Taking a Stand: Plessy v.

Ferguson

Bryce Pilkey, Cap Holley, Andrew Fowlkes

Junior Division Website

Process Paper Word Count: 471

Website Word Count: 1200

My group and I chose Plessy v. Ferguson for many reasons. The first reason is that our

teacher gave us a list of possible choices for the theme of Taking a Stand and we

decided on a couple of possible interests for the project. Then, we researched those

possible choices to see if there was a sufficient amount of information provided for

these possible themes. Then we realized that the most informative possible choice was

the court case of Plessy v. Ferguson because there was not only a lot of information

provided about this source, but there was also the possibility to be able to incorporate

more information that was related to Plessy v. Ferguson such as other court cases that

challenged the Separate but Equal doctrine.

My group and I conducted our research through many different approaches and

formats. One of the ways that we conducted our research was by looking for newspaper

articles written about the Plessy v. Ferguson court case and the stand that Plessy took.

We also looked on websites such as the Library of Congress and the New York Times

for quality content. We additionally used scholarly articles and educational websites to

conduct our research. Finally, we went on search bars such as Google and searched for

critical information using keywords. Furthermore, we looked for related cases and how

they were related to the theme.

My group selected our choice of presentation through the process of deduction. First,

we looked at the requirements for each possible choice of presentation and eliminated a

historical paper, a documentary, and a performance therefore leaving us with two

choices remaining. Then, we went deeper into the restrictions and looked at the

maximum amount for student composed words and we saw that there was a maximum
of 500 student composed words for an exhibit and 1,200 student composed words for a

website. Therefore, we decided to choose a website since that format would allow us to

go deeper with our explanation of our project and sources. Then we combined our

sources into one annotated bibliography and selected sources from that to use on our

project. When we had finished creating our project we got rid of the sources that we did

not use from our final annotated bibliography.

There are several reasons that our project is related to the NHD theme. First of all,

Homer Plessy took a stand against the separate but equal doctrine, which was a

doctrine stating that segregation was legal, but the facilities had to be equal in quality.

Also, the other court cases that we researched challenged segregation by taking a

stand in court. The theme of the entire project is take a stand and therefore since

Homer Plessy took a stand against the separate but equal doctrine my project is

related to the theme.