The film is Kodak Plus X Pan, don't know the ASA rating. The lens was a 50mm, which was the only lens I owned. I had a darkroom and developed, enlarged, and printed all my own stuff. That picture of the Black gentleman and the white woman at the top of the stairs about to enter whatever building was assigned for the hearing was published by some, mostly local, newspapers because it illustrated, for the white community, that Negroes had as much to bear as whites did when their children were bussed out of their neighborhoods to schools in another part of town. I was on this bus trip as a member of the people protesting because I had bought a house right across the street from the elementary school my six year old son would be attending and the bussing order meant that he would be going across the street and boarding a city bus that I had to pay for and taken to another neighborhood to go to school. That was my reason for being AGAINST bussing (and I still am against it).
The controversy started in the 1954 Supreme Court decision that schools must be equal, not separate and equal, because the schools relied (and still do) on property taxes to fund them and the neighborhoods with people who made more money had more money for the schools. Anyhow, since just telling school districts to educate kids equally didn't produce any results (whites were on the school boards and in the government roles who distributed the money), the courts in some places ordered children bussed from their neighborhood schools to achieve a better racial balance. Most neighborhoods were fairly homogeneous because people like to live near other people who share their values, whites and blacks alike. (Ethnic neighborhoods is nothing new.)
That's a quickie, nutshell, explanation. You can read more here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._B ... plications
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing
thanks for the comments,
Mary