Small Mercies

One of the main goals of the early civil rights movement was the integration of public schools. In 1896, the Supreme Court notoriously supported racial segregation on the grounds that schools and other spaces should be “separate but equal.” However, there was an obvious discrepancy in the quality of schools for Black and white children. As the civil rights movement gained traction, activists hoped that exposing the lack of equity in public schools would also expose the entire system of segregation to be deeply harmful to Black people, and therefore a violation of the Constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) scored a signature victory in 1954 with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which mandated the integration of public schools.

Despite this legal triumph, however, attempts at enforcement were often met with fierce resistance. In the Jim Crow South, efforts at integration prompted direct intervention by political leaders and outright violence from racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Many Civil Rights organizations accordingly directed their energies southward, but educational segregation remained a problem in the north as well, particularly in cities like Chicago, New York, and Boston.