Frances Lisa Baer

The Supreme Court's Brown rulings in 1954 and 1955 gave rise to a program of "massive resistance" in the American South that included the resurrection of the doctrine of interposition. The first critical test of interposition occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas, beginning in September 1957 when Governor Faubus called out the National Guard to bar the "Little Rock Nine" from Central High School, thereby igniting one of the greatest constitutional crises in American history. This work examines the development of the states' rights arguments against federal court-ordered desegregation of the schools, and how those arguments came to bear on Faubus, leading him to “interpose” to prevent the admission of the nine black students into the school. The Supreme Court’s September 1958 ruling in the Little Rock case, Cooper v. Aaron, rejected the validity of interposition and left segregationists throughout the South searching for another means to avoid compliance with Brown.