Segregation carried on though out the world wars up to the 1950’s were the battle to integrate races became more intense, harder and much more violent. The problem also created major conflicts between the state and federal authority, national trooper against federal trooper and a governor against its president.
During the 1950’s the NAACP and other civil right groups used the courts to achieve their main objective to end the system having separate schools for the blacks and the whites in the South. In 1954 school were ruled as unconstitutional but only due to evidence of inequality between white and black schools being so obvious, that Supreme Court announced such a rule. However, not many states accepted this judgement and continued to keep their school separate despite the expense of having schools for blacks and whites rather than mixed.
What happened in Little rock, Arkansas, in 1957 shocked the whole nation. The incident brought international attention to the civil rights cause; the media appeal was even greater than that of the Montgomery bus boycott crisis. The whole of America was witness to black student of Little Rock High School being verbally abused and even worse barbarically attacked by white mobs in the streets. Orval Faubus, the governor of Arkansas at the time used military forces to prevent blacks from entering the school because he felt that ‘It was the only way to keep some black people from being killed’ whist being interviewed by Jack Bass and Walter DeVries after the crisis. Nevertheless the mere 150 police body’s on stand by were no match to the larger bodies of white thugs, who were part of the mobs.
Dwight Eisenhower, the president of the U.S tried at first to persuade Faubus over a eighteen day period via the Supreme Court but to enforce the judgement of the Supreme Court that separate school are not equal he decided to take action. After being so reluctant to take action as he never wanted to infuriate the whites, Eisenhower dispatched federal troops to Arkansas to act as body guard for the ‘Little Rock nine’ and to ensure they got to school and lesson’s safely.
While the segregation was occurring through out America in the 1950’s the image they were portraying of a ‘free-country’ to other countries world wide was deteriorating. At this time America was part of the United Nation Organisation which was enforced to support “universal respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all with out distinction to race, sex, language or religion”. This was what put Eisenhower to shame and made him feel extremely embarrassed as it enhanced the fact that a considerable number of their citizens were being deprived the right to vote, whilst they were in a battle fighting against the same civil rights being advocated in Eastern Europe.
Also the use of the media and films which were shown globally to portray the inhumane ways the whites, even such the police treated the blacks. The Blacks withstood violence such as spitting, being attacked physically and constant racial abuse. This made Truman and the presidential successor Eisenhower look really bad as the camera’s couldn’t lie, the world saw how the troops were clearly in sympathy of the whites, which shows to be quiet outrageous and caused an officer to take off this badge and walk away in disgust.
In conclusion to the conflicts, the violence, the history and the images displayed through the eyes of the media each problem was as bad as each other. However, violence was the greatest problem because obviously from the incident at Little Rock High School you could see that Forcible desegregation of schools simply would not work if the students there did not want it to work. Also the rest of the country and the world showed that the black people were determined to obtain equality however hard the going gets. This encouraged not only the NAACP but many other black civil rights organizations to pursue their cases to out a stop to segregation even though the progress was slow. More violent types of racism and segregation and inequality continued in schooling in most places in the Deep South for many years. In addition, to the battle to desegregate schools it did not however put an end to the problem of racial and inequality through out the USA. Even by 1963 only 10% of black children in South went to a desegregated school and state universities in the southern states carried on preventing black students from attending classes.
