Little Rock on Trial: Cooper v. Aaron and School Desegregation,
by Tony A. Freyer.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007.
Fifty years ago this week, nine African American students faced an angry mob barring their entrance to Little Rock Central High School. The efforts of black citizens and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall, took the crisis over school integration to the United State Supreme Court.
The Court unanimously reaffirmed Brown v. Board of Education’s mandate for school integration in the 1958 landmark decision, Cooper v. Aaron.
Little Rock on Trial is the story of the case “includ[ing] the previously untold account of Justice William Brennan’s surprising influence upon Justice Felix Frankfurter’s controversial concurring opinion, which preserved his own ‘deliberate speed’ wording from Brown.”