Seperate But Equal

Storyline

Seperate But Equal, This film follows the true story of the NAACP court court challenge of racial school segregation in the Brown vs. Board of Education. This was the struggle would destroy the legal validity for racial segregation in general and prove to be the start and the first major victory of the civil rights movement.

This Film Should Be Shown In All Schools!

, Sidney Poitier was the perfect actor to play Thurgood Marshall as an attorney for the NAACP in the fifties. Burt Lancaster gives a final performance but one of his best as legal legend, John W. Davis. The supporting cast is excellent. This mini series is about the legal process that can be long, tedious, and time consuming for years. This case starts off when a small town African American minister, teacher, and principal seeks a school bus for his students. When the superintendent blows off the request, the minister goes forward and seeks counsel. The minister and the plaintiffs experience hostility, threats, violence, and more hatred. This film has to be shown in schools to understand American history, a shameful chapter in history.

Separate but Equal is a great movie depicting the tragedy of the time of racial segregation in schools and the steps which these men from the NAACP took to correct it. The movie has great acting and intense speech emotion but sinks into the wordiness and vocabulary which lawyers and judges use and leaves the audience scratching their heads or reading the dictionary. Nevertheless, the movie has great speeches and facts as well as events suitable in a history-documentary. Great movie to sit by and try to teach yourself to be a lawyer.

The relatively peaceful correction through the legal process of an age old wrong is the United States of America at its very best. That is in fact what occurred in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954.

Looking back at that case 52 years later the most significant result of that decision was not in our domestic affairs, but in foreign policy. We were engaged in a Cold War at the time where we vying for the moral leadership of the world against the Soviet Union. If we had not put our own house in order, we would never have gotten any kind of support from any third world nations and never would have triumphed in the Cold War.

And it was all for want of a school bus. Black kids in rural Clarendon County, South Carolina had to walk miles to their designated school because the whites running the board of education of that county wouldn’t give them a bus. That was the start of the lawsuit that eventually found it’s way to the United States Supreme Court.

I suppose it is fitting that one black icon be playing the part of another in this film. Sidney Poitier is very good as Thurgood Marshall, the attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People who believed in the case and fought for it. And like the ending of a fairy tale, Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court where he won the case. But that’s later on in his life.

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