On The Bus To Israeli Apartheid
In 1896 the United States Supreme Court handed down one of its most shameful decisions, in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, rejecting the argument that the segregation between whites and blacks on trains in the state of Louisiana violated the principle of equality.
“We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument,” the court wrote in words that today are considered to be one of the most embarrassing moments in U.S. judicial history, “to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”
The U.S. Supreme Court did not reject the notion that “separate but equal” can indeed be equal until more than half a century later. In the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, it ruled that racial segregation in public schools violated the principle of equality before the law.
It took another two years before the change came to public transportation in the United States. On December 1, 1955, a black woman named Rosa Parks was arrested after refusing to give up her seat in the “colored” section of a crowded public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, to a white passenger. The incident was the catalyst for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a formative event of the U.S. civil rights movement. It led to the Supreme Court’s 1956 decision extending the prohibition of segregation to public transportation and thereby reversing its 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson.
MORE...
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/on-the-bus-to-israeli-apartheid.premium-1.507282
= new reply since forum marked as read
