758 Chapter 28 Collision Courses, Abroad and at Home: 1946–1960
local school systems that wished to desegregate.
When the University of Alabama admitted a single
black woman in 1956, riots broke out. University
officials forced the student to withdraw temporarily
and then expelled her when she complained more
forcefully than they deemed proper.
President Eisenhower thought equality for blacks
could not be obtained by government edict. He said
that the Court’s ruling must be obeyed, but he did
little to discourage southern resistance to desegrega-
tion. “I am convinced that the Supreme Court deci-
sion set back progress in the South at least fifteen
years,” he remarked to one of his advisers. “The fel-
low who tries to tell me you can do these things by
force is just plain nuts.”
However, in 1957 events compelled him to act.
When the school board of Little Rock, Arkansas,
opened Central High School to a handful of black
students, the governor of the state, Orval M.
Faubus, called out the National Guard to prevent
them from entering the school. Unruly crowds
taunted the students and their parents. Eisenhower
could not ignore the direct flouting of federal
authority. After the mayor of Little Rock sent him a
telegram saying, in part, “situation is out of control
and police cannot disperse the mob,” Eisenhower
dispatched 1,000 paratroopers to Little Rock and
summoned 10,000 National Guardsmen to federal
duty, thus removing them from Faubus’s control.
The black students then began to attend class. A
token force of soldiers was stationed at Central
High for the entire school year to protect them.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,
Kansasatwww.myhistorylab.com
How did the civil rights movement change
American schools?atwww.myhistorylab.com
Direct Action Protests:
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
While Marshall and the NAACP were dismantling the
legal superstructure of segregation, its institutional
foundations remained. Blacks increasingly took action
on their own.
This change first came to national attention dur-
ing the Eisenhower administration in the rigidly seg-
regated city of Montgomery, Alabama. On Friday,
December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress at the
Montgomery Fair department store, boarded a bus
on her way home from her job. She dutifully took a
seat toward the rear as custom and law required. As
white workers and shoppers filled the forward section,
the driver ordered her to give up her place to a white
passenger. Parks, who was also secretary of the
WatchtheVideoReadtheDocumentMontgomery NAACP chapter, refused. She had
decided, she later recalled, that “I would have to
know once and for all what rights I had as a human
being and a citizen.”
She was arrested. Over the weekend,
Montgomery’s black leaders organized a boycott.
“Don’t ride the bus... Monday,” their mimeo-
graphed notice ran. “If you work, take a cab, or share
a ride, or walk.” Monday dawned bitterly cold, but
the boycott was a total success.
Most Montgomery blacks could not afford to
miss a single day’s wages, so the protracted struggle
to get to work was difficult to maintain. Black-
owned taxis reduced their rates sharply, and when
the city declared this illegal, car pools were quickly
organized. Few African Americans owned cars.
Although nearly everyone who did volunteered,
there were never more than 350 cars available to the
more than 10,000 people who needed rides to their
jobs and back every day. Nevertheless, the boycott
went on.
Late in February the Montgomery authorities
obtained indictments of 115 leaders of the boycott,
but this move backfired because it focused national
attention on the situation. A young clergyman, the
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was emerging as
the leader of the boycott. A gifted speaker, he
became an overnight celebrity. (See American
Lives, “Martin Luther King, Jr.,” p. 759 .) Money
poured in from all over the country to support the
movement. The boycott lasted for over a year.
Finally the Supreme Court declared the local law
enforcing racial separation unconstitutional:
Montgomery had to desegregate its public trans-
portation system.
This success encouraged blacks elsewhere in the
South to band together against segregation. A new
organization founded in 1957, the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), headed
by King, moved to the forefront of the civil rights
movement. Other organizations joined the struggle,
notably the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE),
which had been founded in 1942. The direct action
movement was becoming a broad-based nationwide
civil rights movement.The Election of 1960
As the end of his momentous second term
approached, Eisenhower somewhat reluctantly
endorsed Vice President Richard Nixon as the
Republican candidate to succeed him. Nixon had
originally skyrocketed to national prominence by
exploiting the public fear of communist subversion.
“Traitors in the high councils of our government,”