Education

Sherilyn Rong

The world of education in the 1950s played a major role in reopening the topic of segregation, and had new problems with the budget shortages.

One of the highly publicized legal cases Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, have reached the United States Supreme Court and “prompted measures to end discrimination in other public institutions.” It was a struggle to put the Court’s decision in full integrating the schools; changing the course of education for states, educators and America’ students. Such actions included the black families were forced to legally send their children to the same school as white students.

In the autumn of 1957 an organized campaign by a black newspaper publisher, Daisy Bates, enrolled nine children in an all-white Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas by the order of the Federal government. Angry mobs surrounded Bates’ home and burned crosses on her lawn, and broke her window with rocks and bullets. The forty-four teachers that favored integration were fired. When anti-intergration hysteria mounted and white mobs gathered and threatened violence, president Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the elite 101^st Airborne Division to Little Rock. The nine students; Melba Patillo Beals, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Carlotta Walls Lanier, Terrance Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, Minnijean Brown Trickey, and Thelma Mothershed Wair, were escorted by soldiers in jeeps to school and each were assigned a solider as they entered the school. Even though everyday they would face white adults shouting horrible obscenities at them, they still held on and walked forward into their school. However one day when Bates failed to notify Eckford about her transportation, alone walking to school Elizabeth Eckford faced an angry mob of her own, she was left to sit on a bench in fear until Benjamin Fine, an education writer of the New York Times put his arm around Elizabeth and told her to not let the people see the tears. Finally a white woman named Grace Lorch who had a husband who taught at a local black college guided Elizabeth away from the mob and accompanied Elizabeth home safely. Even though she was unharmed it left its scar. It wasn’t until 1962 when Little Rock finally integrated its school. During the time when some schools were integrated, more white students enrolled in all-white private school to be away from any black students.

The launch of Sputnik in 1957 caused uproar of anxiety across the county. Seeing the Soviet Unions to be the first in space devastated the national pride and sense of security Americans once felt. It was a symbolized the Soviet educational system was far superior and advanced than our own. Parents, educators and the government complained to the U.S. education department how they have grown soft to the point that other foreign nations were advancing much faster than they are. However, due to the baby boomers, there were overcrowded classrooms, shortage of teachers and schools, and schools failing to meet basic safety standards, which placed more pressure on the U.S. education department. Thus, the U.S. education upgraded the educational system with renewed emphasis on “hard” science, such as physics, biology, chemistry, and engineering, and on mathematics.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott happened in the south where Blacks continue to suffer segregation in public restaurants, movie theaters, bathrooms, and transportation systems. A woman named Rosa Park was tired of the consistent unfair treatment, and refused give up her seat to a white man, and later was arrest in Montgomery, Alabama. “This act of righteous defiance sparked a movement that ultimately abolished racial segregation laws in the South”. (Kallen 113) Martin Luther King Jr., the new minister in town gave a fiery speech in church to thousands of boycotters inside the church. For thirteen months, there was no one riding the bus in Montgomery.

Elizabeth Eckford faced with an angry mob

A3 1950s Rokicki