Tony Little 27s Rock 27n Stepper
Americans were riveted to their television sets in 1957, when a violent mob barred black students from entering Little Rock’s Central High School and faced off versus paratroopers sent by a reluctant President Eisenhower. That set off a firestorm of protest all around the nation and at last led to the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Cooper v. Aaron, reaffirming Brown v. Board of Education’s mandate for school integration “with all deliberate speed” and underscoring the supremacy of federal and constitutional authority over state law.
Noted scholar Tony Freyer, arguably our nation’s top authority on this subject, now provides a concise, lucid, and eminently teachable summary of that historic case and shows that it paved the way for later civil rights victories. He chronicles how the Little Rock school board sought court approval to table integration attempts and how the black community brought suit versus the board’s watered-down version of compliance. The board’s request was refused by a federal appeals court and taken to the Supreme Court, where the unanimous ruling in Cooper reaffirmed federal law–but left in place the maddening ambiguities of “all deliberate speed.”
While other accounts have focalized on the showdown on the schoolhouse steps, Freyer takes readers into the courts to disclose the centrality of black citizens’ attempts to the roots and outcome of the crisis. He describes the work of the Little Rock NAACP–with it is Legal Defense Fund led by Thurgood Marshall and Wiley Branton–in defining the issues and abandoning gradualism in favor of direct confrontation with the segregationist South. He likewise includes the antecedently untold account of Justice William Brennan’s surprising influence upon Justice Felix Frankfurter’s arguable concurring opinion, which preserved his own “deliberate speed” wording from Brown.
With Cooper, the “well morticed high wall” of segregation had ultimately cracked. As the most primary test of Brown, which in a literal sense contained the means to thwart it is own intent, it presaged the civil rights movement’s broader nonviolent mass action combining community mobilization and litigation to in the end defeat Jim Crow. It was not only a landmark decision, but also a turning point in America’s civil rights struggle.
This book is portion of the Landmark Law Cases and American Society series.
From the Back Cover”A riveting tale of struggle among southern segregationists and civil rights advocates, political intrigue, Cold War conflict, legal machinations, and the use of federal paratroopers to defend the rights of black Americans. Deeply researched and powerfully written, Little Rock on Trial is necessary reading for anybody mesmerized in understanding this critical episode in America’s racial transformation.”–Michael J. Klarman, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning From Jim Crow to Civil Rights
“A major contribution to the history of the struggle for racial justice in our nation.”–Mary Frances Berry, Chairperson, United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1993-2004
About the AuthorTony A. Freyer is University Research Professor of History and Law at the University of Alabama. He is the author of more than ten books, including The Little Rock Crisis, and served as a advisor on that subject for the documentary Eyes on the Prize.
