1. “Parents Close Special School,” New York Amsterdam News, October 18, 1958. In the fall of 1957, nine African American school children attempted to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The mobs of white residents who attempted to block the students from entering the school became a national and international story, as did Governor Orval Faubus’s use of the Arkansas National Guard to achieve the same purpose. Though President Eisenhower called in U.S. paratroopers to protect the nine students, and in June 1958 the first black student graduated from Central High, the struggle continued through the fall of 1958 when Governor Faubus closed all of the public high schools in Little Rock. The schools were not reopened until August 1959, when the Supreme Court ruled that the closing was unconstitutional. See Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir (New York: David McKay Co., 1962f);
2. Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, Voices of Freedom (New York: Bantam, 1990), 36–52;
3. and Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 222–225.
4. The literature on Northern (and Western) struggles for equal educational opportunities generally picks up the story with the Supreme Court’s 1973 challenge to de facto segregation (Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1) and the court-ordered school busing cases of the early 1970s. Boston’s busing war has received a fair amount of attention (see Jeanne Theoharis’s critical analysis of this literature in this volume). Other examples include Gregory S. Jacobs’s study of Columbus, Ohio’s 1977 court-ordered school desegregation case, Getting Around Brown: Desegregation, Development, and the Columbus Public Schools (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998); George R. Metcalf, From Little Rock to Boston: The History of School Desegregation (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983); several essays in Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education, Gary Orfield, Susan E. Eaton and the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, eds. (New York: The New Press, 1996), including “Still Separate, Still Unequal,” by Susan E. Eaton, Joseph Feldman, and Edward Kirby, and “Segregated Housing and School Resegregation,” by Gary Orfield.
5. The recent publication of James T. Patterson’s Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) and ensuing debate about the court’s, the civil rights attorneys’, and the historians’ attention to Northern school segregation underscores that this remains a contentious historical and contemporary issue. See Lewis M. Steel’s review of Patterson’s book and letters to the editor in The Nation, February 5, 2001, and April 30, 2001.