ABSTRACT
On “Black Monday”—May 17, 1954—the Supreme Court of the United States presented its decision in the case of Brown et al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka. The decision ushered in a decade in which the desegregation of southern schools remained the dominant issue in each fall’s newspaper headlines; a decade in which Thurgood Marshall and Earl Warren became heroic figures; a decade of violence and the beginnings of a revolution in American racial relations. A great deal has been written about this story, and we have no reason to summarize it here. 1 The task of this chapter is to describe the issue facing the southern school boards we have studied.
