Little Rock Schools Freed From Court
Little Rock’s school district has been freed from federal supervision, a half-century after a defiant governor’s refusal to allow nine black students into an all-white Central High sparked one of the biggest crises of the civil rights era.
U.S. District Judge William R. Wilson Jr. issued a ruling Friday that found that the district was substantially complying with a 1998 desegregation plan worked out in the 27,000-student district.
Little Rock, which now has a black-majority school board, was satisfactorily evaluating its academic programs in the effort to improve achievement on blacks, the ruling found.
In 1957, President Eisenhower dispatched the 101st Airborne to enforce a U.S. Supreme Court order striking down segregation after Gov. Orval Faubus tried to prevent black students from enrolling at Central High.
Fifty years is a long time – most of my conscious life. Fifty years before that, Henry Ford introduced the Model-T Ford, and people put aside their horse drawn buggies. But I remember this fifty-years-ago. It wasn’t a dull page in a history book, or a period piece in Wikipedia, it was part of my actual life growing up in the segregated South. And not much later, there were riots in my own little downtown about who could eat at the five and dime lunch counters.
The President was a General Eisenhower, "Ike," a real hero who had saved America and the world from evil. His Vice President was Dick Nixon [hero? not so much]. Eisenhower had appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court. Conservative Earl Warren had a change of heart, and sherherded Brown versus the Board of Education and the Miranda rulings, among others. Eisenhower rued the day that he had appointed Warren, but he enforced the Supreme Court’s rulings, and he went to war with the Governors who tried to stop the integration of the southern schools. When he left office, he made a speech, warning us of the dangers of the Military-Industrial Complex, something he’d helped to create during the Cold War.
So, here we sit, some of us agonizing over the sorry state of our country. We’re off fighting a failed war of conquest in Mesopotamia for our big Model-Ts’ fuel. There’s a resurgence of ancient Middle Eastern religions. Gated Communities surround us like Feudal Walled Cities and a lot of kids either go to "academies" or stay home for school.. And, by the way, it’s getting pretty hot. Reckon it’s the Model-Ts?
It’s not much worse now than it was back in 1957 [or even in 1907]. But it’s not a hell of a lot better either…
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