Reaction to Brown Supreme Court Decision

After the supreme court decision on May 17, 1954 for the Brown v. Board of Education case, things changed dramatically.In states such as Kansas and Oklahoma , state officials said things should change with little trouble.However, in other states like Mississippi and Georgia , state officials vowed to give total resistance. Governor Talmadge of Georgia said, " The people of Georgia will not comply with the decision of the court ......We're going to do whatever is necessary in Georgia to keep white children in white schools and colored children in colored schools."Within a year,more than 500 school districts had desegregated their classrooms, To speed things up, in 1955 the supreme court handed down a second ruling,known as Brown II, that ordered school desegregation implemented "with all deliberate speed." In 1948, Arkansas had become the first Southern state to admit African Americans to state universities without being required by a court order. By the 1950s ,some scout troops and labor unions in Arkansas had quietly ended their Jim Crow practices.Newly elected school bored officials were publicly for desegregation in schools. One of them,Virgil Blossom,began planning for desegregation soon after Brown. However, Governor Orval Faubus publicly showed support for segregation. In September 1957, he ordered the National Guard to turn away the "Little Rock Nine"-nine African-American students who had volunteered to integrate Little Rock's Central High School as the first step in Blossom's plan. A federal judge ordered Faubus to let the students into school. Later on September 9,1957, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957,the first civil rights law since Reconstruction.