"Cooper v. Aaron:" Incident and Consequence

Blocking a federal court order upholding the Little Rock School Board's attempted compliance with the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions of 1954 and 1955 in Brown v. Board of Education, Faubus placed the governor's police powers at odds with city authorities, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the Supreme Court itself. At the time and ever since, it was the practical consequences that garnered public attention: the consequences for the school board's good-faith effort to implement the token desegregation of a single city school in the face of growing hostility on the part of the white community, for Faubus's purported political ambitions, for the Eisenhower administration's inconsistent stance on the Brown decision even as it wrestled with a Cold War propaganda battle over the same issue, for the authority of the Supreme Court as it confronted mounting opposition from southern segregationists and their northern conservative sympathizers, and, above all, for the courageous Little Rock Nine, bearing the painful assaults of racial animosity. Undergirding the entire discussion," he writes, "was the status of race relations in the city and the fear that public education at the elementary school level was fast approaching the 'tipping point' at which whites would leave Little Rock public schools altogether due to suburban flight and the proliferation of private schools.