DEFYING BROWN

In May 1954, the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education struck down racial segregation in public schools. In response, white Americans organized widespread political, social, and economic campaigns to defy the Court’s decision and defeat what they considered “invading agitators” aiming to disrupt their “way of life.” Throughout the Civil Rights Movement, white Americans in the South and across the country participated in systematic efforts to oppose racial equality and prevent social progress.

Southern white political leaders condemned Brown and vowed to oppose it. The governors of Georgia, South Carolina, and Mississippi publicly stated they intended to maintain school segregation, even if it meant they had to dissolve public education altogether. White parents throughout the South participated in public protests that often grew violent and political backlash grew.

In March 1956, 19 senators and 77 representatives – most of the South’s representatives in Congress –– signed Virginia Senator Harry Byrd’s “Southern Manifesto on Integration,” which denounced Brown as a “clear abuse of judicial power” orchestrated by “outside agitators.” The document accused the Court of jeopardizing white people’s “habits, traditions, and way of life” and pledged the South to all “lawful means” of opposition. At the same time, the legislatures of eight Southern states – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia – enacted “interposition” resolutions that denounced Brown as an “illegal encroachment” on states’ rights and declared it “null, void and of no effect.”

Through legal delay and minimal compliance policies, white Southerners launched a campaign of “massive resistance” that stalled school integration in the South. By 1960, only 98 of Arkansas’s 104,000 Black students attended desegregated schools; as did 34 of North Carolina’s 302,000; 169 of Tennessee’s 146,000; and 103 of Virginia’s 203,000. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3 percent of the South’s African Americans attended school with white students – and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, that number remained substantially below 1 percent.

As an October 1960 article in Commentary Magazine observed, “If school integration in the South were to continue at its 1959 rate, it would take four thousand years for all Southern Negro children to achieve their right to educational opportunity.”

White Americans vowed "massive resistance" to Brown v. Board of Education’s requirement to desegregate schools.