Desegregation
Desegregation as a policy took its beginnings in the South after the Plessy versus Ferguson Supreme Court Case of 1896, in which it was ruled that separate but equal facilities for blacks was constitutional. The gains of Reconstruction had disappeared and blacks were forced back into a situation no different from when they were under slavery. The Jim Crow laws enacted by the South were symbolic of the contemptible treatment of Blacks in the South. The laws stated that blacks (or "colored [sic]") people had to have separate facilities. However, this was laughable. Beals in her interview recalls that the all-black school she went to took all of its facilities from Central High's used stock.
As mentioned in the Education Interpretative Essay, desegregation took an about turn with the decision of the United States Supreme Court in favour of Brown in the Brown versus Board of Education case. The ruling that segregation of public schooling in the United States was unconstitutional proved an extraordinary turn-around since 1896.
In December 1955, Rosa Parks challenged a segregation ordinance that had been part of Montgomery, Alabama, society. She refused to stand up for a white man who was standing and this sparked a battle in the courts, which she and the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) - and of which Martin Luther King Jr. was the President of - had initiated in protest against the segregation ordinance. The battle was supported by a boycott of the cities' buses by most of the Blacks in Montgomery1.
In the source, Melba Beals says she was glad to have gone into Central High on the fateful morning of September 23. Her hope that integration will be achieved is due to her personal experience. On a wider historical context, integration took much longer in the rest of the South. Although legally prohibited, segregation was still practised. Having been brought up in a mindset of segregation, the kids of Central High did not know any other way of treating Blacks. They had been brought up to treat Blacks as inferior, and they reverted to what they been raised up to be. They abused Beals. Indeed in other chapters of the book, Beals sees herself as God's tool to breakdown the racial prejudice that existed in the school.
Prejudice, therefore, is the key to
segregation. With the deep-seated prejudice, it can be seen within the
source that integration, even with legal backing cannot be fully
accepted. It is important, therefore, to note the importance of past
history and culture in understanding segregation, a system that was planted in
the era of slavery.
1 David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, 1986, pp. 11-83. Further reading on this subject and challenges to segregation in Bearing the Cross are recommended. See Reading List for more details.