Cities such as Little Rock, Boston, and Detroit saw massive resistance to integration in the form of violence, riots, and boycotts, and many white families chose to leave their home communities in order to avoid the prospects of integration. After a series of appeals, in 1960, Wright set down a plan that required the integration of the schools on a grade-per-year basis, beginning with the first grade. But 1956 was also the year that saw explosive clashes all across the South, between African Americans, who were determined to overthrow Jim Crow, … 2 During the Civil Rights Movement school integration became a priority, but since then de facto … Before the start of the 1956-1957 school year, in compliance with a federal desegregation order and the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision barring racial segregation in schools, the… The campaign to discredit school desegregation in the nation’s capital demanded more than provincial racial politics. In December 1956, the United States Supreme Court ordered the Mansfield school district to integrate immediately, but Mansfield public schools did not officially desegregate until 1965. School integration in the United States is the process (also known as desegregation) of ending race-based segregation within American public and private schools. the desegregation of public schools and the full implementation of desegregation in Kentucky’s schools took many years. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial desegregation in schools in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision but separation remained the rule in Mansfield two years later. Violent opposition and resistance to desegregation was common throughout the country. T he dress Jo Ann Allen Boyce had picked out for her first day of school, August 27, 1956, was beautiful: a black top and matching skirt with a pattern around the hem. Though the Mansfield school district, seventeen miles southeast of Fort Worth, numbered fewer than 700 Whites and sixty Blacks in 1956, it segregated Black children to an inferior elementary school. Black teenagers were obliged to ride public buses, which dropped them twenty blocks from a school in Fort Worth. Throughout the twentieth century, school desegregation has been one of the most divisive issues 1 in the United States. Desegregation of Sturgis High School National Guard escort African American students to Sturgis High School in Kentucky. Yet the school investigation, echoed in the segregationist response to the 1962 football riot, revealed broader aspirations. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress NAACP Records) Kentucky encountered very little public resistance to the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954 to desegregate public school systems. In 1956 U.S. District Court Judge J. Skelly Wright ordered the desegregation of the New Orleans public schools. Though the desegregation of Kentucky’s public schools proceeded with a minimum of difficulty, there were some trouble spots. Racial segregation in schools existed throughout most of American history and remains an issue in contemporary education. In the first days of school in 1956 at Sturgis, in Union County, Kentucky, nine African American In 1956, Mansfield, Texas, was a small farming town of 1500 people. Its schools were strictly segregated and facilities for black students were run-down and under-funded. Southern segregationists’ success rested …