"Cooper v. Aaron:" Incident and Consequence

Abstract

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLES PRESENT important new perspectives on the Little Rock school desegregation crisis. When Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus, in the name of preserving order, directed the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine black young people from entering Little Rock Central High School on September 2, 1957, he precipitated a constitutional crisis. Blocking a federal court order upholding the Little Rock School Board's attempted compliance the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions of 1954 and 1955 in Brown v. Board of Education, Faubus placed the governor's police powers at odds city authorities, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the Supreme Court itself. Yet the constitutional issues engendered by Faubus's actions remained abstract to most people except for legal experts. At the time and ever since, it was the practical consequences that garnered public attention: the consequences for the school board's good-faith effort to implement the token desegregation of a single city school in the face of growing hostility on the part of the white community, for Faubus's purported political ambitions, for the Eisenhower administration's inconsistent stance on the Brown decision even as it wrestled a Cold War propaganda battle over the same issue, for the authority of the Supreme Court as it confronted mounting opposition from southern segregationists and their northern conservative sympathizers, and, above all, for the courageous Little Rock Nine, bearing the painful assaults of racial animosity. The three essays that follow suggest how the litigation culminating in Cooper v. Aaron shaped these consequences and their ramifications for decades to come. The Cooper v. Aaron litigation went through several stages. The Supreme Court's Brown decision of 1954, holding that racially segregated public schools were inherently unequal and therefore violated the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, precipitated the Little Rock School Board's efforts to comply. Shortly before the Court handed down the 1955 Brown II order, which required desegregation plans to proceed with all deliberate speed but left their formulation to community school boards-subject to local federal court oversight-Little Rock school officials published a plan that opened only Little Rock Central High to token desegregation, maintained racial segregation at all other schools, and left unstated when those schools might be desegregated. Once the limited scope of desegregation became apparent, the Little Rock branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) rethought its earlier trust in the school board's good faith effort, and, in the name of black parents and children, initiated suit in 1956. Styled Aaron v. Cooper, the case was tried and decided during August 1956. The black litigants lost at trial and upon appeal in April 1957. As the summer unfolded and the nine black students prepared to enter Central, Faubus and city school officials confronted mounting hostility from segregationists. Meanwhile, the federal government declined to become involved. After various public and secret maneuvers, Faubus implemented a strategy defying the federal court's desegregation order. The ensuing three-week crisis culminated in Eisenhower's dispatch of the 101st Airborne to Little Rock, which ended the violence and enforced the court order. Inside Central High, the Little Rock Nine-Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, and Carlotta Walls-endured continuous harassment. School officials responded by asking the federal court for a two-and-a-half-year delay in implementation of the desegregation decree. Although the local federal court awarded the delay, the NAACP appealed. The U.S. circuit court, sustained by the U.S. Supreme Court, upheld the NAACP's argument that Little Rock's desegregation plan had to continue to be enforced. …