Jane Bond Moore most recent in long line of Civil Rights activists
Crystal Frank
Issue date: 1/23/06 Section: News
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Moore's speech entitled "Black, Brown, and Yellow, encounters with the constitution and school segregation" was prsented Feb. 14, in Weigand Gallery.
Moore speech touched on her own personal experiences with civil rights in the '60s and acknowledged court cases that focused on desegregation.
Moore's father taught at different black colleges; her family finally settled in Fort Valley, Ga. She decided to go to law school and become an attorney after having three children.
Moore mentioned that, in the '60s, there were only two school systems, all white and all black schools.
When Brown v. Board of Education was argued in 1954, Moore was skeptical about the Supreme Court abolishing segregation in public schools. With the help of National Association for the Advance of Colored People, the Supreme Court struck down the "separate but equal" policy under Plessey v. Ferguson for public education and required desegregation in schools across America.
However, the Supreme Court's decision did not rule out the desegregation in public facilities such as restaurants, restrooms, etc. Moore said that Brown v. Board of Education court case was a giant step towards complete desegregation in all public schools.
Moore brought other important cases in history such as Yick Wo v. Hopkins.
In Yick v. Hopkins, a San Francisco ordinance prohibited operating a laundry located in a wooden building without the consent of the Board of Supervisors; laundries in brick or stone buildings needed no approval. At the time, over 95 percent of the 320 laundries in the San Francisco were located in wooden buildings, and of these, two-thirds had Chinese owners.
The Board of Supervisors granted permission to operate laundries in wooden buildings to all but one of the non-Chinese owners, but none to the 200 Chinese applicants. Yick Wo, a Chinese alien who had operated a laundry in the city for many years, was refused a permit.
When he continued to run the business, he was arrested and convicted. The Supreme Court reversed the conviction, but not because the ordinance was biased.
The final court case Moore spoke about was Mendez v. Westminster School District of Orange County. The Mexican community claimed that their children and 5,000 other children of "Mexican and Latin descent" were victims of unconstitutional discrimination by being forced to attend separate "Mexican" schools in the Westminster, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, and El Modeno school districts of Orange County.
With the support of the NAACP, Judge Paul J. McCormick ruled in favor of Mendez and his co-plaintiffs on Feb. 18, 1946, and more than a year later, on April 14, 1947, McCormick's ruling was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal in San Francisco.
Moore concluded by emphasizing the right to vote because voting is an essential asset that Americans have been gifted with.