Chief Justice Earl Warren announced that the Constitution was ‘colour blind’. So the Supreme Court ordered the Topeka Board of Education to end segregation in schools. It took 14 years to end segregation in schools.
In 1957 the town of Little Rock in Arkansas decided that it would integrate schools a bit at a time.
The Governor of Arkansas, Orville Faubous, announced that it would be impossible to keep Law and order if black children started at the school.
He sent troopers to the school to make sure that the black did not get in the school.
Black people in Little Rock took Faubus to court and he ordered to remove the troopers.
President Eisenhower then sent 1,000 paratroopers to Little Rock to protect the black children.
After all this had happened integration was speeded up in some towns.
The Bus Boycott
A lady called Rosa Parks got on a bus from her work in Montgomery, Alabama. As she was black she had to sit at the back of the bus, soon the bus became crowded and a white man got on the bus and demanded that Rosa should give up her seat for him. Rosa refused and was taken by the police. As she was the secretary of the NAACP news spread across Montgomery so quick. One of Rosa’s friends rang the Baptist minister (Martin Luther King) for advice.
The black American’s decided to go to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court decided that Segregation on the buses should be illegal.
On 13 November 1956 the Supreme Court announced that segregation on buses was illegal. The bus boycott began in 1955 and ended in 1956.
The Freedom Rides.
In 1961 the Congress of Racial E quality (CORE) started a series of Freedom Rides on Buses. The buses had been de-segregated but the bus stations, restaurants and shops were still segregated.
Black people would catch buses to southern bus stations and then try to use ‘whites only’ services. Sometimes they were beaten.
Robert Kennedy sent around 500 marshals to protect a group of Freedom Riders that set off from Montgomery. But they were attacked. Then finally Robert Kennedy got the Interest Commission to end segregation on buses and rail stations and also at airports.
Civil Rights Bill.
Kennedy announced that he was asking Congress to pass a civil Rights Bill that would make all forms of discrimination in public illegal. Politicians such as George Wallace promised they would fight the Bill all the way.
Civil Rights had a very weird feeling that the Congress would not pass the Bill.
They organised one of the biggest demonstration in American history.
In August nearly 500,000 people were led to the Lincoln Memorial, and Martin Luther King.
