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

In the postwar years, the NAACPs legal strategy for well-behaved rights continued tosucceed. Led by Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund challenged and tip-tilted many forms of discrimination, but their main thrust was equal studyal opportunities. For example, in Sweat v. Painter (1950), the SupremeCourt decided that the University of Texas had to integrate its constabulary school.Marshall and the Defense Fund worked with sulfurern plaintiffs to challenge thePlessy doctrine directly, careen in effect that separate was inherently unequal.The U.S. Supreme Court comprehend arguments on five cases that challenged elementary-and secondary-school segregation, and in May 1954 issued its landmark ruling inBrown 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 large(p) i nto massive resistance, a strategy topersuade all whites to resist respect with the consolidation secerns. 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, resolution public schools rather thandesegregating, and boycotting all public education that was integrated. The White Citizens Council was organize and led opposition to school consolidation allover the South. The Citizens Council called for economic compulsion of blacks who favored integrated schools, such as firing them from jobs, and the creation ofprivate, all-white schools. some no schools in the South were desegregatedin the first years after the Brown decision. In Virginia one county did indeedclose its public schools. In Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, Governor OrvalFaubus defied a federal court order to admit nine black students to Central HighSchool, and President Dw ight Eisenhower direct federal troops to enforcedesegregation. The event was covered by the case 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. ofttimes schools weredesegregated only in theory, because racially segregated neighborhoods led tosegregated schools. To inhibit this problem, some school districts in the 1970stried 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 widespread in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, though Klan