Enforcing Brown in the Little Rock Crisis

In modern America no issue revealed more explicitly the compromise of aspirations than the desegregation of public schools. The Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education declared as a fundamental value "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." (1) A year later in Brown II the Court based its decision on the likelihood of resistance, holding that the implementation of educational equality should proceed "with all deliberate speed," (2) and so acknowledged that the idea of educational equality was a relative truth. (3) In the twentieth century no instance of opposition to that constitutional principle was more significant than the Little Rock desegregation crisis. (4) On September 3, 1957, Governor Orval E. Faubus claimed that civil disorder threatened to erupt, and in defiance of federal authority ordered the state's National Guard to block desegregation of Central High School. For three weeks, Faubus, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the local school board, the local black community, the NAACP, and the federal judiciary were embroiled in intractable confrontation. When on September 20 the federal court found that his assertions concerning disorder were unsubstantiated, Faubus complied with the order to withdraw the Guard. However, after nine black young people entered the school on September 23, a few rabble-rousers galvanized the crowd outside Central, forcing their withdrawal. The next day President Eisenhower dispatched combat-ready paratroopers to the city and federalized the Arkansas National Guard in order to enforce the court's desegregation mandate. Although troops remained at Central High until the academic year ended, a small group of segregationist-supported youths harassed the nine black students relentlessly. (5) Tension again mounted during the summer of 1958. Faubus sought a nearly unprecedented third-term gubernatorial nomination, and the United States Supreme Court in a special August term considered whether Arkansas authorities had violated the Constitution during the fall confrontation. The governor won a landslide victory, and the Court decided against Arkansas public officials in Cooper v. Aaron. (6) In the wake of these events, the city's high schools were closed. Not until local white moderates, informally aided by blacks, mobilized support for a special school board election in the spring of 1959 did the crisis finally end. (7) From 1954 to 1959, segregationists appealed to white supremacy, states' rights, and class consciousness in their opposition to desegregation; integrationists advocated the constitutional value of equal opportunity and interracial brotherhood in their support of it. Both groups held to these views as a matter of absolute principle. (8) By contrast, school officials, state and federal authorities, and for some time Faubus too, supported desegregation, primarily out of deference to the Constitution as expounded by the Supreme Court. President Eisenhower used this justification when he ordered the paratroopers of the 101 Airborne to Little Rock: "Our personal opinions about the [Brown] decision have no bearing on the matter of enforcement," he said. (9) The moderates who won the school board election that ended the confrontation in the spring of 1959 were even more explicit. The Supreme Court's Brown decision, the moderates exclaimed, "however much we dislike it, is the declared law and is binding upon us. We think that the decision was erroneous and that it was a reversal of established law upon an unprecedented basis of psychology and sociology." But, they continued, "we must in honesty recognize that, because the Supreme Court is the court of last resort in this country, what it has said must stand until there is a correcting constitutional amendment or until the Court corrects its own error." (10) Following the decision of Brown I, school board superintendent Virgil Blossom envisioned a program of substantial integration, but by the announcement of Brown II in 1955 major revisions had occurred. …