Most states did not want to accept the ruling. Besides, the Supreme Court’s decision did not include instructions on how the ruling was to be put into practice.
Desegregation began almost immediately in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, while Texas integrated only one school district, Arkansas only two, and in the rest of the South, not a single classroom was racially mixed.
Most of the states waited for specific instructions from the Court on how to end school segregation. A year after the Brown decision, the Court was still silent.
Instead, the justices asked the federal courts closer to the local school districts to make sure their districts admitted black children to public schools “with all deliberate speed.”
It took many years for all-white schools to allow black students to attend. When they finally had to, violence often marked the first day that the first black student entered, or tried to enter, an all-white school.
