National Guard troops played a role in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and early 1960s. Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the National Guard to bar black students from Little Rock Central High School in 1957 (later withdrawing them under pressure from President Eisenhower), but National Guard troops under federal control enforced desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962 and the University of Alabama in 1963, and protected marchers in Selma, Ala., in 1965. Later that decade, the Guard would revert to its traditional role of suppressing unrest: in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965, in Cleveland and Dayton, Ohio, in 1966, Detroit and Newark, N.J., in 1967 and nearly everywhere in the country after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. National Guard troops under federal control would also protected marchers and escorted integrated students. #civilrights...
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