The American Nation A History of the United States, Combined Volume (14th Edition)

Blacks Challenge Segregation 757

Angry jeers from whites rain down on Elizabeth Eckford, one of the first black students to arrive for registration at

Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. State troops turned black students away from the school until President

Eisenhower overruled the state decision and called in the National Guard to enforce integration.

thePlessydecision. “In the field of public education,

the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” he

declared. “Separate educational facilities are inher-

ently unequal.” The next year the Court ordered the

states to end segregation “with all deliberate speed.”

Flouting the Court’s decision, few districts in the

southern and border states integrated their schools.

As late as September 1956, barely 700 of the South’s

10,000 school districts had been desegregated.

White citizens’ councils dedicated to all-out

opposition sprang up throughout the South. When

the school board of Clinton, Tennessee, integrated

the local high school in September 1956, a mob

rioted in protest, shouting “Kill the niggers!” and

destroying the property of blacks. The school was

kept open with the help of the National Guard until

segregationists blew up the building with dynamite.

In Virginia the governor announced a plan for “mas-

sive resistance” to integration that denied state aid to

for one student,” the president of the University of
Oklahoma confessed when the Court, in 1948,
ordered Oklahoma to provide equal facilities. Two
years later, when Texas actually attempted to create
a separate law school for a single black applicant,
the Court ruled that truly equal education could
not be provided under such circumstances.
In 1953 President Eisenhower appointed
California’s Governor Earl Warren chief justice of the
U.S. Supreme Court. Convinced that the Court must
take the offensive in the cause of civil rights, Warren
succeeded in welding his associates into a unit on this
question. In 1954 an NAACP-sponsored case,
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, came up for
decision. Marshall submitted a mass of sociological
evidence to show that the mere fact of segregation
made equal education impossible and did serious psy-
chological damage to both black and white children.
Speaking for a unanimous Court, Warren reversed