The Civil Rights Movement :: African-American Civil Rights Movement

In the postwar years, the NAACPs legal strategy for civil rights continued tosucceed. Led by Thurgood marshal, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund challenged and tip-tilted many forms of discrimination, but their main thrust was equaleducational opportunities. For example, in Sweat v. Painter (1950), the SupremeCourt decided that the University of Texas had to integrate its law civilize.Marshall and the Defense Fund worked with Southern plaintiffs to challenge thePlessy doctrine directly, arguing in effect that separate was inherently unequal.The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on pentad cases that challenged elementary-and secondary-school segregation, and in May 1954 issued its landmark ruling in brownness v. Board of Education that stated that racially segregated education wasunconstitutional. White Southerners received the Brown decision first with shockand, in some instances, with expressions of goodwill. By 1955, however, whiteopposition in the South had grown into massive resis tance, a strategy to persuade all whites to resist compliance with the desegregation orders. It wasbelieved that if enough people refused to cooperate with the federal court order,it could not be enforced. Tactics included firing school employees who showedwillingness to seek integration, closing public schools rather thandesegregating, and boycotting all public education that was integrated. The White Citizens Council was formed and led opposition to school desegregation allover the South. The Citizens Council called for scotch coercion of blacks who favored integrated schools, such as firing them from jobs, and the creation ofprivate, all-white schools. Virtually no schools in the South were desegregatedin the first years aft(prenominal) the Brown decision. In Virginia one county did indeedclose its public schools. In short(p) Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, Governor OrvalFaubus defied a federal court order to lead nine black students to Central HighSchool, and President Dwight Eisen hower sent federal troops to enforcedesegregation. The event was covered by the national media, and the fate of theLittle Rock Nine, the students attempting to integrate the school, dramatizedthe seriousness of the school desegregation issue to many Americans. Althoughnot all school desegregation was as dramatic as in Little Rock, thedesegregation process did proceed-gradually. Frequently schools weredesegregated only in theory, because racially segregated neighborhoods led tosegregated schools. To overcome this problem, some school districts in the seventiestried busing students to schools outside of their neighborhoods. Asdesegregation progressed, the membership of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) grew.The KKK used violence or threats against anyone who was suspected of favoringdesegregation or black civil rights. Klan terror, including intimidation andmurder, was far-flung in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, though Klan