the object of the Fourteenth Amendment was to create "absolute equality of the two races before the law," such equality extended only so far as political and civil rights (e.g., voting and serving on juries), not "social rights. As Justice Henry Brown's opinion put it, "if one race be inferior to the other socially, the constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane." Furthermore, the Court held that the Thirteenth Amendment applied only to the imposition of slavery itself.”