1. The Struggle over De-Segregated Education
Brown vs. Topeka/ Board of Education
Little Rock

2. Is education one of the most important Civil Rights?
An Important Question
Is education one of the most important Civil Rights?
Why?
Why not?

3. Learning Objectives and Success Criteria
To be able to explain why segregated education became a central issue in the struggle for civil rights.
To be able to evaluate causes and consequences of the struggle for equal education.
Examined source material on the issue of desegregated education.
Described the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case, evaluated its causes and consequences.
Explained the impact of Little Rock on the civil rights movement.
Created a glossary of key terms that may be useful to you.

4. What is happening in this source?

5. What is this source about?

6. What is going on in these sources?

7. What’s happening in this source?

8. Schools in the South
What do you think education would be like in the south?
What do you think some of the issues are with segregated education?
What issues may occur with de-segregating education in the south?

9. A landmark case in the History of Civil Rights
Brown vs. Topeka
A landmark case in the History of Civil Rights

10. What does this source claim is the problem with segregated education?
“Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system...”

11. Brown vs. Topeka/ Board of Education
Linda Brown wanted to go to a white school just down the road as opposed to a black school further away. The white schools were also much better funded than black schools.
June 1951: Linda’s father, Oliver, brought the case of Brown v. Topeka to state court.
Video:

12. Case Failed
Case rejected on grounds of Plessy vs. Ferguson. Supported by the NAACP, Brown took his case to the Supreme Court.
The NAACP was an organisation that existed to help change segregation and racism in the USA and had a legal fund to help cases come to court that many African-Americans otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford.

13. Case Succeeded
17th May 1954, Supreme Court ruled that all school segregation was ‘unconstitutional’ and had to be amended. Chief Justice Earl Warren announced that segregation in America’s school system was undermining black children with a ‘sense of inferiority that may affect their hearts and minds for the rest of their lives’.

14. Did education desegregate?
“We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”. The text of the decision of Brown vs. Topeka/Board of Education.

15. Did education desegregate?

16. Did education de-segregate?
Supreme Court did not give a date for de-segregation...
President Eisenhower refused to endorse the ruling fearing that school integration would cause civil unrest...
Membership of the KKK increased...
White Citizens Councils were set up in the South...
1956, Southern senators signed up to the ‘Southern Manifesto’...
May 1956, 350 school boards representing nine southern states had been desegregated...

17. School Segregation Still Not Happened
Little Rock
School Segregation Still Not Happened

18. September 1957
The school board belonging to the town of Little Rock, Arkansas, decided to test integration to see how the white community reacted.
Nine of the top black students were selected to attend Little Rock Central High School.
On the 4th September, 1957, it was agreed that the nine students would all travel there together, accompanied by their parents and church ministers.

19. Confronted by a mob and soldiers

20. Elizabeth Eckford
"I stood looking at the school— it looked so big! Just then the guards let some white students through. The crowd was quiet. I guess they were waiting to see what was going to happen. When I was able to steady my knees, I walked up to the guard who had let the white students in. He didn’t move. When I tried to squeeze past him, he raised his bayonet and then the other guards moved in and they raised their bayonets. They glared at me with a mean look and I was very frightened and didn’t know what to do. I turned around and the crowd came toward me. They moved closer and closer. Somebody started yelling, "Drag her over this tree! Let's take care of that nigger!'

21. Elizabeth Eckford
“They moved closer and closer. ... Somebody started yelling. ... I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the crowd—someone who maybe could help. I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me”.

22. Another report
"The crowd let out a roar of rage. 'They’ve gone in,” a man shouted....' Once the Little Rock Nine entered the school, they were separated. The mob infiltrated the school, and under threats of death, the nine were taken to the principal’s office. One of the nine overheard officials saying “We may have to let the mob have one of those kids, so’s we can distract them long enough to get the others out.”

23. Governor Orval Faubus
Governor of Little Rock, Orval Faubus, ordered the Arkansas National Guard (state troops) to ‘preserve the peace’ by blocking the African-American students from entering the building.
This made national and international news headlines.
They were prevented from entering the school until 23rd September 1957.
Martin Luther King told the president that if the federal government did not take a stand against the injustice it would “set the process of integration back fifty years. This is a great opportunity for you and the federal government to back up the longings and aspirations of millions of peoples of good will and make law and order a reality”. He said this in a telegram sent on the 9th September.

24. Little Rock Central High

25. Federal Troops and Eisenhower
On the 24th September, Eisenhower ordered federal troops (the US Army) to accompany the African-American children to school. He took control over the Arkansas National Guard and ordered them to protect the African-American students.
Eisenhower was well aware that this was becoming a national embarrassment and that the eyes of the world were on Little Rock.

26. Eisenhower’s Presidential Address
In the South, as elsewhere, citizens are keenly aware of the tremendous disservice that has been done to the people of Arkansas in the eyes of the nation, and that has been done to the nation in the eyes of the world... it would be difficult to exaggerate the harm that is being done to the prestige and influence, and indeed to the safety, of our nation and the world. Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation. We are portrayed as a violator of those standards of conduct which the peoples of the world united to proclaim in the Charter of the United Nations. There they affirmed "faith in fundamental human rights" and "in dignity and worth of the human person" and they did so "without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion."

27. Treatment of Students in Little Rock Central High
Was not good.
Minnijean Brown was taunted by members of a group of white male students in December 1957 in the school cafeteria during lunch. She dropped her lunch, a bowl of chili, onto the boys and was suspended for six days.
Melba Pattillo had acid thrown into her eyes and also recalled in her book, Warriors Don't Cry, an incident in which a group of white girls trapped her in a stall in the girls' washroom and attempted to burn her by dropping pieces of flaming paper on her from above.

28. Did Schools Desegregate?
Governor Faubus, for the next academic year, closed the four public schools so no black or white children could attend schools.
This year became known as the “Lost Year”.
The black children were blamed for this and it increased the level of hatred towards them when they returned to school.
Ernest Green was the first to graduate- in 1958

29. President Nixon and the Desegregation of Schools
A happy ending?

30. President Nixon
Nearly 15 years after Brown vs. Topeka/ Board of Education, President Nixon inherited a nation in which nearly 70% of black children in the South attended all-black schools.
By the end of 1970, that number was 18%.
By 1974, it had fallen to 8%.

31. The Delegation of Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon delegated the task of desegregating schools to his vice president, Spiro Agnew.
Spiro Agnew delegated this further down to committees for each area that worked on plans for their own area to desegregate.
Quietly, with little fuss or fanfare, schools in the USA were desegregated, having been given control over how to do it, whilst knowing that they had to do it.