Tony Little 27S Rock 27N Stepper

Tony Little 27s Rock 27n Stepper 2

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 allround the nation and in the long run 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 concentered on the showdown on the schoolhouse steps, Freyer takes readers into the courts to disclose the centrality of black citizens’ attempts to the origins 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 also 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 crucial 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 likewise a turning point in America’s civil rights struggle.

This book is portion of the Landmark Law Cases and American Society series.

“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 consultant on that subject for the documentary Eyes on the Prize.

Tony Little 27s Rock 27n Stepper 2 Photo

Tony Little 27s Rock 27n Stepper 2 Photo

Tony Little 27s Rock 27n Stepper 2 Pic

Tony Little 27s Rock 27n Stepper 2 Pic