Southern Resistance

In Alabama, white parents used the 1956 Alabama Pupil Placement Act to choose which public schools their children would attend, but when Black parents in Birmingham tried to use the same law to send their children to white schools, school board officials stalled the application process with procedural rules and turned them away. A first school desegregation lawsuit filed in 1957 by Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and his foot soldiers against the school board failed. In 1960, barber James Armstrong, a lieutenant among Shuttlesworth's foot soldiers, sued the school board for operating a biracial school system that kept two of his four children from attending all-white Graymont Elementary. Armstrong's lawyers convinced judges that Birmingham school officials would not integrate public schools without a federal court order. By 1961, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama were the last remaining Southern states with racially segregated school systems. In 1963, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Birmingham's separate school system violated the 1954 Brown rule and ordered the school board to submit a plan to begin integrating public schools by September 1963, allowing parents to send children to their school of choice regardless of race. Armstrong and a few other Black parents were the first to enroll their children in three all-white schools, where large crowds staged loud anti-integration demonstrations, and on September 10, 1963, Gov. George Wallace sent Alabama troopers to block the Armstrong boys and their supporters from entering Graymont Elementary.

Birmingham, Alabama · United States