30 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
refused to act. A disgusted Roy Wilkins concluded that ‘President
Eisenhower was a fine general and a good, decent man, but if he had fought
World War II the way he fought for civil rights, we would all be speaking
German today.’
In Louisiana, governor Jimmy Davis vowed to go to jail before black
children entered white schools in New Orleans. Nevertheless, in November
1960, 6-year-old Ruby Bridges was escorted to the William Frantz
Elementary School by armed US marshals. As she ascended the school’s
steps, housewives and teenagers chanted and spat at her, shook their fists,
threw eggs, and waved a baby-sized coffin containing a black doll. ‘You
wanna be white?’ one woman screamed at Ruby. ‘We’ll make you white!
We’re gonna throw acid in your face!’ Angry parents scurried into the
building to withdraw their children. When the other teachers refused to
teach Ruby, Barbara Henry, a young white teacher from Boston, made school
fun for her only pupil. To force Ruby to quit, her father, who had saved a
white soldier’s life in Korea, was fired from his job, and her grandparents
were forced off the land that they had sharecropped for twenty-five years.
Eventually, some parents decided that education mattered more than segre-
gation, and their children returned one-by-one to other classrooms. The next
year, Ruby entered a fully desegregated class, but her first-grade teacher had
been dismissed.
The Ruby Bridges story was the exception. Seven years after the Supreme
Court ordered the desegregation of public schools, not a single black student
sat next to a white one in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina.
Less than one-tenth of 1 per cent of students in Florida, Louisiana, North
Carolina, and Virginia attended desegregated schools. Arkansas and Tennessee
had less than 1 per cent. At this rate, it would take the South 1,288 years
to desegregate. In 1964, the Supreme Court finally acted. It canceled the
decade-old order for ‘all deliberate speed’ and insisted that segregated school
systems be merged ‘forthwith.’
Some scholars have downplayed the importance of the Browndecision.
The civil rights movement, critics point out, began much earlier, with NAACP
lawyers winning important legal victories for forty years before Brown.
Moreover, the ruling sidestepped fundamental questions of school financing,
which seemed more closely related to student performance than desegrega-
tion. The decision also did not touch de facto segregation, which became
ever more pronounced in the North as black southerners migrated above the
Mason-Dixon line. In fact, the mandate for desegregated schools oftentimes
produced the opposite effect as whites fled to suburbia, leaving behind
poorly funded, resegregated city schools. Nor did the decision declare that
state-sponsored racism was illegal in all areas of American life, such as vot-
ing, housing, and interracial marriage.Bridges, Ruby(1955– ):
Integrated New Orleans
public schools.