Tongue Tied Week 3

The three major groups of language minority who continue to be negatively impacted are the Native Americans, African Americans and Latinos. It started with the when the Europeans took over and began pre ssuring Native Americans to attend catholic school in the early 1500’s. However, after persevering there was slight progress in the 1930’s. But this did not last long, because after a few back and forth regressions and progression, after the Reagan era all opportunities to restore Native American Languages were diminished.

            The second major group of language minority who continue to suffer are the African American. During the time of slavery African Americans were cruelly mistreated. A large portion of African Americans lived in the southern states, however, the African Americans who lived in the northern states were better known as Freeborn African Americans. Even though, they lived a better life they were still segregated and treated less than the white Americans. African American struggled with obtaining a decent education and fought for their rights. After the Louisiana Law that required equal but separate accommodations, this was the beginning of racial segregation in public schools in 1896. By 1899 when Cumming vs. Richmond County Board of Education ruled against the demands to end secondary educations for whites since there was none for African Americans. This led to major differences between white education and African American Education. In 1908 a law prohibiting integrated classes in a private mixed-race college. After much fighting finally in 1969 the Supreme Court gave a ruling that 33 districts in Mississippi plan to desegregate.

            The third major and largest group of language minority who continue to suffer are the Latinos. Due to the hostility towards Puerto Rican by 1907 most schools provided only English speaking classes. A lot of teachers for Latino students did not care much about their education. Whether they learned or not if they were well behaved they would pass. The Bilingual Education Act was passed in 1968 because of the lack of good educations for Latino students. In 1974 there was a law that stated the violation of students civil rights, if they were not accommodated. In 1992 Puerto Rico finally declare its official languages as Spanish and English.