<P> In 1963, Alabama Gov. George Wallace personally blocked the door to Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to prevent the enrollment of two black students . This became the infamous Stand in the Schoolhouse Door where Wallace personally backed his "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" policy that he had stated in his 1963 inaugural address . He moved aside only when confronted by General Henry Graham of the Alabama National Guard, who was ordered by President John F. Kennedy to intervene . </P> <P> In North Carolina, there was often a strategy of nominally accepting Brown, but tacitly resisting it . On May 18, 1954 the Greensboro, North Carolina school board declared that it would abide by the Brown ruling . This was the result of the initiative of D.E. Hudgins Jr., a former Rhodes Scholar and prominent attorney, who chaired the school board . This made Greensboro the first, and for years the only, city in the South, to announce its intent to comply . However, others in the city resisted integration, putting up legal obstacles to the actual implementation of school desegregation for years afterward, and in 1969, the federal government found the city was not in compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act . Transition to a fully integrated school system did not begin until 1971, after numerous local lawsuits and both nonviolent and violent demonstrations . Historians have noted the irony that Greensboro, which had heralded itself as such a progressive city, was one of the last holdouts for school desegregation . </P> <P> In Moberly, Missouri, the schools were desegregated, as ordered . However, after 1955, the African - American teachers from the local "negro school" were not retained; this was ascribed to poor performance . They appealed their dismissal in Naomi Brooks et al., Appellants, v. School District of City of Moberly, Missouri, Etc., et al.; but it was upheld, and SCOTUS declined to hear a further appeal . </P> <P> Many Northern cities also had de facto segregation policies, which resulted in a vast gulf in educational resources between black and white communities . In Harlem, New York, for example, not a single new school had been built since the turn of the century, nor did a single nursery school exist, even as the Second Great Migration caused overcrowding of existing schools . Existing schools tended to be dilapidated and staffed with inexperienced teachers . Northern officials were in denial of the segregation, but Brown helped stimulate activism among African - American parents like Mae Mallory who, with support of the NAACP, initiated a successful lawsuit against the city and State of New York on Brown's principles . Mallory and thousands of other parents bolstered the pressure of the lawsuit with a school boycott in 1959 . During the boycott, some of the first freedom schools of the period were established . The city responded to the campaign by permitting more open transfers to high - quality, historically - white schools . (New York's African - American community, and Northern desegregation activists generally, now found themselves contending with the problem of white flight, however .) </P>

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