Hayden Smith, University of Utah
Humanities
While serving as a full-time volunteer missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 2010-2012, I gained a new perspective of discrimination and racism in contemporary America. My mission was located in West Texas and East New Mexico. While living in this region, I came into contact with a much different setting then I had experienced growing up in Salt Lake City, Utah. I learned Spanish and worked very closely with the Latino and also the African American minority populations. This was compelling as I learned a great deal about the types of discrimination which minorities experienced in the United States. In Lubbock, TX in particular, I saw a very segregated community, as the city was still divided upon racial lines.
My study will begin by briefly analyzing how segregation was legally dismantled, yet remained socially in the period from Plessy v. Ferguson to Brown v. Board of Education. Brown v. Board served as the primary springboard for U.S. Civil Rights victories in the 1950s and 1960s. It also became the fulcrum for implementing proper laws and creating adequate social change to attack legal segregation at its core.
The next part of my analysis will analyze post-Brown v. Board educational segregation issues that the nation has faced. I will explore to what extent segregation has been reduced and eliminated. I will also focus my study on cases where anti-segregation laws have been ineffective in various locales of the nation. The end goal of my project is to discover where we stand as a nation in overcoming educational segregation and racism.