***Note: Figures may be missing from this format of the document A genuine attempt to integrate Mississippi's public schools did not occur until 1970, sixteen years after the United States Supreme Court's pivotal 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. White resistance to school desegregation proved both deep-seated and sustained, relenting only under a steady stream of legal action by black parents and federal intervention. Consequently, the elimination of Mississippi's dual educational system occurred largely on white terms. Black teachers and administrators lost their jobs and the black community saw an erosion of the control they had exercised over their children's education. In the years that followed, as federal support waned, efforts in Mississippi and across the nation to create unitary school systems usually floundered, in many cases leading to a resegregation of schools. 1 Given the difficulties surrounding the dismantling of separate schools, it is not surprising that many have judged school integration a failure. 2 One flaw in the process that a number of commentators have pointed to is that the attempts to achieve school integration did little to help (or even hindered) the attainment of the larger goal surrounding school integration efforts: the improvement of black education. 3 Black demands for educational improvements grew even louder by the end of the war. In January 1945 T. R. M. Howard, a black doctor from Mound Bayou, bluntly announced to the black Greenwood Civic League what most of his listeners already knew: the state's black educational system was a "failure." And he asked, "Will it interfere with any good Southern tradition to do

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