Civil Rights Movement: Didn't Change the Attitudes of Many White Americans

By the end of the 1950s the Civil Rights movement was seen as a success because of the awareness it raised to the public. However it didn’t seem to change the attitudes of many white Americans.  
During the 1950s there were major events and decisions to enforce the end of segregation in schools. One of these major decisions was Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education.   In this case the NAACP challenged the right of the local school boards, to run segregated schools and on the 17th May 1954, the Supreme Court decided that segregation in schools was illegal under the constitution as “separate but equal”. In 1957 the events in Little Rock proved to be further progress for the Civil Rights movement.   Nine black teenagers were set to attend Little Rock Central High School, when they were refused entry to the school by the National Guard. The media played a critical part in events that followed at Little Rock. They highlighted the white backlash and showed the injustices that blacks lived with as well as displaying pictures of racist behaviour and assaults.   It encouraged popular support for the civil rights movement and negative P.R. for white racism; as well as drawing massive global attention to Little Rock, it also forced the U.S government to act and support the civil rights movement. Eventually the students were allowed entry to the school, the abuse that followed showed the American public and the whole world how much of a problem segregation was.  
Bus segregation laws in the 1950s reformed after the arrest of Rosa Parks; who was promptly arrested after refusing to give up her seat for a white man. This arrest resulted in a twenty four hour bus boycott, which was so successful, it continued until bus companies agreed to end segregation; it was commonly known as the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott was extremely damaging to bus companies as they lost a huge majority of their passengers. Demonstrations made by white Americans were not effective and in 1956 the...