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Though the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. After a tense standoff, President Eisenhower deployed federal troops, and nine students-known as the “ Little Rock Nine”- were able to enter Central High School under armed guard. In one major example, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state National Guard to prevent Black students from attending high school in Little Rock in 1957. While Kansas and some other states acted in accordance with the verdict, many school and local officials in the South defied it. Though well intentioned, the Court’s actions effectively opened the door to local judicial and political evasion of desegregation. Board of Education II), which remanded future desegregation cases to lower federal courts and directed district courts and school boards to proceed with desegregation “with all deliberate speed.” In May 1955, the Court issued a second opinion in the case (known as Brown v. In its verdict, the Supreme Court did not specify how exactly schools should be integrated, but asked for further arguments about it. In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” as segregated schools are “inherently unequal.” As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being “deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.” Little Rock Nine Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, then governor of California.ĭisplaying considerable political skill and determination, the new chief justice succeeded in engineering a unanimous verdict against school segregation the following year. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand.
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Johnson would appoint Marshall as the first Black Supreme Court justice.)Īt first, the justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, with Chief Justice Fred M.
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(Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. When Brown’s case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v.
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