Racial integration in the context of "Town Planning"

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court which ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and hence are unconstitutional, even if the segregated facilities are presumed to be equal. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had held that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal" and was rejected in Brown based on the argument that separate facilities are inherently unequal. The Court's unanimous decision in Brown and its related cases paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement, and a model for many future impact litigation cases.

The case involved the public school system in Topeka, Kansas, which in 1951 had refused to enroll the daughter of local black resident Oliver Brown at the school closest to her home, instead requiring her to ride a bus to a segregated black school farther away. The Browns and twelve other local black families in similar situations filed a class-action lawsuit in U.S. federal court against the Topeka Board of Education, alleging its segregation policy was unconstitutional. A special three-judge court of the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas heard the case and ruled against the Browns, relying on the precedent of Plessy and its "separate but equal" doctrine. The Browns, represented by NAACP chief counsel Thurgood Marshall, appealed the ruling directly to the Supreme Court, who issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of the Browns. However, the decision's 14 pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second decision in Brown II (1955) only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed".

Desegregation is the process of ending the separation of two groups, usually referring to races. Desegregation is typically measured by the index of dissimilarity, allowing researchers to determine whether desegregation efforts are having impact on the settlement patterns of various groups. This is most commonly used in reference to the United States. Desegregation was long a focus of the American civil rights movement, both before and after the US Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, particularly desegregation of the school systems and the military. Racial integration of society was a closely related goal.

The Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments, known together as Pruitt–Igoe (/ˈpruːɪt ˈaɪɡoʊ/), were joint urban housing projects first occupied in 1954 in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. The complex of 33 eleven-story high rises was designed in the modernist architectural style by Minoru Yamasaki. At the time of opening, it was one of the largest public housing developments in the country. It was constructed with federal funds on the site of a former slum as part of the city's urban renewal program. Despite being legally integrated, it almost exclusively accommodated African Americans.

Although initially viewed as an improvement over the tenement housing it replaced, living conditions in Pruitt–Igoe began to deteriorate soon after completion. By the mid-1960s it was plagued by poor maintenance and crime, particularly vandalism and juvenile delinquency. Numerous initiatives to reverse the decline failed, and by 1970 more than two-thirds of the complex was vacant. Demolition of the complex began in 1972 with a televised implosion of several of the buildings. Over the next four years, the rest of the complex was vacated and demolished.

The Liberty Party was an abolitionist political party in the United States before the American Civil War. The party experienced its greatest activity during the 1840s, while remnants persisted as late as 1860. It supported James G. Birney in the presidential elections of 1840 and 1844. Others who attained prominence as leaders of the Liberty Party included Gerrit Smith, Salmon P. Chase, Henry Highland Garnet, Henry Bibb, and William Goodell. They attempted to work within the federal system created by the United States Constitution to diminish the political influence of the Slave Power and advance the cause of universal emancipation and an integrated, egalitarian society.

In the late 1830s, the antislavery movement in the United States was divided between Garrisonian abolitionists, who advocated nonresistance and anti-clericalism and opposed any involvement in electoral politics, and Anti-Garrisonians, who increasingly argued for the necessity of direct political action and the formation of an anti-slavery third party. At a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in May 1840, the Anti-Garrisonians broke away from the Old Organization to form the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. The New Organization included many political abolitionists who gathered in upstate New York to organize the Liberty Party ahead of the 1840 elections. They rejected the Garrisonian singular emphasis on moral suasion and asserted that abolitionists should oppose slavery by all available means, including by coordinating at the ballot box.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (/duːˈbɔɪs/ doo-BOYSS; February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American sociologist, writer, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist.

Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After completing graduate work at Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, Du Bois rose to national prominence as a leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of black civil rights activists seeking equal rights. Du Bois and his supporters opposed the Atlanta Compromise. Instead, Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought about by the African-American intellectual elite. He referred to this group as the talented tenth, a concept under the umbrella of racial uplift, and believed that African Americans needed the chance for advanced education to develop their leadership.

Berea College is a private liberal arts work college in Berea, Kentucky, United States. Founded in 1855, it was the first college in the Southern United States to be coeducational and racially integrated. It admitted non-White students from as early as 1866 until 1904, and again after 1954.

The college participates in federal work-study and work college programs that cover the remaining tuition fees after subtracting the total sum a student receives from Pell Grant, other grants, and scholarships. Most of the college's students come from southern Appalachia but students come from more than 40 states in the United States and 70 other countries. Approximately half of them identify as people of color.

The white genocide, white extinction, or white replacement conspiracy theory is a white nationalist conspiracy theory that claims there is a deliberate plot (often blamed on Jews) to cause the extinction of white people through forced assimilation, mass immigration, or violent genocide. It purports that this goal is advanced through the promotion of miscegenation, interracial marriage, mass non-white immigration, racial integration, low fertility rates, abortion, pornography, LGBTQ identities, governmental land-confiscation from whites, organised violence, and eliminationism in majority white countries. Under some theories, Black people, non-white Hispanics, East Asians, South Asians, Southeast Asians, and Arabs are blamed for the secret plot, but usually as more fertile immigrants, invaders, or violent aggressors, rather than as the masterminds. A related, but distinct, conspiracy theory is the Great Replacement theory.

White genocide is a political myth based on pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and ethnic hatred, and is driven by a psychological panic often termed "white extinction anxiety". Objectively, white people are not dying out or facing extermination. The purpose of the conspiracy theory is to justify a commitment to a white nationalist agenda in support of calls to violence.

Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little, later el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz; May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965) was an African American revolutionary and human rights activist who founded Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI) and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). He was also a prominent figure during the civil rights movement until his assassination by members of the Nation of Islam (NOI) in 1965. A spokesman and minister for the Nation of Islam from 1952 until 1964, after which he left, he was a vocal advocate for Black empowerment and the promotion of Islam within the African American community. A controversial figure accused of preaching violence, Malcolm X is also a celebrated figure with Black people and Muslims worldwide for his pursuit of racial justice.

Malcolm spent his adolescence living in a series of foster homes and with various relatives, after his father's death and his mother's hospitalization. He committed various crimes, being sentenced to eight to ten years in prison in 1946 for larceny and burglary. In prison, he joined the Nation of Islam, adopting the name Malcolm X to symbolize his unknown African ancestral surname while discarding "the white slavemaster name of 'Little'", and after his parole in 1952, he quickly became one of the organization's most influential leaders. He was the public face of the organization for 12 years, advocating black empowerment and separation of black and white americans, as well as criticizing Martin Luther King Jr. and the mainstream civil rights movement for its emphasis on non-violence and racial integration. Malcolm X also expressed pride in some of the Nation's social welfare achievements, such as its free drug rehabilitation program. From the 1950s onward, Malcolm X was subjected to surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) is a public research university in Catonsville, Maryland, United States, named after Baltimore County. It had a fall 2025 enrollment of 13,530 students. In 2019, it had 61 undergraduate majors, over 92 graduate programs (38 master, 25 doctoral, and 29 graduate certificate programs) and the first university research park in Maryland. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity".

Established as a part of the University System of Maryland in 1966, the university became the first public college or university in Maryland to be inclusive of all races. UMBC has the fourth highest enrollment of the University System of Maryland, specializing in natural sciences and engineering, as well as programs in the liberal arts and social sciences. Its athletic teams are known as the UMBC Retrievers and participate in the America East Conference.