School Desegregation
After the Civil War
After the abolition of slavery in the United States, three Constitutional amendments were passed to grant newly freed African Americans legal status: the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the Fourteenth provided citizenship, and the Fifteenth guaranteed the right to vote. However, between 1873 and 1883 the Supreme Court handed down a series of decisions that virtually nullified the work of Congress during Reconstruction. Blacks were separated from whites by law and by private action in transportation, public accommodations, recreational facilities, prisons, armed forces, and schools in both Northern and Southern states. In 1896 the Supreme Court sanctioned legal separation of the races by its ruling in H.A. Plessy v. J.H. Ferguson, which held that separate but equal facilities did not violate the U.S. Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment. Americans, both black and white, waged a long struggle to eliminate racial discrimination and segregation from American life. By the middle of the twentieth century their focus was on legal challenges to public-school segregation.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, declaring that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" and ordered desegregation "with all deliberate speed." The "deliberate speed" called for was quickly overshadowed by events outside the courtrooms. A number of school districts in the southern and border states did desegregate peacefully, but elsewhere resistance to school desegregation resulted in open defiance and violent confrontations, requiring the use of federal troops in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957.
Desegregation in Kentucky
In Kentucky, where a law had been passed in 1873 forbidding a black child to attend a white school and the reverse, and requiring that the separate schools be at least 600 feet apart, resistance to desegregation of public schools was widespread. Its full implementation took many years. Kentucky had its own highly dramatic confrontation in 1956, when ten black students attempted to attend the all white high school in Sturgis, Kentucky. Turned back by a jeering mob, they appealed to Governor A.B. Chandler who called out the National Guard. The soldiers held back the crowd the next morning as nine black students entered the school. The first schools to desegregate in Kentucky were the Fayette county and Wayne County school systems, in 1955. The Kentucky School for the Blind also integrated its classes in 1955. The last school district in Kentucky to integrate was Louisville, where a "freedom of choice" plan resulted in de facto segregation for several schools. On July 17, 1975, the schools were integrated by court order; the school system achieved racial balance to by instituting mandatory busing to distribute students throughout the district.