Race over rights: The resistance to public school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, and beyond, 1954--1960

The 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and the 1955 implementing decree in Brown II, which established no guidelines and set no timetable for compliance with the Court's directive to desegregate the public schools, gave rise to a program of "massive resistance" in the American South. Part of the strategy of massive resistance involved the resurrection of the presumed defunct doctrine of interposition.; Previous studies of massive resistance have tended to treat interposition as a short-term political tactic, as did Numan V. Bartley in The Rise of Massive Resistance (1969), or as a means to achieve racist ends in a fashion that was colorblind on its face, as did Neil McMillen in The Citizens' Council (1971). Because the foci of these and other studies are on other aspects of the resistance, however, they do not fully convey the symbolic value of interposition. States' rights and interposition were not mere abstractions to the southerners who asserted them, but were fundamental elements of American constitutionalism that defined the very nature of the Union.; Perhaps ironically, the first critical test of the doctrine of interposition occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas, beginning in September 1957 when Governor Orval E. Faubus called out the National Guard to bar the "Little Rock Nine" from Central High School and thereby ignited one of the greatest constitutional crises in American history. My dissertation examines the development of the states' rights arguments against federal court-ordered integration in the public schools, and how those arguments came to bear on Faubus, leading him to "interpose" to prevent the admission of a handful of black students into a single, previously all-white high school in the Arkansas capital.; The culmination of the legal battle over the resistance to integration at Central High School came in the Supreme Court's ruling in Cooper v. Aaron in the fall of 1958. The Court's principal opinion addressed rejected the validity of interposition. Despite the straightforward language of Cooper, however, the idea that a state could interpose to prevent the enforcement of federal desegregation orders was not settled by this case.