Journal of Supreme Court History

Abstract:

Contemporary and later commentators emphasized the Supreme Court’s forceful affirmation of its own authority in Cooper v. Aaron (1958). The case was the Court’s first significant test of states’ rights opposition denying that Brown v. Board of Education (1954) (Brown I) and the Brown II (1955) decree permitting gradual implementation were legitimate constitutional law. Indeed, following the Court’s announcement of Cooper v. Aaron in September 1958, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus and his followers closed the very same Little Rock schools the Supreme Court had ordered desegregated. Black students’ rights did not prevail until summer 1959. In Arkansas and elsewhere, defiance initially triumphed over the Supreme Court’s self-assertive power.1