Although segregation in schools ended, legal segregation continued. The Jim Crow laws still remained for another ten years until the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. President Eisenhower would soon attempt to provide for a common defense for the African American race.
In 1957, a handful of black children requested to enter an all-white school in Little Rock, Arkansas. The governor of Arkansas ordered the Arkansas National Guard to block the school entrance so the black children could not enter, after a federal court ordered local and state authorities to protect the rights of the students to integrate the school. The governor and others provoked angry whites, which in return threatened the safety of the black children when they entered the school. President Eisenhower finally realized it was time to intervene in the situation in Arkansas. The mob violence became too great and he had to restore the image of America which everyone is free and has equal rights. He then decided to send in the Arkansas National Guard. He ordered them to protect the safety of the African American children as they entered the school.1 The President has the power to order in the National Guard because he is Commander and Chief of the U.S. Army. This was a bigger and more successful step in the Civil Rights Movement. These brave black students paved the way for future black students who wanted to attend public schools. If it had not have been for the Little Rock Nine, segregated schools might still appear today.
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The Montgomery Bus Boycott got its start on December 1, 1955.2 Blacks in Montgomery Alabama would refrain from riding the city buses until they could sit anywhere they wanted, since they were forced to sit all the way in the back of the bus away from the whites. The movement mainly involves four people, Rosa Parks, E.D. Nixon, Jo Ann Robinson, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Rosa Parks was the most well known person to come out of the boycott.