The Road to Brown

47 minutes
Source: California Newsreel

This film tells the story of the legal campaign against segregation that launched the Civil Rights Movement. It is also a moving tribute to a visionary black lawyer, Charles Hamilton Houston, “the man who killed Jim Crow.” By guiding students through the world of segregation sanctioned by the 1896 Plessey v. Ferguson decision, the cases Houston waged during the 1930s, and the final triumph in 1954 of Brown v. Board of Education, this film provides a concise history of how African Americans struggled for full legal equality under the constitution.