Peter Irons begins Jim Crow's Children by quoting former slaves talking about the difficulties they faced trying to learn how to read. "If we told him we had been learnin' to read," "he would near beat the daylights out of us" one slave recalled. This book delves into the deepest of court battles between African Americans and their white counterparts who wanted nothing to do with them. Backed by Thurgood Marshall, the man who had won the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, African Americans were for the first time free to express themselves in any way they wanted. There were stringent laws here in the United States regarding African Americans until this decision, and it took many years after the decision before the racism started to fade away. Peter Iron’s look into history is one of passion and one of tribulation because of the black man. Iron’s is an American political activist, civil rights…show more content… Board of Education decision shaped our country. The Brown v. Board of Education was a group of five legal appeals that challenged the “separate but equal” basis for segregation in public schools. These cases occurred in Topeka, Kansas, Virginia with the Dorothy Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward, South Carolina with Briggs v. Clarendon County, Delaware with both Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart, and finally in the District of Columbia with Bolling v. Sharpe. On their own they did not make that much of a difference, but together they became something greater. The appeals reached the Supreme Court in 1954 and the judges came to a landmark decision declaring that state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. This decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation. These court cases were the cornerstones of Iron’s book, with each case taking up their own