The 14th Amendment has been the law of the land since mid 19th century but sadly enough it had only been the theory and had hardly been enforced until some time through the civil rights movement. Alan Freeman took few of the most obvious and visible examples from some of the most famous Supreme Court cases and split them into two perspectives. We are offered a perpetrator's view and a victim's of the outcome of these cases to help us better understand the eminent need for Civil Rights movement and what factors influenced the changes that occurred in the second half of the 20th century.
In one perspective we are offered that it is probably a coincidence that no blacks had ever been elected for the office, and that a street closing is just a routine traffic control decision. And obviously from another perspective, one (victim) can imply that the street is closed to keep the black people out from where they are not supposed to be, and that the reason they had not been elected for the office is not a coincidence at all but might just have something to do with the color of their skin after all. One of the strongest arguments that had been used to disprove of all these statement had been that "You can't ask whites as a class to bear the responsibly for statistical disparities, unless you can prove the whites were purposely excluding blacks ) (p287).
Basically we can imply that the 14th amendment and other laws that stated "separate but equal" had been the laws on the books, but laws in action or rather the lack of laws in action had been totally absent from social reality of black people. The second half of the 20th century can be classified into four completely different eras. During the first era of uncertainty, which lasted through 1954-65, the case of Brown vs. Board of Education played a major role in what was the very beginning of the end to segregation. The Supreme Court finally acknowledged that school segregation was completely unconstitutional.
