As Labor Day's approach sends students across the U.S. heading back to class, they and their parents naturally hope that this back-to-school season will be smooth and happy. But just a few decades ago, that return to the classroom was in many places dominated by a serious struggle — the fight over the right to equality in education.
Though the most famous photographs of the conflict over school integration would be taken the following year in Little Rock, Ark., in 1956 school integration was, as LIFE put it in a story that September, already "the greatest unresolved national issue." The Supreme Court had ruled on the matter in Brown v. Board of Education two years before, but the implementation of that order was still being met with violence in places like Clinton, Tenn., as seen in the photos above by Howard Sochurek and Robert W. Kelley.
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