As elsewhere, the hardest part of the struggle for integration in Tallahassee concerned the school system. Despite the unanimous Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional, and a court statement in 1955 that compliance with the decision should take place "with all deliberate speed" (Brown II), no schools in Florida were desegregated until 1959 (and only one school, in Miami, was integrated that year). Many Floridians viewed "Brown v. Board of Education" as "a day of catastrophe — a Black Monday — a day something like Pearl Harbor". Although the desegregation process in Florida brought less violence and upheaval than in other Southern states, Florida counties resisted integration "by every means", and local lawsuits in federal courts, on a county by county basis, were necessary for integration to take place. Leon County "fought school integration as tenaciously as any community in Florida". Florida schools were not fully desegregated until the late 1960s, and in Tallahassee, only after the "dyed-in-the-wool segregationists", as school Superintendent Freeman Ashmore called them, had decamped for three newly-founded segregation academies: Maclay School, North Florida Christian High School, and Maranatha Christian Academy (closed). Governor LeRoy Collins (1955-1961) supported (gradual) school desegregation—the first Southern official to do so—but the legislature passed a resolution declaring Brown v. Board of Education "null and void", as a federal imposition on states' rights. "By the time Collins left office in 1961, Tallahassee, like most of Florida, remained committed to preserving a segregated school system."