In 1955, the court issued guidance known as Brown II, ordering that desegregation in public schools occur with “all deliberate speed.” However, that wording “was so vague it opened the door to all sorts of delaying tactics and resistance,” Foner says. Indeed, Southern states began a campaign of “massive resistance” to desegregation. A new wave of violence and intimidation was unleashed against African-Americans by segregationist groups like the White Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan. In 1956, 101 members of Congress signed the “Southern Manifesto,” opposing racial integration and accusing the Supreme Court of abusing its judicial power.
The following year, in September 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower signed an executive order authorizing the use of federal troops in Little Rock, Arkansas, where riots had erupted when black students attempted to enroll in Little Rock Central High School. President John Kennedy later deployed federal troops at the University of Mississippi in 1962 to quell rioting against the enrollment of U.S. Air Force veteran James Meredith.
Yet a decade after the Brown decision, 98 percent of black students in the South remained in completely segregated schools, says Gary Orfield, research professor at UCLA and co-director of the school’s Civil Rights Project. Orfield notes that it took the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed all forms of segregation, to really make a difference.