The ruling on Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) could be viewed as both successful and detrimental to the struggle for black equality. On the surface, the Brown ruling looks to be a great success, but a closer look reveals otherwise. The decision was a sensitive issue that took time and compromise for the entire Supreme Court to rule on. Ending school desegregation was obviously a huge success, but it was not without limitations. There was a large amount of resistance towards desegregation. Local whites vehemently opposed forced segregation. Most politicians, including President Eisenhower, opposed segregation. Polls showed 80 percent of the white Southerners opposed Brown in the south. Due to these factors, school desegregation was ordered to be done gradually. As time will tell, the process was done too slowly for blacks looking for equality, and it forced them to eventually change strategies.
             On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation deprived students of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision came after months of bargaining while Chief Justice Warren waited patiently for the two dissenting justices to come to a unanimous decision. In order for the Court to rule unanimously, a compromise needed to be made. Because many justices were worried that their inability to enforce such a momentous ruling would discredit the judicial process, Warren accepted gradualism as the course to take for desegregation. The Court was also worried that many southern politicians would defy the federal law if immediate desegregation occurred.
             One politician staying away from this issue was President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower would neither endorse nor support the ruling for fear that he would lose the votes of Southern whites. Eisenhower was worried that school integration would cause social disintegration and that it was nuts to do it by force. He never favored d...