>> Southern white racism was transparent, implacable, up front and in your face. There, there was nothing ambiguous or hidden about it. Sometimes, it was paternalistic. Sometimes, it was hostile, even deadly. Especially in deep south towns and hinterlands with Ku Klux Klan klaverns. Throughout the South, places of public accommodation were segregated by law and custom. Hotels, restaurants, lunch counters, movie theaters, skating rinks, libraries, swimming pools. Rest rooms, water fountains, barbershops, beauty parlors, amusement parks and so forth. Signs marked white and colored, directed young and all alike to their appropriate places in the South's racial topography. Segregated public schools were part of this backward looking social system. Confronted with the prospect of racially integrated schools, the Jim Crow South did not go gently into that good night. The first major battle ground was Little Rock, Arkansas where in 1957, the school board followed a federal judge's order to enroll nine blacks in Central High School, which had some 2,000 white students. Nine blacks to two thousand whites. The integration of the high school was meant to be gradual. Yet Arkansas's Governor Orval Faubus saw an opportunity in the court order to secure his re-election as governor. Assuming the mantel of a racial demagogue, the blustering Faubus obstructed the court order. >> Faubus summoned troops of the Arkansas National Guard to Central High School, ostensibly to prevent violence. But in reality, to prevent the black youth from entering the building. Over the next several days, the Little Rock Nine as the black students were dubbed in the press arrived to enter the building only to be repulsed by the guard and a crowd of angry name calling whites. The situation escalated when the black students finally gained entry to the school. By this point, all the white students had left the building. A furious mob, including racists from throughout the South demonstrated outside the high school. Little Rock's mayor managed to get the nine black students out of the building. What was not only drew the ire of the district court judge who ordered him to cease his obstructionism, but also President Dwight Eisenhower, who was constitutionally bound to enforce federal laws. Eisenhower denounced action in the national address, federalized a contingent of the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1000 troops, 101 Airborne Division to Little Rock. For two months, paratroopers guarded the school with fixed bayonets. The black students had armed escorts in the building. Federalized guardsmen patrolled the school for the rest of the year. >> Extreme resistance took another form in Prince Edward County, Virginia, which closed it's public schools for five years rather than comply with the district court desegregation order. Elsewhere, whites met the letter if not the spirit of Brown. Desegregating their school systems by means of so-called freedom of choice or open enrollment plans. Southern politicians and not a few powerful Southern judges took the position that the constitution was color blind. Accordingly, they interpreted Brown to be nothing more than black and white parents alike were free to choose the schools their children would attend. In theory, open enrollment meant that black children could legally enroll in white schools. Yet, how likely was a black child to enroll in a white school when her father was dependent on a white man for his job as a service station mechanic or her mother for her job as a domestic in a white household. When the child faced the prospect of merciless heckling or physical abuse from a white classmates or when a father might be beaten or even killed or their home set afire. Open and Roman was a false coin, little wondered that by 1964, fewer than 2% of black children across the South attended white schools. >> The Civil Rights Movement was advancing at a fast pace by 1963. In Birmingham, Alabama, the media spectacle of white police turning powerful fire hoses on peaceful black demonstrators, even children. And vicious police dogs tearing their flesh appalled whites sympathetic to the black cause and grew their numbers. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson cajoled and bullied the congress to pass a landmark Civil Rights Act, which mandated the racial integration of all places of public accommodation across the South. A title of the Civil Rights Act authorized the US Department of Justice to initiate lawsuits on behalf of black plaintiffs in school desegregation cases. Another part of the law threatened to withdraw federal funds from uncooperative school districts. A non-sequential threat as we will see in our final module. >> In 1968, the Supreme Court finely called a halt to white Southerners intransigence. And Green V County Board, School Board of New Kent County, a Virginia case. The court struck down open enrollment plans and ordered the immediate root and branch removal of all vestiges of de jure segregation from Southern schools. A subsequent ruling in a Mississippi case made it clear that the court would no longer tolerate any delay in racial integration. >> Attention, now turned to finding the means for integrating large numbers of black and white school children. A case that had been percolating in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina was about to go national. Since the early 1950s, the Charlotte City schools had been consolidated with the County schools. All the schools were segregated and many of the County's high school students were bussed to their schools. For example, black high school students in Davidson at the northern end of Mecklenburg County rode their own buses nine miles to Torrence-Lytle School in Huntersville. The white high school students in town took a bus that carried them two miles past Torrence-Lytle on Highway 115 to North Mecklenburg Senior High School. Some integration was achieved in Charlotte Mecklenburg by 1965 though nothing of the scope achieved after the Supreme Court's green mandate. Adjudicating Swann V Charlotte Mecklenburg, Board of Education in 1969, Federal Judge Jamus McMillan decreed that the city county school system was to be racially balanced. Meaning that each school would be targeted to have an eight to two white-black student ratio, proportionate to the county's total white-black population ratio. The instrumental means to accomplish McMillan's plan was court ordered busing. In 1970 and 71, he rolled out his plan dividing the city and county into pie shaped wedges and grouping inner city black schools with white schools out in the County. Court ordered busing spurred a lot of loud protest on the part of grieved whites, a spate of pool riots and a general atmosphere of disquiet. >> In the spring of 1971, the Supreme Court upheld McMillan's ruling in Swann, inferring the constitutionality of court ordered busing to achieve racially balanced schools. Swann marked the legal end of Jim Crow schooling in the South. That is it marked the end of de jure segregation. After two years of turbulence, in 1973 Charlotte Mecklenburg had passed a crises. It was a racially integrated school district on the way to becoming the nation's most successful experiment in court ordered busing. After 1971, the nation's eyes turned to the North. Where residential so-called de facto segregation prevailed. Presumably, Northern schools were segregated only as a result of parents residential decisions not by means of any law. After all, State laws that segregated public schools at the North had been abolished by the end of the 19th century. Yet, something else was going on. Something not law, but tantamount to law. In our next episode, we turn to the North. [SOUND]
