| 1954 | Brown v. Board of Education. |
| 1957 | Federal troops called out to enforce school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas. |
| 1960 | Desegregation of public schools in New Orleans provokes violence and unrest. |
| 1964 | Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, which gives new powers to the federal government to end de jure segregation. But the legislation is not to be used to correct “racial imbalances.” |
| 1968 | George Wallace runs for president as a third-party candidate on a platform staunchly opposed to desegregation and school busing. |
| In Green v. New Kent County, the Supreme Court says that “freedom of choice” desegregation plans are acceptable only so long as they disestablish dual school systems. | |
| 1969 | In Holmes v. Alexander, the Supreme Court calls for an immediate end to dual school systems in thirty-three Mississippi school districts. |
| 1970 | The Stennis amendment, which calls for a uniform desegregation policy across the nation, is debated in the Senate. |
| 1972 | Antibusing protests break out in Detroit and other cities; Congress passes antibusing provisions. |
| 1974 | Racial violence and unrest breaks out in Boston over school desegregation efforts in that city. |
Ten years after the Brown decision, southern schools remained starkly segregated by race. When the 1964 Civil Rights Act provided new tools in the desegregation fight, southern school districts responded with new tactics. Many adopted “freedom of choice” plans. Ostensibly, all schools were open to any student, but in practice, black families who sent their children to traditional “white” schools were subjected to all manner of harassment. The result was that very little desegregation actually occurred. In 1968, the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. New Kent County that freedom of choice desegregation plans were permissible only as long as they resulted in meaningful desegregation. In October the following year, in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, the Court ordered an immediate end to thirty-three recalcitrant school districts in Mississippi, setting the stage for widespread integration of public schools across the deep South.
The situation in northern schools was more complicated. In Brown, the Court had outlawed de jure segregation, or segregation by law—the kind that existed primarily in southern states—but had not ruled on the constitutionality of de facto segregation, or segregation that was said to derive from economic or social factors, and the kind that was widespread throughout public schools in the North and West. The 1964 Civil Rights Act included a provision that “desegregation shall not mean the assignment of students to public school in order to overcome racial imbalance.” Southern congresspersons accused northerners of inserting the language to ensure that the bill would not be used against de facto segregation in the North. It fueled their sense that southern schools were being unfairly singled out while segregation in northern schools went unpunished.
By the late 1960s, racial unrest knew no regional boundaries. In 1968, George Wallace, an avowed segregationist and former governor of Alabama, ran a third-party campaign for the presidency that attracted considerable support from working-class whites in the North. Wallace’s campaign had a noticeable impact on Republican candidate Richard Nixon, who made support of “freedom of choice” a centerpiece of his campaign. In addition, growing numbers of African Americans began to question the usefulness of integrated schools; many emphasized “community control” of schools, as was the case in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, a section of Brooklyn, New York, where racial tensions flared in 1968.
All of these issues came together in an unlikely debate in the U.S. Senate in February 1970 over an amendment introduced by Senator John Stennis of Mississippi to provide for a uniform federal policy of desegregation, North and South.