Remember: Executive Order 10730 isn't specifically about whether integration is right or wrong. It's about the president's duty to enforce the law.

Reaction to the order tends to fall into two camps—for and against—and those positions haven't changed much over time. If you think the president had to uphold the law (which happened to be the Brown decision) and was within his rights to use the military to do that, you're for it. If you think the president overstepped his bounds and should have left the state decide for itself, you're against it.

In 1957, public and congressional opinion was way more polarized than it is today about states' rights issues as they applied to racial equality. Staunch segregationists felt they had God (he made the races separate, as many noted ) on their side, and saw segregation as one of the cultural and social underpinnings of their way of life. Everyone had his or her own place in the social order and that was that. Even slavery, which everyone today considers a shameful period in U.S. history, had been defended as a states' rights issue, and many in the south hadn't quite gotten over it yet. The southern states believed that integration ordered by the courts, as opposed to being legislated, was invalid.

Segregationists didn't go down easy. One response to federal orders to integrate was to close public schools altogether. Little Rock did this in the 1958-1959 school year. One Virginia county closed its schools for five years while the issue worked its way through the courts.

Public and legislative opinions outside the South overwhelmingly supported the president's decision back in 1957, and thanks to the sacrifices of courageous civil rights activist in the '50s and '60s, there would be a steady rise in support for civil rights in all parts of the country.

Looking back on Eisenhower's actions from today's perspective, almost everyone except extremist states' rights advocates see it as a heroic move. People may argue that sending in troops was an overreaction, but most people understand that it was a dangerously escalating situation. And the troops handled themselves professionally—no one got hurt. It shut that thing right down.

TV coverage also changed a lot of people's minds about civil rights. It's tough to ignore such injustice when it's shown in your living room every evening on the news. Old fogies out there remember seeing the dogs and fire hoses that Bull Connor's policemen set on peaceful protestors in Birmingham, Alabama. They watched police systematically beating non-violent protestors as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965 en route to Montgomery to demonstrate for voting rights.

Rewind

Except for neo-Nazis and other white supremacist movements, integration as the law of the land is pretty much settled. That's not to say that we're living in a post-racial society—just check the news any day of the week to see that's not true—but nobody's overtly trying to challenge civil rights law. Many schools are segregated, but that's for different reasons that some people see as "soft" segregation: denying people of color economic and educational opportunities, harsh treatment by police, discriminatory lending policies. No one's arguing states' rights as a way to return to the days of bathroom battles.

Oh, wait.

The Obama administration has issued a series of guidelines (not orders) allowing people to use the bathroom of the gender they identify with, stating this was a civil rights issue under Title IX's sex-discrimination statues. These policies have been challenged by 21 states, most notably North Carolina, which passed a law requiring individuals to use bathrooms based on their birth gender. The states claimed the feds overstepped their authority on this one.

North Carolina is paying a price for the law. They've been boycotted by a bunch of organizations, like the NBA, who pulled their All-Star game out of Charlotte. The ACLU and the Department of Justice are both challenging the law, and like the school integration issue, it's probably going to end up in the lap of the Supreme Court.