Perhaps those who did foresaw generations of children benefiting by their efforts and took the risk. “Lynchings and assassinations didn’t start with the Brown v Board case, but the pursuit of equal rights was a dangerous activity, dating from the time of reconstruction,” said Banks.Ĭlearly, violence and various forms of intimidation made it a high risk proposition for African Americans who stepped forward to demand implementation of rulings already in place. Vernon Dahmer met the same fate in 1965.” “Shortly after that, he was assassinated. Freedom riders Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were brutally murdered in 1964.
“The first desegregation case in Mississippi was filed in 1963 by Medgar Evers,” Banks recalls. The clients who filed lawsuits to pressure the Southern states to follow the Brown v. Living in Mississippi and working with clients to correct inequities was a dangerous proposition, where clients stood to lose the most. Board decision was the National Guard’s intervention at the University of Mississippi to safeguard “a lone black young man (James Meredith) as he tried to attend the university, even though he had already been admitted by court order.”
“Even though a couple of decades of litigation had already settled the issue of allowing African Americans to attend institutions of higher learning (including at the graduate level), states like Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia outright refused to do it,” he said.Ī vivid example just seven years after the Brown v. Banks also recalls how the “entire nation witnessed via television the National Guard having to escort a handful of black students to Central High School in Little Rock, through crowds of screaming, unruly and violent whites seeking to prevent their attendance.” He is thankful that former President Eisenhower had the foresight to order the servicemen to the school.Īt the same time, the public schools were not the only education institutions resisting integration.
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