History Of School Desegregation

School Desegregation

The most pivotal Supreme Court decision launching the modern civil rights movement was the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In 1954, the U. S. Supreme Court rejected the “separate but equal” laws that had been used 1850. Chief Justice Earl Warren said “ to segregate school children from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their states in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone” (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954). The struggle for integrated schools has gone through a number of phases since the 1954 decision and has been shaped both “for” and “against” by various
Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to surround Little Rock all-white Central High School and prevent nine black students from entering. Twenty-two days later Daisy Bates, an official of the NAACP, led the nine children into the school with the help of federal troops sent by President Eisenhower. These kids later became known as The Little Rock Nine. At the end of the year Earnest Green became the first African American to graduate form that school. In the fall of 1958, before schools opened, Faubus closed all Little Rock’s public high schools rather than proceed with desegregation. A county in Virginia also abandon its whole public school system, leaving only private schools, which excluded African Americans kids. This action meant that most African Americans kids were locked out of schools for several years, until the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. These were just a couple of extreme tactics counties tried to implement. They were partially successful, after a decade only 2 percent of African Americans children in the Deep South attended integrated schools. In 1966, the Fifth Circuit Court ordered school districts no only to end segregation but to “undo the harm” segregation had caused by racially balancing their schools under federal guidelines. The decision of Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, in 1968, required
Charlotte-Mecklenburg board of Education, launched one of the largest urban desegregation plans, court-ordered busing. African American kids would be bussed to White schools even if it were across town in efforts to integrate schools. Busing was widely attacked some saying it undermined the sanctity of the neighborhood schools, other people just didn’t want African American children anywhere around their kids. President Nixon even joined the attack on “busing” by asking Congress to ban it. Court-ordered busing actually worked especially in the south where school districts are often