Bill Clinton: “My public schools were not integrated until 2 years after I left. That's the point I was trying to make with Ernest. The…”

“My public schools were not integrated until 2 years after I left. That's the point I was trying to make with Ernest. The integration of the schools throughout the South basically took about 15 years after the Brown decision. So I'm a little bit younger than Ernie, not much. And so our school--what happened was, a lot of these school districts sat around and waited for the Justice Department to come after them, the Federal Government to say, where is your plan, or for somebody to force the States to adopt a plan. And that's why I wanted to make the point that after Brown v. Board of Education, all of these schools didn't integrate overnight, and it took a significant number of years before it happened throughout the South and throughout the country. Ernest Green. Mr. President, I think one of the things you want to point out about the Little Rock case is that Little Rock was much earlier than many of the other cases, and that the fact that the Federal Government finally used their power and might to underscore it may have helped, I like to think, fuel part of the modern civil rights movement. As you know from the movie, we had 1,000 paratroopers that came to Little Rock to enforce the Court order. But this was the first time that school desegregation had been undergirded by Federal support in that manner.”