On May 17, 1954, in one of the most important court cases of American history, Oliver Brown won the right for his daughter to attend school with her friends. Not only her, but African American children across the United States now had the right to attend any school of their choosing. Segregation in schools had finally been declared illegal. The obvious next step was a plan for desegregation. The Supreme Court announced a year later that desegregation in schools should be put into action ‘with all deliberate speed.’ Because of the particular wording used, schools which were unsupportive of integration had no specific timezone by which they needed to be integrated, and so they put no effort into making it happen anytime soon. Many went against …show more content…
An example of this took place in Prince George’s County, Maryland. In the County’s version of the Freedom of Choice plan, children were automatically registered to the school they would have attended under the previous plan, and to change this the student’s parent had to request a transfer. This was not as simple as it should have been. The procedure for transferring was difficult to come by, and could only be done at certain periods. In the book A Long Day’s Journey Into the Light: School Desegregation in Prince George’s County, a member of the Fact Finding Committee created by the school board to devise strategies for and find problems with desegregation found fault in the actions taken towards desegregation immediately after Brown vs. …show more content…
A large number of schools stopped African American children from attending at all, refusing to acknowledge the new regulation. The most famous of these incidents was that of Arkansas Governor Orval Faubas, who brought in the Arkansas National Guard to block admittance of nine African American students who had enrolled in Little Rock’s Central High School. The students were denied entry for a month before President Dwight Eisenhower sent in U.S. Troops to protect them on their way into and out of the school. Another example came in the form of Prince Edward County, Virginia, shutting down its public schools altogether. White students continued their education in private schools while African American kids were left virtually without an education. This was not solved for years, until the Supreme Court finally ruled it