LITLE ROCK

Escorted by United States troops, nine black students walk up the stairs to the main entrance of Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas, on the first full day of integration, September 25, 1957.

The fight for school integration had few supporters outside the black community. The NAACP aided parents who petitioned school boards to admit their children to the all-white schools, in compliance with the Brown decision, but the organization became the target of an extensive effort across the South to shut it down. In 1956 Alabama passed a state law effectively barring the NAACP from operating in that state; South Carolina barred NAACP members from state employment. Five other states enacted laws requiring the NAACP to register and to provide lists of members and contributors.

While such state action was often unconstitutional, the burden was on local NAACP branches to spend scarce resources in fighting to overturn these laws. In the meantime, the White Citizens Council (WCC), founded in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in 1956, organized local businessmen and civic leaders throughout the South. WCC chapters used economic reprisals and manipulation of the law in an effort to intimidate and undermine civil rights activists and supporters.

Southern obstructionists met their first major setback in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1957 a group of local parents, working with NAACP leader Daisy Bates, succeeded in winning a court order mandating the admission of black students to Central High School. Governor Orval Faubus employed the National Guard to block the admission of the nine men and women selected to attend Central High. The governor's bold defiance of the federal courts compelled President Eisenhower, who was no supporter of school integration, to send in army troops and federalize the Arkansas National Guard in order to ensure peaceful compliance with the court order. After the school year ended, the governor closed the public schools to avoid further integration.

From 1957 to 1959 public schools in Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, closed rather than obey desegregation orders. In New Orleans, when public schools admitted four young black girls to the first grade, whites in the city rioted.