Little Rock on Trial

Winner: J.G. Ragsdale Book AwardChoice Outstanding TitleAmericans were riveted to their television sets in 1957, when a violent mob barred black students from entering Little Rocks Central High School and faced off against paratroopers sent by a reluctant President Eisenhower. That set off a firestorm of protest throughout the nation and ultimately led to the Supreme Courts landmark decision in Cooper v. Aaron, reaffirming Brown v. Board of Educations mandate for school integration with all deliberate speed and underscoring the supremacy of federal and constitutional authority over state law.Noted scholar Tony Freyer, arguably our nations top authority on this subject, now provides a concise, lucid, and eminently teachable summary of that historic case and shows that it paved the way for later civil rights victories. He chronicles how the Little Rock school board sought court approval to table integration efforts and how the black community brought suit against the boards watered-down version of compliance. The boards request was denied by a federal appeals court and taken to the Supreme Court, where the unanimous ruling in Cooper reaffirmed federal lawbut left in place the maddening ambiguities of all deliberate speed.While other accounts have focused on the showdown on the schoolhouse steps, Freyer takes readers into the courts to reveal the centrality of black citizens efforts to the origins and outcome of the crisis. He describes the work of the Little Rock NAACPwith its Legal Defense Fund led by Thurgood Marshall and Wiley Brantonin defining the issues and abandoning gradualism in favor of direct confrontation with the segregationist South. He also includes the previously untold account of Justice William Brennans surprising influence upon Justice Felix Frankfurters controversial concurring opinion, which preserved his own deliberate speed wording from Brown.With Cooper, the well morticed high wall of segregation had finally cracked. As the most important test of Brown, which literally contained the means to thwart its own intent, it presaged the civil rights movements broader nonviolent mass action combining community mobilization and litigation to finally defeat Jim Crow. It was not only a landmark decision, but also a turning point in Americas civil rights struggle.