The NAACP legal defense fund was so fixated on destroying segregation in education that it didn’t spend a lot of time strategizing on what needed to be done after the decision was made.”
Roger Wilkins traces the civil rights movement and the still present racial divide in the United States through history, from its colonial roots in the seventeenth-century Bacon’s Rebellion in the colony of Virginia to Brown v. Board of Education to the unequal education poor children usually receive. He compares Brown’s aftermath to Reconstruction after the Civil War and illustrates the importance of the active and continued pursuit of civil rights. The job, he says, isn’t finished yet.
Above: On September 24, 1957, soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division escorted the Little Rock Nine students into the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, as part of Operation Arkansas. Photograph courtesy of the National Archives.