Public Reaction to the Brown Supreme Court Decision

On May 17, 1954, Thurgood Marshall won the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In a landmark verdict, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down segregation in schooling as an unconstitutional violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. That was step number 1. The next step, getting people to accept Step 1, was harder.

Official reaction to the ruling was mixed. In Kansas and Oklahoma, state officials said they expected segregation to end with little trouble, but in Texas, the governor warned that plans might “take Years” to work out. In Mississippi and Georgia, officials vowed total resistance. Within a year, more than 500 school districts had desegregated their classrooms, and black and white students sat side by side for the first time in history. However, in many areas where African Americans were a majority, whites resisted desegregation. In order to speed things up, the Supreme Court handed down a second ruling in 1955, known as Brown II, that ordered school desegregation implemented “with all deliberate speed.”

In 1948, Arkansas had become the first Southern state to admit African Americans to state universities without being required by a court order. The citizens of Little Rock had elected two men to the school board who publicly backed desegregation.

However, Governor Orval Faubus publicly supported segregation, and, in September 1957, order the National Guard to turn away the “Little Rock Nine,” nine African American students who had volunteered to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School. A federal judge ordered Faubus to let the students into school, and NAACP members called eight of the students and arranged to drive them to school.

The crisis in Little Rock forced Eisenhower to act. He placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal control and ordered a thousand paratroopers into the city.