A decade and a half earlier in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

In a later decision by the Court in May 1955 known as Brown II, school districts were given the ambiguous order to desegregate "with all deliberate speed.

[10][11] The Board of Education's resistance to integration had already been emboldened by North Carolina's passage of the Pupil Assignment Act in April 1955.

[12] In response to these developments, fifteen local African American parents presented a petition to the school district in August 1956 calling for the abolition of segregation, which the board refused to consider.

A federal lawsuit was subsequently filed in December 1956 asking for the immediate desegregation of Caswell County and North Carolina schools.

[13] In August 1957, 43 local students, many of whom were plaintiffs via their parents in the federal court case, applied for admission to public schools that were closer to their homes than the segregated ones they had been assigned.

Saunders Sr., the KKK's threats caused him to miss a school board reassignment hearing ordered by the judge in August 1961 prior to his final judgment.

[16] A year after the Saunders decision, Stanley ruled that the school district had been improperly administering the Pupil Assignment Act.

[12] On their first day of school, a group of white men harassed and threatened one of the parents, Jasper Brown, who was a local civil rights leader and farmer.

[21][12] By late 1967, only 57 African American children out of a Black student population of approximately 3,000 were attending integrated public schools in Caswell County.

[23] Its "freedom of choice" plan put the onus of integration on individual African American students and parents, who had to opt to cross the color line themselves.

[8][12] The school district's low integration rate resulted in the U.S. Office of Education citing the county in 1966 as one of seven in the state that were not in compliance with its civil rights Title IV guidelines.