Massive Resistance 1

Running head: Massive Resistance

Brown v. Board of Education and Massive Resistance

Kom Jerry Case

EDFON641 History of American Education

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Brown v. Board of Education and Massive Resistance

“We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal"

has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the

plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of

the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the

Fourteenth Amendment…” (Supreme Court of The United States, 1954) with this opinion Chief

Justice Warren, and the Supreme Court, would begin the change educational equality and

unleash Southern Massive Resistance. As southern states set about to resisting the Brown v.

Board of Education decision Virginia and Harry F. Byrd stood out as being influential in the

movement to resist school desegregation.

Many southern states while disagreeing with the courts decision did little in the way of

protesting the order to desegregate. South Carolina’s Jimmy Byrnes reported that he was

‘shocked’ at the decision, North Carolina’s William B. Umstead claimed that he was ‘terribly’

disappointed, but surprisingly added that because it was the highest court in t e land that had

spoken, the decision ought to be obeyed (Lewis, Massive resistance : the white response to the

civil rights movement, 2006, p.27). Many states began making preparations for compliance,

Deep Southern states entrenched themselves deeper to resistance, and other states in varying

degrees hesitated, watched, waited, and searched for leadership (Bartley,1969, p.68). Many

states did set up commissions with specific mandates to devise appropriate responses, but upon

closer inspection at the correspondence of those involved suggest that many were little more than

discussion meetings on how to hold the status quo (Lewis, Massive resistance : the white

response to the civil rights movement, 2006, p.30).

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Within a month after the passing of Brown the first legislative reactions that were

introduced, and enacted into law, began to appear to begin legislative Massive Resistance. The

Louisiana legislature in 1954 passed a so-called “police power” amendment and in November

voters approved the measure by a five to one majority (Wilhoit, 1973, p.35). The purpose of the

amendment was to establish the principle that segregation was a matter of “health and morals”

and subject to only regulation by the states inherent police power. The courts would later

invalidate this amendment (Wilhoit, 1973, p.35). Alabama legislators recommended to

Governor Persons that a constitutional amendment be offered to the voters that would allow the

legislature, in extreme cases, to abolish the state’s public school system (Wilhoit, 1973, p.35).

Mississippi’s legislators convened in special session on September 7th and approved a

constitutional amendment similar to the one proposed in Alabama, it permitted the total abolition

of public schools if other ways of preventing school intergration failed (Wilhoit, 1973, p.35). It

aslo authroized local school authorities to abolish specific schoos under integration orders, and

provided for the payment of tuition grants to children attending private schools.

As Southern states looked for ways of delaying or refusing to desegregate schools the

Supreme Court issued an enforcement ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in May of 1955.

This ruling would come to be known as Brown II and was issued on the implementation of the

original Brown case (Leidholdt, 1997, p68). States found two areas in the Brown II decision

that would allow them to continue delaying desegregation. The first, while the decision required

‘prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance’ with the original Brown decision, the exact

timeframe for compliance was an abstract requirement for it to take place with ‘all deliberate

speed’ (Lewis, 2006, p.31). The second, being that the Court placed the responsibility of

implenting the decision in the hands of lower local courts and school boards, which were
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composed of the very opponents of desegregation (Lewis, 2006, p.31). As a result many states

would further delay and battle desegregation of Southern schools.

As anger and resistance to desgregation grew Virginia and it’s political leaders began to

emerge as the vocal opposition to desegreation. Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd was the first to

use the term “Massive Resistance” in a speech he gave on February 1956 in response the

Supreme Courts decisions on desegregation of schools. Senator Byrd made it clear that he was

not advocating or condoning violence in opposing of the Court’s decision or enforcement, he

was instead seeking to get Southern states to unite in declaring the court’s opinion being

unconstitutional. “If we can organize the Southern States for massive resistance to this order I

think that in time the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be

accepted in the South” (The Associated Press, 1956). Senator Byrd supported the use of

“interposition” as a means to challenge the Court’s decisions. Interposition refers to the right of

the states to protect their interests from federal violation deemed by those states to be dangerous

or unconstitutional (Williams, 2010). Soon after Byrd’s speech nineteen Senators and eighty-

one Representatives signed a document called “The Southern Manifesto” that was brought to the

floor and presented by Georgia’s Senator Walter F. George. The Manifesto condemned the

"unwarranted decision" of the Court in Brown as a "clear abuse of judicial power" in which the

Court "with no legal basis for such action, undertook to exercise their naked judicial power and

substituted their personal political and social ideas for the established law of the land." The

signers pledged themselves "to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision

which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation." It

was signed by nineteen of the twenty-two southern senators, by every member of the

congressional delegations from Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and
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Virginia, by all but one of the representatives from Florida, all but one from Tennessee, all but

three from North Carolina, and half of the Texas delegation (Badger, 2008).

The Manifesto’s idea was that of the Freshman Senator Strum Thurmond and he was

merely tapping into the popular sentiment of the Southern public but also of the political leaders

opposition to desegregation. What Thurmond hoped to achieve by his manifesto was to enforce

this unanimity of opinion on defiance of the Supreme Court in other parts of the South, to force

other politicians, who might waver in their commitment to segregation, to proclaim their

determination to protect traditional patterns of race relations. As far as Thurmond was

concerned, the manifesto was certainly "not for home consumption." Rather, the aim was to

"obtain unity of action" throughout the South. As Thurmond and his staff were subsequently

proud to point out, the core of Thurmond's original version of the manifesto remained intact after

all the various drafts and revisions of the Declaration: in particular, his reading of the

Constitution, the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment, judicial precedents for separate but equal,

and the importance of parental control over education (Badger, 2008). But being that Thurmond

was a Freshman Senator his Manifesto idea would have died an early death if not for Virginia’s

Harry F. Byrd, who was instrumental in bringing it to life. Senator Byrd was able to get Walter

George to convene a meeting of southern senators to rally support and solidarity in disapproval

of the Court’s decision. The document itself had no legal standing and required no congressional

action, yet it provided a dramatic challenge of the South’s’ ruling oligarchs to the supremacy of

federal law and authority in the states of the South (Wilhoit, 1973, p.52).

A retrospective analysis of the Manifesto would indicate that the drafters, and signers,

had at least ten purposes in mind. They were:

1) to reassert and antebellum conception of federalism; 2) to stress the illegitimacy of the

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Brown decision; 3) to rehabilitate Plessy’s view of the equal protection clause of the

fourteenth amendment; 4) to convince southern opinion that the Brown opinion was an

act of naked usurpation by the Supreme Court; 5) to urge states’-rightists throughout the

nation to make the South’s cause their own; 6) to give hope to local officials who were

seeking ways to avoid desegregation; 7) to put the prestige of a part of the United States

Congress behind southern resistance; 8) to scare white southerners with threats of

invasions by outside agitators; 9) to polarize white opinion in the South by forcing

moderates to come out for or against Brown; and 10) to nip in the bud the undercurrent of

“inevitability” about desegregation that had been rising in the South since the spring of

1954 (Wilhoit, 1973,p.52).

The Southern Manifesto met with condemnation from other Senators Democrats and

Republicans alike. Senator Pat McNamara, Democrat from Michigan, told the Senate the

Manifesto was “a matter so shameful that it will forever be a dark page in American history”

(Drury, 1956). McNamara continued his criticism by stating, “ This declaration may not be

outright sedition, but it certainly is subversive in its intent to undermine the integrity of the

judicial system of this nation.” He additional said “no amount of phrasing in this declaration—

such as the pledge to use ‘lawful means’ to reverse the Supreme Court decision—can dim the

hatred and open defiance of law and order poorly hidden within.” (Drury,1956). Senator Richard

L. Neuberger, Democrat from Oregon, urged President Eisenhower to call a White House

Conference on race relations and the creation of a commission to protect constitutional rights of

minority groups.

“This developing crisis in our democracy is so grave it holds such danger to our country

both at home and in the eyes of the world that it is incumbent on the President to use the
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great resources of leadership inherent in his office to stop this growing crisis before

incalculable damage has been done.

“Can any issued demand the President’s attention today more immediately and more

urgently than the security and the civil rights of Americans, and the stature of our country

as a true democracy in the eyes of the world?” (Drury, 1956)

From the years 1956 to the 1960 saw a flurry of state initiatives to resist or delay school

desegregation through out the Southern states. Initiatives ranged from laws that would have

given states the right to close schools that faced or were forced to desegregate. Many states did

follow through on the closing of schools especially in Virginia. As one of the original litigants in

the Brown vs. Board of education, Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, the

county board of supervisors closed all Prince Edward County schools for 5 years from 1959 to

1964 (Civil Rights Movement Veterans, 2009).

Laws were passed for the use of state funds to promote school choice to allow white

students to attend private all white schools. In the area of funding additional actions were taken

to limit or to completely forbid integrated schools from receiving any state funds (Winston,

2009, p.31). Several Southern states tried to pass laws making the NAACP and it’s actions

illegal. Many of these laws and other gave rise to “white flight” to from urban city areas and

gave rise to suburban areas.

One of the more frequently used methods of fighting the Court’s ruling was through the

use of the outdated doctrine of “interposition”. As mentioned earlier interposition represented

the extreme limit of the states’ rights doctrine, for its adherents claimed that the legislatures of

individual sovereign states had the right – and the power – to intercede if the federal government

overstepped its legitimate authority in a manner that threatened of those states (Lewis, 2006,
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p.62). By the end of 1956 Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana,

and North Carolina had all formally adopted resolutions that linked them to interposition,

ranging from Georgia’s claim that was nothing less than ‘the duty of the state’ to interpose it’s

powers in such a flagrant abuse of federal powers as that borne out by the Supreme Court in

Brown, to Alabama’s assertion that the Brown decisions were ‘as a matter of right null, void, and

of no effect’, and that, as a result, ‘this State is not bound to abide by them’ (Lewis, 2006, p63).

It was hoped that interposition would transform from a less defensive obstructive to a

more constructive and active approach. It’s not quite know when interposition first appeared but

some give Georgia’s Herman Talmadge credit when he met with his advisors in 1951 while some

credit to a white supremacist group, The Committee of 52’, from South Carolina when they

issued a declaration of principles that included interposition in August 1955 (Lewis, 2006, p.62).

Credit can be given to editorial page editor of the News Leader, James Jackson Kilpatrick, who

gave statewide, South-wide, and national prominence to interposition in a three part editorial.

Kilpatrick drew upon the work and legacy of Jefferson and Madison to renovate interposition.

The ‘principles enunciated so forcefully’ by the tow men during the Kentucky-Virginia

Resolutions, he wrote in the first of those three editorials, surely has ‘great validity today (Lewis,

2006, p63). By the second editorial, Kilparick was talking in terms of the ‘Right of

Interposition’. On the third day, there were five editorials espousing interposition, one f which

stated unevquivocally that ‘Unless interposition in made now, in a desperate effort to hal this

process of judicial amendment of the Constitution, the States invevitably will be reduced to non-

entities; and the whole structure of our Union will be radically altered.’ (Lewis, 2006, p.63).

By end of the 1950’s and beginning of the early 1960’s the Massive Resistance

movement began to fade as the Supreme Court struck down all challenges to the Brown decision
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and with the passage of the Civil Rights act in 1964 all Southern schools were forced to

desegregate. The legacy of the Massive resistance movement and it’s bitter fight still linger

today as many black students still struggle for access to equal educational opportunties afforded

them.
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Bibliography

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Policy History , 20 (1), 126-142.

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Drury, A. (1956, March 15). Senate Liberals Score Manifesto. The New York Times , p. 1.
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Leidholdt, A. (1997). Standing Before The Shouting Mob. Tuscaloosa, AL, US: The University
of Alabama Press.

Lewis, G. (2006). Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Righst Movement. New
York, NY, US: Hodder Arnold.

The Associated Press. (1956, February 26). Byrd Calls on South To Challenge Court. New Your
Times , p. 1.

Wilhoit, F. M. (1973). The Politics of Massive Resistance. New York, NY, US: George Braziller,
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Williams, B. (2010, February 28). The Cyclical History of Interposition and Nullification. (B.
Williams, Producer, & Huffington Post) Retrieved April 5, 2010, from Huffington Post:
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Winston, B. V. (2009, June 1). Massive Resistance. The Crisis , pp. 28-34.
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