The Schoolhouse Stand at Alabama

The Schoolhouse Stand at Alabama. March Route for Education. Southern governors, mayors and elected officials employed every means to resist public school integration, even famously using armed state guards to block Black students from entering. For example, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus called the Arkansas National Guard to block nine Black students from integrating Little Rock High School in 1957. But President Dwight Eisenhower deployed national troops, and then federalized the Arkansas National Guard. So, the same state guards who once blocked the students had to obey the President's federal order to escort the "Little Rock Nine” into the school through an angry White mob. Arkansas also shut down its public schools or leased them to "private school corporations” to prevent integration. An Alabama governor later tried the same tactic, with a dramatic response from another president. , Paired marker , June 11, 1963 , Alabama Gov. George Wallace kept his 1962 campaign promise to stand in the schoolhouse door” to physically stop integration. After giving a speech against federal judges interfering with “state's rights," with state troopers at his side and television cameras broadcasting the drama, Wallace took his stand at the main door of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He blocked Assistant U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach from entering with Black students Vivian Malone and James Hood, who had federal court orders to be admitted to the university. Wallace eventually stepped aside to allow the first Black students into the university since Autherine Lucy in 1956. Miss Malone was the school's first Black graduate. Later in his life, Wallace apologized for his opposition to school integration. , "Nothing should be overlooked in fighting for better education." , Roy Wilkins , Long-time leader of the NAACP and civil rights activist., Lesson D7: Discuss how some White Southerners might have felt about the cultural changes brought on by the Civil Rights Movement.