After the famous Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, Washington immediately integrated the schools the next year.
In 1975, as a cub reporter, I covered the launch of court-ordered busing that integrated the schools in Louisville, Ky., and its suburbs.
I could have apologized for the actions of the board of trustees; instead, I helped integrate the school.
After Gov. Orval Faubus refused to integrate the school, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered federal troops to escort the students.
But Ms. Silberman, who took over as principal in 2004, is intent on rebuilding the auto program and integrating the school's dual vocational and academic missions.
In the resulting film, "Crisis" (also in the Criterion set), Robert Kennedy proved to be a master strategist, while his associate Nicholas Katzenbach, working in Tuscaloosa, devised and calmly executed the tactical confrontation with Wallace which proved successful in integrating the school.
When the question of co-education arose in the nineteen-nineties, Clare Wolfowitz, a board member, argued that the geographic isolation of the campus would make life unduly stressful for the women tasked with integrating the school.
As state president of the N.A.A.C.P. at the time, she helped select the nine students to integrate the school, and she counseled them and their families throughout the ordeal.
Integrating the school was an early test of Brown v. the Board of Education, a landmark Supreme Court ruling that having separate high schools for white and black children was a violation of the Constitution.
