Zinn project day 3
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Howard Zinn was a historian and author born in 1922 who wrote A People's History of the United States challenging standard narratives. He participated in WWII bombings that killed civilians. In 2004, he published Voices of a People's History with primary sources. The Zinn Education Project was later launched using A People's History in classrooms. Mendez v. Westminster in 1946 challenged school segregation in California, ruling it unconstitutional and influencing Brown v. Board of Education.
Zinn project day 3
- 1. Howard Zinn 1922-2010 EDSS 620 Summer 2013
- 2. Biographical Notes • Zinn was born to a Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn • Zinn joined the Army Air Force during World War II and was assigned as a bombardier in the 490th Bombardment Group. Zinn later learned that the aerial bombing attacks in which he participated had killed more than 1000 French civilians as well as some German soldiers hiding near Royan to await the war's end. • Before and during his tenure as a political science professor at Boston University from 1964 to 1988 he wrote more than 20 books, which included his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States. • In the years since the first edition of A People's History was published in 1980, it has been used as an alternative to standard textbooks in many high school and college history courses.
- 3. The Zinn Project • In 2004, Zinn published Voices of a People's History of the United States with Anthony Arnove. Voices is a sourcebook of speeches, articles, essays, poetry and song lyrics by the people themselves whose stories are told in A People's History. • In 2008, the Zinn Education Project was launched to support educators using A People's History of the United States as a source for middle and high school history. • The Project was started when a former student of Zinn, who wanted to bring Zinn's lessons to students around the country, provided the financial backing to allow two other organizations, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change to coordinate the Project. The Project hosts a website that has over 100 free downloadable lesson plans to complement A People's History of the United States. http://www.rethinkingschools.org/index.shtml http://www.teachingforchange.org/
- 4. History • “History isn't what happened, but a story of what happened. And there are always different versions, different stories, about the same events.” • -http://www.historyisaweapon.com/
- 7. A People’s History of the American Empire http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
- 10. United States History and New York History – Holt McDougal http://www.mrliotta.com/US%20HISTORY%20II/InteractiveStudyGuideBook.pdf
- 11. Brown vs. Board of Education • Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. • The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation, insofar as it applied to public education.
- 12. Brown vs. Board of Education • In 1951, a class action suit was filed against the Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. The plaintiffs were thirteen Topeka parents on behalf of their twenty children. • The named plaintiff, Oliver L. Brown, was a parent, a welder in the shops of the Santa Fe Railroad, an assistant pastor at his local church, and an African American. • He was convinced to join the lawsuit by Charles Scott, attorney and a childhood friend. • Brown's daughter Linda, a third grader, had to walk six blocks to her school bus stop to ride to Monroe Elementary, her segregated black school one mile (1.6 km) away, while Sumner Elementary, a white school, was seven blocks from her house. • The District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, citing the U.S. Supreme Court precedent set in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), which had upheld a state law requiring "separate but equal" segregated facilities for blacks and whites in railway cars.
- 13. The Brown Family
- 14. Brown vs. Board of Education • The case of Brown v. Board of Education as heard before the Supreme Court combined five cases: Brown itself, Briggs v. Elliott (filed in South Carolina), Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (filed in Virginia), Gebhart v. Belton (filed in Delaware), and Bolling v. Sharpe (filed in Washington D.C.). • The two lead attorneys were Charles H. Houston and Thurgood Marshall, the architects of the NAACP's legal strategies. Marshall would later become the nation's first African American Supreme Court Justice.
- 15. Brown vs. Board of Education • Conference notes and draft decisions illustrate the division of opinions before the decision was issued. Justices Douglas, Black, Burton, and Minton were predisposed to overturn Plessy. • Fred M. Vinson noted that Congress had not issued desegregation legislation; Stanley F. Reed discussed incomplete cultural assimilation and states' rights and was inclined to the view that segregation worked to the benefit of the African-American community; Tom C. Clark wrote that "we had led the states on to think segregation is OK and we should let them work it out Felix Frankfurter and Robert H. Jackson disapproved of segregation, but were also opposed to judicial activism and expressed concerns about the proposed decision's enforceability. • After Vinson died in September 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren as Chief Justice. Warren had supported the integration of Mexican-American students in California school systems following Mendez v. Westminster.
- 16. Brown vs. Board of Education • Warren convened a meeting of the justices, and presented to them the simple argument that the only reason to sustain segregation was an honest belief in the inferiority of Negroes. Warren further submitted that the Court must overrule Plessy to maintain its legitimacy as an institution of liberty, and it must do so unanimously to avoid massive Southern resistance. He began to build a unanimous opinion.
- 17. Justice Thurgood Marshall Justice Earl Warren
- 18. Mendez v. Westminster • Mendez, et al v. Westminster School District, et al, was a 1946 federal court case that challenged racial segregation in Orange County, California schools. • In its ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, held that the segregation of Mexican and Mexican American students into separate "Mexican schools" was unconstitutional.
- 19. Mendez v. Westminster • Five Mexican-American fathers challenged the practice of school segregation in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. They claimed that their children, along with 5,000 other children of "Mexican" ancestry, were victims of unconstitutional discrimination by being forced to attend separate "schools for Mexicans" in the Westminster, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and El Modena school districts of Orange County.
- 20. Mendez v. Westminster • The ruling was found that the segregation practices violated the Fourteenth Amendment. • Governor Earl Warren of California, who would later become Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court and preside over Brown vs. Board of Education, signed into law the repeal of remaining segregationist provisions in the California statutes. • Several organizations joined the appellate case as *amicus curiae, including the NAACP, represented by Thurgood Marshall and Robert L. Carter.
- 21. Amicus Curiae • An amicus curiae (literally "friend of the court") is someone who is not a party to a case who offers information that bears on the case but that has not been solicited by any of the parties to assist a court. This may take the form of legal opinion, testimony or learned treatise (the amicus brief) and is a way to introduce concerns ensuring that the possibly broad legal effects of a court decision will not depend solely on the parties directly involved in the case.
- 22. Mendez v. Westminster • The Ninth Circuit ruled only on the narrow grounds: although California law provided for segregation of students, it did so only for "children of Chinese, Japanese or Mongolian parentage." Because "California law does not include the segregation of school children because of their Mexican blood," the ruling held that it was unlawful to segregate the Mexican children. • This was remedied in California later that same year, on June 14, 1947, when California Governor Earl Warren signed a law repealing the remaining school segregation statutes in the California Education Code. • Seven years later, in Brown v. Board of Education, Earl Warren, by then the Chief Justice of the United States, wrote the unanimous decision holding "separate but equal" schools to be unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.