Reaction Post

Arguments For Integration

Dom brought in some really powerful religious arguments. He used scripture like "there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free" to show we shouldn't be divided under Christ. He also mentioned the golden rule as this universal ethical principle and really hammered home how segregation goes against Christian teachings about justice and equality. His whole point was that segregation violates both the 14th Amendment and basic human dignity.

Nathan had this memorable line: "separate has never been equal." He talked about how Black schools had terrible funding and resources while white schools had everything they needed. What really stood out to me was when he said that tradition once defended slavery and denied women the right to vote, but America succeeds when we learn from the past instead of repeating it. He brought up the psychological harm segregation causes and called for the court to actually uphold constitutional values of equality and justice.

Lucas took an economic approach which was really interesting. He asked "what kind of citizens are we raising?" and talked about how segregation costs the economy billions annually because we're literally wasting human capital. He argued that education is the gateway to economic citizenship, and by providing inferior schools, states are basically sending Black children into economic exile before they even have a chance. The point about how segregation brands children as "unworthy" and "unmarketable" really stuck with me - that stigma follows them into every job interview and loan application for the rest of their lives.

Ben focused on the constitutional problems and brought up previous cases like Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma. He explained how those cases showed that equality in education isn't just about buildings or books - it's about interaction, shared experiences, and equal access to every part of school life. His argument was that segregation itself creates inequality that can't be fixed by just making facilities equal. The 14th Amendment was created to dismantle state-imposed caste systems, and that's exactly what segregation is.

Arguments For Segregation

Andrew argued that the framers of the 14th Amendment never intended to mandate racial integration in schools. He talked about education being a state issue and said the court should uphold Kansas' system based on existing legal precedents and the 10th Amendment.

Graham focused on historical and cultural traditions, saying separate schooling has been established for over a century. He emphasized that these systems have value in maintaining social continuity and community identity, and changing them would be disruptive to long-standing traditions.

Leo brought in biblical principles and talked about respecting individuals and being careful before changing laws. He advocated for maintaining separate schools while keeping facilities equal, arguing it serves both legal and moral purposes.

Christian took a practical approach, focusing on the responsibilities of state and local governments and the costs of immediate integration. He advocated for a gradual approach to protect community stability, employment, and funding for education.

Matt emphasized the legal framework and local control. He argued that the law doesn't mandate social mixing and that separate but equal facilities can meet constitutional standards. He was worried about the negative consequences of forced integration.

My Thoughts

Honestly, I thought everyone did a great job stating their arguments and staying on track with their cases. People pulled different quotes and really backed up their points with facts. It was interesting to see how passionate everyone got about their assigned positions, even though we all know how this case actually turned out in real history. The exercise really made me think about how these arguments were actually made back then and how much was at stake in this decision.

AI Disclosure: I used Claude AI only to help me form all my notes I took on my classmates presentations, into a formal blog post. This really helped me to make it sound a little more professional and easier to understand and read.

Reconstruction Reflection

Reflections on Reconstruction: The Struggle for True Freedom

The presentations on Reconstruction-era America revealed a troubling pattern: how legal freedom can exist without genuine equality. Between 1865 and 1866, southern states passed Black Codes that stripped newly freed African Americans of basic rights. These laws prevented Black citizens from traveling freely, owning firearms, or voting, ensuring they remained at society's bottom despite emancipation. This period demonstrated that ending slavery was only the first step toward justice—legal freedom without equality remained incomplete.

The response to Reconstruction came from various directions. Carpetbaggers—northerners who moved south carrying cheap bags—arrived with mixed intentions. While some genuinely wanted to rebuild and heal the war-torn region, others sought to exploit cheap land opportunities. Many worked alongside freedmen and southern Republicans, passing important civil rights legislation, yet they became controversial symbols of northern control in the eyes of white southerners.

Resistance to Black equality manifested violently through the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1865 by former Confederate soldiers. What began as a secret social club quickly became a terrorist organization using fear, threats, and violence against African Americans and their supporters to restore white supremacy throughout the South.

Lynching emerged as the most horrific tool of racial terror, peaking between the 1880s and 1930s with over 4,000 documented Black victims. These public murders enforced racial hierarchy, supported Jim Crow laws, and forced Black migration northward. Community participation in these atrocities was disturbingly common, yet offenders were rarely prosecuted, leaving lasting trauma across generations.

The assassination of President Lincoln on April 14, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre removed a potentially crucial voice for reconciliation. Meanwhile, anti-miscegenation laws banned interracial marriage in thirty states, preserving white supremacy through legal racism until the landmark Loving v. Virginia case finally struck them down, though its legacy lingered.

These presentations powerfully illustrated how systematic oppression replaced slavery, creating obstacles that would take another century to begin dismantling.

AI Disclosure: This blog post was created with the assistance of Claude, an AI assistant by Anthropic. The content was notes were written by me and assisted by Claude to Create a blog post.

Final Presentation Blog Post

Monday, December 8, 2025

The Hidden Skills You're Building in Every Class

Every day in the classroom, you're developing valuable skills that extend far beyond your grades. From mock trials to class discussions, these experiences are shaping your professional future in ways you might not realize.

Mock Trials Build Real-World Confidence

Participating in a mock trial teaches you more than just legal procedure. You're developing critical thinking by constructing arguments from evidence and anticipating counterarguments. The public speaking experience builds confidence that translates directly to job interviews and business presentations. Perhaps most importantly, you learn that thorough preparation makes all the difference between a mediocre performance and an excellent one.

Presentations Sharpen Communication

Class presentations force you to organize information clearly and manage your time effectively. You develop audience awareness, learning to read the room and adjust your delivery based on reactions. Handling questions on the spot teaches you to think quickly and respond thoughtfully under pressure. These communication skills are exactly what employers look for in candidates.

Note-Taking and Discussions Develop Active Engagement

Taking notes isn't passive transcription. It's active listening, where you filter important information in real-time and synthesize complex ideas into key concepts. Class discussions teach you to articulate thoughts clearly, build on others' ideas, and practice respectful disagreement. Every time you speak up, you're building intellectual courage.

Your Classroom is a Training Ground

These everyday classroom activities are preparing you for success in ways that extend far beyond any single test or assignment. You're building transferable skills that will serve you throughout your career and life.

What Cinema Teaches Us About Free Speech

Watching In the Heat of the Night and Gone with the Wind revealed how media both reflects and shapes our understanding of freedom. In the Heat of the Night showed us how racial hierarchy in the Jim Crow South fundamentally restricted freedom of expression for Black Americans. The iconic "They call me MISTER Tibbs!" scene wasn't just about respect—it was about claiming the right to speak with authority in a system designed to silence.

Gone with the Wind presented a different lesson: how popular media functions as powerful political speech that shapes historical narratives for generations. The film demonstrates the distinction between legal protection of speech (the First Amendment protects even problematic expression) and our cultural responsibility to critically examine influential narratives that distort history.

Historical Lessons: From Plessy to Reconstruction

Our blog posts traced the evolution of constitutional rights through pivotal moments in American history. Writing about Homer Plessy's constitutional challenge and the Reconstruction era taught us that constitutional rights are only as strong as courts' willingness to enforce them—judicial interpretation can undermine or preserve freedoms for generations.

We learned that freedom of speech, press, and assembly are essential tools for marginalized groups to claim citizenship and political power. But these protections mean little without federal enforcement and political will to defend them against violent suppression, as the rollback of Reconstruction tragically demonstrated.

Studying Lydia Maria Child's abolitionist work showed us that exercising free speech on controversial issues often comes with severe personal and professional costs. Marginalized groups used writing and publishing to claim political voice when formal rights were denied, demonstrating that strategic litigation and public advocacy serve as powerful forms of political resistance and social change.

Learning to Work With AI: New Skills for Understanding Freedom

This class also pushed us into new technological territory by using AI to create informational videos about First Amendment principles. This experience taught us skills that extended far beyond technical know-how:

Critical Evaluation Matters More Than Ever
We learned to assess whether AI-generated content was accurate and appropriate, especially

We learned to assess whether AI-generated content was accurate and appropriate, especially when dealing with complex legal concepts. This skill proved essential—AI can produce polished content that sounds authoritative but may contain subtle errors or oversimplifications.

The Art of Prompt Engineering
Crafting clear instructions and refining our prompts to get better results became a valuable skill. We discovered that the quality of what AI produces depends heavily on how well we communicate what we need.

Fact-Checking Is Non-Negotiable
Building skills in verifying AI-generated information against reliable sources became second nature. For constitutional law topics, accuracy isn't just academic—it's about understanding the foundations of our rights.

Creative Integration of Tools and Thinking
Perhaps most importantly, we learned to leverage AI as a tool while maintaining our own critical thinking about First Amendment principles. The technology accelerated our research and production workflows, but our analysis and understanding remained distinctly human.

Ethical Awareness in the AI Age
We developed understanding of appropriate AI usage in academic settings, including transparency about how we used these tools. Learning to treat AI as a collaborative partner rather than a replacement for our own work became a guiding principle

The Bigger Picture

These diverse learning experiences—from analyzing classic films to writing about constitutional history to experimenting with AI tools—all pointed toward a common truth: freedom of expression requires constant vigilance, courage, and critical thinking.

Whether it's Virgil Tibbs demanding to be called "Mister," Lydia Maria Child risking everything for abolition, or students today learning to navigate AI-generated information, the work of protecting and exercising free speech has never been passive. It demands that we think critically, verify carefully, speak courageously, and use every tool at our disposal—including new technologies—to advance understanding and justice.

The First Amendment protects our right to speak, but it's up to each generation to learn how to use that right wisely, responsibly, and effectively.

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AI Disclosure: This blog post was created with the assistance of Claude, an AI assistant by Anthropic. The content was generated based on educational concepts about classroom learning and skill development.

Video Reaction Post

Reconstruction and Beyond: Lessons from America's Pivotal Era

The presentations on post-Civil War America illuminated critical moments that shaped our nation's struggle for equality. Lincoln's assassination on April 14, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth fundamentally altered Reconstruction's trajectory. Lincoln had developed the moderate Ten Percent Plan, emphasizing forgiveness and reconciliation while advocating for African American voting rights in his final speech. Booth's motivation stemmed directly from Lincoln's commitment to Black suffrage. His successor, Andrew Johnson, a former slaveholder, initially promised to punish the South but ultimately issued pardons and allowed states to rejoin with minimal conditions, showing little interest in protecting newly freed people's rights.

The end of the Civil War brought freedom to four million formerly enslaved individuals, yet freedom didn't guarantee equality or economic independence. Sharecropping emerged as the dominant agricultural system, where landowners divided plantations into small plots of twenty to fifty acres. Black families and poor white farmers worked this land, receiving a share of crops in exchange for their labor while landowners provided land, housing, tools, and supplies, typically claiming half or more of the harvest. By 1870, only 30,000 African Americans in the South owned land out of four million—a stark illustration of economic inequality.

Despite obstacles, the Reconstruction era witnessed remarkable political transformation. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, while the 14th and 15th Amendments enabled political participation. The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, prohibited voting discrimination based on race, allowing Black men to register en masse. Black voter registration surged throughout the South, sometimes surpassing white registration.

However, persistent Jim Crow laws, racial violence, and economic hardship eventually triggered the Great Migration between 1916 and 1970. Six million African Americans relocated from the rural South to urban centers in the North and West, seeking opportunities created by northern industries during World War I. This movement transformed African American communities into vibrant cultural and political centers, fundamentally reshaping American society and continuing the ongoing quest for genuine equality. 

AI Disclose: I use Claude AI to draft me a blog post with all my notes I took from the Videos. I then went through my blog post and made sure Claude put in the right information and gave me a more in depth post.

EOTO Reaction post

Reflections on EOTO Presentations

The presentations on Reconstruction-era America revealed a troubling pattern: how legal freedom can exist without genuine equality. Between 1865 and 1866, southern states passed Black Codes that stripped newly freed African Americans of basic rights.

These laws prevented Black citizens from traveling freely, owning firearms, or voting, ensuring they remained at society's bottom despite emancipation. This period demonstrated that ending slavery was only the first step toward justice—legal freedom without equality remained incomplete.

The response to Reconstruction came from various directions. Carpetbaggers—northerners who moved south carrying cheap bags—arrived with mixed intentions. While some genuinely wanted to rebuild and heal the war-torn region, others sought to exploit cheap land opportunities. Many worked alongside freedmen and southern Republicans, passing important civil rights legislation, yet they became controversial symbols of northern control in the eyes of white southerners.

Resistance to Black equality manifested violently through the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1865 by former Confederate soldiers. What began as a secret social club quickly became a terrorist organization using fear, threats, and violence against African Americans and their supporters to restore white supremacy throughout the South.

Lynching emerged as the most horrific tool of racial terror, peaking between the 1880s and 1930s with over 4,000 documented Black victims. These public murders enforced racial hierarchy, supported Jim Crow laws, and forced Black migration northward. Community participation in these atrocities was disturbingly common, yet offenders were rarely prosecuted, leaving lasting trauma across generations.

The assassination of President Lincoln on April 14, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre removed a potentially crucial voice for reconciliation. Meanwhile, anti-miscegenation laws banned interracial marriage in thirty states, preserving white supremacy through legal racism until the landmark Loving v. Virginia case finally struck them down, though its legacy lingered.

These presentations powerfully illustrated how systematic oppression replaced slavery, creating obstacles that would take another century to begin dismantling.

AI Disclose: I use Claude AI to draft me a blog post with all my notes I took from the EOTO presentations. I then went through my blog post and made sure Claude put in the right information and gave me a more in depth post.

Plessy v. Ferguson

 

The Constitutional Case Against Segregation: Defending Homer Plessy in 1896

In 1896, a landmark case reached the Supreme Court that would define American race relations for generations. Homer Plessy, a Louisiana citizen, challenged the state's Separate Car Act of 1890, arguing that this segregation law violated the very foundation of American constitutional liberty. His legal team presented compelling arguments that exposed the Act as nothing more than a badge of inferiority stamped upon an entire race—a clear violation of both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

The Thirteenth Amendment argument struck at the heart of what freedom truly meant. This amendment did not merely end the physical chains of slavery; it abolished the institution entirely, including all badges and incidents of servitude. The segregation law perpetuated the very distinctions that slavery had created, marking one race as unfit to associate with another. This represented involuntary servitude in a disturbing new form—compelled separation and legally mandated inequality that transformed constitutional freedom into second-class citizenship.

The Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause provided even stronger grounds for challenging Louisiana's law. The Supreme Court had already established crucial precedent in Strauder v. West Virginia in 1880, recognizing that the Fourteenth Amendment specifically protects the colored race from discriminatory state laws. In Strauder, the Court ruled that excluding Black citizens from jury service violated equal protection because it implied their inferiority and denied them equal standing before the law.

The Separate Car Act operated on identical discriminatory principles. It told Homer Plessy that despite purchasing a first-class ticket and conducting himself as any gentleman would, he must be removed from his seat—not for his behavior or any legitimate reason, but solely because of his ancestry. Like the jury exclusion struck down in Strauder, this law explicitly discriminated based on race.

Louisiana's claim that the law treated both races equally was demonstrably false. Everyone understood its true purpose: to exclude colored people from white coaches, not to protect Black passengers from white intrusion. The stigma fell entirely on one race. The law itself declared that association with colored persons was something from which white citizens needed protection—the very definition of a badge of inferiority that the Constitution prohibits.

The Strauder decision had declared that the Fourteenth Amendment prevents "discriminations which are steps towards reducing them to the condition of a subject race." The Separate Car Act did precisely this, reducing citizens like Ples
sy to subjects who could be ordered about and told where to sit at the whim of a conductor enforcing Louisiana's discriminatory mandate.

Perhaps most troubling was the precedent this case would set. If states could segregate railway cars, what would prevent them from segregating courtrooms, restaurants, theaters, and every public space? The logic of "separate but equal" proved boundless in its potential for oppression.

Homer Plessy's case represented more than one man's right to sit in a train car. It challenged whether America would honor its constitutional promise of equal protection under law or permit states to construct elaborate legal caste systems under the pretense of equality. The Constitution demanded better—it guaranteed freedom from the badges of slavery and equal protection for all citizens, regardless of race.

AI Disclose: I use Claude AI to draft me a blog post with all my script that claude made for me. I then went through my blog post and made sure Claude put in the right information and gave me a more in depth post.

Reconstruction video reflection

 

The Broken Promise of Reconstruction

The Charleston church massacre serves as a haunting reminder of America's long history of white terror, its roots embedded deeply in the Reconstruction era. This period was one of extraordinary excitement and hope for newly freed slaves, yet looking back, they couldn't have known the cliff they were heading toward.

When Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865, it marked the Civil War's end and the beginning of emancipation. The slaves themselves had been instrumental in this transformation, finding safe havens and converting Americans, including Abraham Lincoln, to their cause. In his final speech before assassination, Lincoln advocated that some black men—particularly veterans and the educated—deserved voting rights. Their hopes were far greater than what history would deliver.

The aftermath brought both promise and heartbreak. Freed people desperately searched for family members torn away during slavery, placing newspaper ads that revealed the war's devastating human toll. Hours after Lincoln's death, Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency, and Reconstruction's trajectory shifted dramatically. While the Republican Party championed civil rights and became the party of African Americans, Johnson—a Southern Democrat—had different priorities rooted in the planter class mentality.

True freedom required land ownership, and the Freedmen's Bureau under Howard faced the monumental task of transforming Southern society. They distributed forty-acre land plots and established courts to ensure fair treatment. Many believed this was the blueprint for successful Reconstruction.

It didn't last. Johnson systematically undermined these efforts, pardoning former Confederates who quickly reclaimed power and seized land back from the Freedmen's Bureau. He believed he could handle Reconstruction before Congress reconvened, keeping the black population under control through new state governments.

The three years following the Civil War became some of history's most violent. One hundred years after emancipation, Black Americans were still fighting for the basic rights that Reconstruction had promised but catastrophically failed to deliver.

AI Disclose: I use Claude AI to draft me a blog post with all my notes i took from the reconstruction video. I then went through my blog post and made sure Claude put in the right information and gave me a more in depth post.