Remember when we had presidents who just followed the law instead of whining about activist judges?

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http://www.suntimes.com/news/steinberg/571326,CST-NWS-stein24.article

Little Rock + 50

Fifty years ago today, the mayor of Little Rock, Ark., Woodrow Mann, sent a telegram to the president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, asking him to dispatch troops to contain the crisis that had been building for weeks at Central High School.

Early that month, all-white Central High had tried to admit nine black students, in accord with the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision that rejected the fiction of "separate but equal" schools for blacks and whites as unconstitutional.

The governor of Arkansas, a man with the comic opera name of Orval Faubus, resisted desegregation at Central High. He ordered the Arkansas National Guard to the school to bar the black students from entering and went on television with the unsupported claim that outraged white mobs were descending on Little Rock.

Eisenhower -- who privately disagreed with the Brown decision -- dithered, meeting with Faubus and extracting promises to remove the guardsmen, promises the governor reneged on when he got back to Little Rock. When the nine tried to return to school, in late September, the white mobs that Faubus had imagined took their cue and showed up in reality.

After receiving the telegram, Eisenhower took control of the National Guard away from Faubus and dispatched U.S. Army soldiers to Little Rock. When the sun came up on Sept. 25 -- 50 years ago tomorrow -- a thousand paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division were positioned, bayonets fixed, around the school, ready for when the nine black students arrived for class in an Army station wagon.

I tell this story at length, even though I harbor hope that it will be familiar to many, because I consider it a great moment in American history, like Washington crossing the Delaware. Such a story demands frequent retelling.

Why? Because it is a story of courage -- the courage of the Little Rock Nine. The courage, albeit belated, of Eisenhower, who did not whine about "activist judges" but respected the law, even above his own feelings.

Not because the civil rights struggle began or ended on that day. It didn't. The Little Rock school system fought desegregation to the Supreme Court (which declared, a year later, in Cooper vs. Aaron, "Law and order are not to be preserved by depriving the Negro children of their constitutional rights.") And not because everything is fine now.

But I don't think that imperfect race relations today means we can't be proud of the progress of the past. That isn't how we treat other long, complicated stories -- we don't tut-tut the discovery of anesthesia because we haven't cured cancer yet.

Even after half a century, we are too close to these events to understand their true significance. The civil rights movement should be recognized as being on par with the formative events of this nation. The Bill of Rights was written by one group of Americans, who struggled and fought and died for it, but it took another group of Americans -- of all races, like it or not -- to struggle and fight and sometimes die to take those noble words and make them apply to all Americans everywhere. Little Rock was an important step in that process, and if we don't rank Sept. 25 with July 4 and Dec. 7, we should.