School desegregation in the 1950s

Legal and social movement to end separate schooling for white and nonwhite students

School desegregation during the 1950’s began to turn the United States away from a long history of racially unequal education.

By 1950, segregated schools had had a long history in the United States. In the decades after the Civil War, state and local governments, especially in the South, created separate institutions and facilities for white and nonwhite citizens. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation was constitutional. The Court stated that different races could legally be treated separately, as long as they were treated equally. Since the Court provided no way of measuring equality, this ruling essentially recognized all forms of segregation.

The Plessy ruling was quickly applied to schools. In 1899, the Supreme Court upheld a Georgia school board’s action to close a black high school and build two black elementary schools in its stead and then encourage the displaced black high school students to continue their educations in parochial schools. The Supreme Court did not interfere in the board’s refusal to allow the black students from attending the white high school, ruling that the entire issue was a state, not a federal, matter. In the 1908 case of Berea College v. Kentucky , the Court upheld a Kentucky law that mandated that no educational institution could provide instruction for blacks and whites unless classrooms for each race were at least twenty-five miles apart. As black populations grew outside of the South during the first half of the twentieth century, local governments and school boards outside of the South also segregated school systems.

Legal Challenges to Segregation

During the 1930’s, an attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) , Nathan Margold, devised a strategy for challenging school segregation. Margold recommended that the NAACP concentrate on legal attacks on the inequality of separate schools systems, rather than on the segregation itself. The NAACP established the Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF, often known as the “Legal Defense Fund”) to pursue this strategy.

At first, legal efforts under the direction of LDF attorney Thurgood Marshall concentrated on graduate and professional schools, on the grounds that exclusion from these white-only institutions usually left aspiring black students without any options at all, and therefore such exclusion could not claim the justification of “separate but equal.”

The beginning of the 1950’s saw two of the first major legal victories for school desegregation. Herman Sweatt, an African American living in Texas, had applied for admission to the prestigious University of Texas law school. When he was denied admission, he sued on the grounds that there was no Texas law school for black students. The state of Texas responded by setting up a new black law school in the basement of a petroleum company. Sweatt pressed his case for admission to the Supreme Court, which, in the case of Sweatt v. Painter (1950) , ruled in Sweatt’s favor. The Sweatt decision established that simply having separate law schools did not provide educational equality. In a second 1950 case, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education , the idea that separate physical facilities do not provide equal education was extended to professional schools in general. These two cases provided the legal foundation for school desegregation as the NAACP lawyers turned attention from higher education to primary and secondary schools.

The Brown Decision

In several cases around the nation, the NAACP backed African American families who were suing because state laws had forbidden their children to attend schools with white students, even when the white schools were closer and had better resources than black schools. The case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas went to the Supreme Court to test the legality of school segregation in all parts of the United States. The Brown case began in 1951 when the daughter of a minister in Kansas was refused entry to a local white school.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court, under the leadership of Chief JusticeEarl Warren , ruled that separate schools were inherently unequal and were subsequently illegal. This ruling is generally known as Brown I. One year later, on May 31, 1955, the Court issued a second ruling on the case, known as Brown II, which ordered local school boards to desegregate “with all deliberate speed” and handed over direction of school desegregation to lower federal courts.

Massive Resistance

The Brown decision made the segregation of public schools illegal, and it predictably met opposition. In 1955, a poll conducted by the Gallup Organization showed that school desegregation did have substantial support in many areas of the country. According to this poll, most Americans in the East, Midwest, and West were in favor of eliminating separate schooling for black and white students. However, in the South, where a majority of African Americans lived, 80 percent of respondents were opposed to the Brown ruling.

In 1956, Virginia senator Harry Byrd publicly called for massive resistance to the Brown order, and 101 southern senators and congressmen signed the Southern Manifesto, which declared that the Brown decision itself had been illegal. The term “massive resistance” quickly became a motto of many southern politicians, and the term came to be used as a label for the period in school desegregation from 1955 to the early 1960’s.

During 1956, the legislatures of South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia passed resolutions declaring that the Brown decision had no authority in their states. This was based on the doctrine of interposition, a pre-Civil War political theory that held that states could intervene to prevent the enforcement of federal policies that were in violation of states’ rights.

Several states passed laws to attempt to maintain dual school systems as long as possible. Some laws created standards for admission to white schools that virtually ensured no black students could enroll. Other laws gave permission to local authorities to close public schools that were being desegregated. The Virginia Assembly, for example, passed legislation authorizing the closing of any school that allowed blacks and whites to attend together. In 1959, the Prince Edward County school board in Virginia did shut down the entire school system for five years rather than allow black children to sit next to white children in the same classrooms. This kind of massive resistance often had great support from white populations. In New Orleans, Louisiana, where a federal judge had ordered white schools to admit African American pupils in 1956, the school board president conducted an opinion poll of parents. In this poll, 82 percent of white parents said that they would rather shut down the public schools than accept any integration.

Encouraged by the Brown decision, the NAACP mounted a legal offensive against the segregated schools that many state and local governments were so stubbornly defending. In Virginia alone, during a three-month period in 1956, the NAACP filed suits against local school boards in Arlington, Norfolk, Newport News, and Charlottesville. It became increasingly clear that enforcing the Supreme Court decision would not be easy. The most famous struggle to enforce the decision took place in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The Battle in Little Rock

Events in Little Rock put school desegregation on television and on the front pages of newspapers around the country. The crisis in Little Rock erupted in 1957. Shortly before the beginning of the school year, on August 27, the Little Rock’s Mothers League sought an injunction to halt plans for school integration. The injunction was granted by Pulaski County Chancellor Murray Reed, but it was rejected three days later by Federal District Judge Ronald Davies.

The enrollment of the African American students might have proceeded in a relatively peaceful manner if the governor had not used it for political advantage. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus was searching for political support to win a third term in office and decided that he could appeal to whites eager to preserve segregation. Faubus declared that he would not be able to maintain order if Central High School were integrated, and on September 2, he ordered the National Guard to surround the school.

The local NAACP organized the nine African American students slated to enroll in Central High to arrive in a group. They were met by National Guardsmen who turned the students away with bayonets. One of the students arrived after the others and was confronted by screaming segregationists. Television, which occupied a central place in most American homes by 1957, broadcast the scenes from Little Rock around the nation.

Alarmed by the developments in his city, on September 24, Little Rock mayor Woodrow Mann asked President Dwight D. Eisenhower for federal troops to maintain order. Eisenhower responded by sending one thousand troops of the 101st Airborne Division and placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal control. The troops escorted the nine students to the school each day. Many Americans were shocked to see that military protection was needed to protect the basic rights of citizens. Others were disturbed at what they believed was a federal military occupation of a state, reviving historical memories of the military occupation of the South during Reconstruction in the years following the Civil War.

On the opening of the 1958-1959 school year, Governor Faubus ordered Little Rock public schools closed, and white students enrolled in private schools or in other districts. On September 27, 1958, Little Rock residents voted on school integration and overwhelmingly rejected it. However, on June 18, 1959, a federal court declared that closing Little Rock’s public schools was unconstitutional. Little Rock schools opened one month early for the 1959-1960 school year and enrolled both African American and white students.

Impact

The legal decisions of the 1950’s, especially the Brown decision, laid the foundation for all desegregation efforts that would follow. The crisis at Little Rock and the period of “massive resistance” throughout the South brought school desegregation to the center of national attention. Although many schools continued to have majority white or majority African American student bodies, officially segregated schools were illegal by the end of the decade, and the nation began a long effort to achieve schools that were desegregated in practice.

Subsequent Events

The first part of the 1960’s continued the practice of open resistance to school desegregation by many state and local governments. This largely came to an end with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Under the first piece of legislation, the federal government acquired the power to cut off federal funds to any institution or organization engaging in racial discrimination. The Office of Civil Rights was charged with investigating school segregation, and the U.S. attorney general was given the authority to sue segregated school districts. The ESEA was the first successful major federal education bill, and it provided funding to school districts that spent money on desegregation.

Bibliography

Bankston, Carl L., III, and Stephen J. Caldas. A Troubled Dream: The Promise and Failure of School Desegregation in Louisiana. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002. A detailed study of school desegregation in one state. The first chapter provides information and statistics on segregated schools in 1950.

Bartley, Numan V. The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950’s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Originally published in 1969, this is a reprint of an excellent book on southern opposition to school desegregation.

Cottrol, Robert J., Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland B. Ware. Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003. Discusses the events leading to the historic decision and its consequences.

Rossell, Christine H. “The Evolution of School Desegregation Plans Since 1954.” In The End of Desegregation?, edited by Stephen J. Caldas and Carl L. Bankston III. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2003. Describes the changes in approaches to desegregation in the years following the Brown decision.