Hodges, the state developed a series of legal and administrative barriers that blocked school integration in the interest of 'local choice' without appearing to openly violate the Supreme Court ruling.

Under the leadership of Lieutenant Governor Luther H. At the time, the national NAACP was readying the court challenge that would lead to the Brown decision.įollowing the 1954 Brown decision, which ordered states' compliance 'with all deliberate speed,' North Carolina lawmakers moved with extraordinary caution in the face of virulent white opposition to the decision. Primary and secondary school systems remained segregated, however, and in the same year the Pamlico County NAACP filed a lawsuit for school equalization or integration.

Kenneth Lee, and James Lassiter became the first African Americans admitted to the university's law school. In North Carolina the winds of change had first been felt in the area of educational segregation in 1951, when the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was ordered by federal courts to admit blacks to its law, medical, and graduate schools. The 1954 decision declared that separate facilities were inherently unequal and state laws and constitutional provisions upholding segregation denied African American children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision expressly rejected the separate-but-equal doctrine contained in the Court's 1896 Plessy v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, unanimously ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Board of Education and White Resistance to School DesegregationĪ watershed moment in the modern civil rights movement came on, when the U.S. Board of Education and White Resistance to School Desegregation Part 4: Integration Efforts in the Workplace, Sit-Ins, and Other Nonviolent Protests Part 5: Forced School Desegregation and the Rise of the Black Power Movement Part 6: Continued Civil Rights Battles in the State. Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Roots of Civil Rights Activism in North Carolina Part 3: Brown v. Criner, 2006Īdditional research provided by Scott Matthews, Sally Mullikin, and Wiley J.

Brown v board of education impact