The assault on school inequality, though centrally planned and coordinated, rested on local activism by black parents and students fed up with the woefully inadequate schools and second-class treatment they had to deal with. It took extraordinary courage for them to take on the established racial order. One of the five cases consolidated in the Brown decision involved the schools in Clarendon County, South Carolina, where in 1949 the NAACP challenged the vast inequity in schooling for whites and blacks. The plaintiffs in the case soon found themselves fired from their jobs, denied credit, and in one instance the victim of house arson. Another of the Brown cases began with a two-week strike by 450 black high school students in Prince Edward County, Virginia, protesting the miserable condition of their school. The parents of the strike leader, sixteen-year-old Barbara Johns, so feared for her safety—the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on their lawn—that they sent her to Montgomery, Alabama, to live with her uncle, Vernon Johns, a Baptist minister and uncompromising critic of segregation.
Authorities in many parts of the South, worried that the federal courts would find unequal facilities unconstitutional, increased spending on black schools. Prince Edward County built a new high school for black students, which opened in 1953. But by then the NAACP had shifted its line of attack, beginning in 1950 to argue that segregated schools were inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. The only constitutional remedy would be desegregation.
The case that gave Brown its name carried the most weight in the argument that segregation in itself violated the law. After Linda Brown was denied admittance to a white elementary school in Topeka, Kansas, her father, Oliver, whose unionized job as a welder for a railroad offered him some protection from economic reprisal, became a plaintiff for a suit brought by the NAACP seeking to desegregate the city’s schools. The suit highlighted that school segregation was not simply a southern practice but a national one; Kansas was one of four states—along with Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming—that allowed school districts to practice racial segregation if they chose to, while seventeen other states, in the South and the border region, required it. In Topeka, there were not gross inequities between the schools for whites and blacks. For the Browns, the chief issue was that segregation meant that Linda had a much longer and more dangerous trip to school than if she could attend the one nearest to her home. The NAACP introduced an additional issue by contending, with support from social scientists it recruited to testify, that racial segregation, especially when enforced by government, had a detrimental effect on black children, denoting their inferiority, undermining their motivation to learn, and retarding their educational and emotional development.
The Supreme Court heard the Brown case in December 1952. Not eager to make a quick decision, it asked for a rehearing, which took place a year later. By then President Eisenhower had appointed Earl Warren as chief justice, succeeding Fred Vinson, who had died in September. Finally, in May 1954, the Court issued a short, unanimous ruling that in public education, “separate education facilities are inherently unequal” and unconstitutional. Agreeing with the NAACP, it declared that for black children segregation “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in their community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.”
As a statement of law and national policy, Brown proved thunderous, stripping segregation of the legitimacy it had long enjoyed through its endorsement by the federal government. The ruling went a long way toward denationalizing and defederalizing the legal structures of white supremacy, and it inspired civil rights advocates to press harder for racial equality and justice. But Brown did very little to change its immediate subject, the racial segregation of public schools.
The Supreme Court took a year to issue an order implementing Brown. In the interim, some school districts, largely in border states, desegregated on their own. Baltimore dropped all racial bars to school enrollment, and the city’s Catholic schools and public housing authority soon desegregated as well. In Topeka, the school board decided to desegregate even before the Supreme Court heard the case that originated there.
Initial reactions farther south varied greatly. Many of the major white southern religious denominations endorsed Brown, including the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, though local church leaders fell on both sides of the issue. (In the same year as Brown, Billy Graham began refusing to allow segregated seating at his revival meetings, even in the Deep South.) Some southern elected officials suggested that they would accept the Court decision, while others vowed to resist it.
Over time, the balance swung to the resisters. In the summer following the Brown decision, leading white citizens in the Mississippi Delta founded the White Citizens’ Council to resist desegregation, using economic reprisals to discourage African Americans from seeking to register to vote, send their children to integrated schools, or in other ways assert their rights. Similar groups soon sprang up in other states, like the North Carolina Patriots and the Southern Gentlemen in Louisiana. Many prominent southern politicians began coming out against Brown, culminating in a March 1956 “Southern Manifesto” signed by 101 members of Congress, condemning the decision as a “clear abuse of judicial power” and pledging that the South would use “all lawful means” to resist it. Many southern states began using anticommunist laws and hearings against the civil rights movement, especially the NAACP, setting up agencies to report on the purported involvement of subversives in the struggle for black rights. Mississippi’s State Sovereignty Commission, created in 1956, developed into a secret police force that worked closely with the Citizens’ Councils to spy on and undermine civil rights groups.
The unequal apportionment of seats in southern state legislatures, giving disproportionate power to heavily black rural areas, where whites were particularly vehement in opposing desegregation and few if any blacks could vote, contributed to the passage of a rash of new segregationist laws. Louisiana amended its constitution to make school integration illegal. Voters in Georgia and Mississippi approved amendments to their constitutions allowing their legislatures to close schools rather than desegregate them. Georgia made it a felony for a state or local official to spend money on an integrated school. South Carolina repealed its compulsory education law. Virginia authorized closing any school that desegregated and giving tuition assistance to white students who wanted to attend a private, all-white school. Prince Edward County did just that, shutting down its school system for four years rather than allow black and white students to attend it together. North Carolina introduced what proved to be one of the most effective means of resisting desegregation, a pupil assignment law that without mentioning race gave school boards wide discretion in deciding which school each student would attend. Like Virginia, North Carolina also authorized tuition grants to whites attending segregated private schools.
The failure of the federal government to firmly back Brown encouraged resistance. Though the Eisenhower administration submitted an amicus curiae brief that largely supported the Brown plaintiffs, the president, while saying he would uphold the ruling, never publicly endorsed it. Privately, he thought it a mistake, sympathizing with southern whites, eager to make sure, as he told Earl Warren at a White House dinner during the Court’s deliberations, “that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negro.” Most national Democratic leaders did not differ with Eisenhower’s public stand. Adlai Stevenson urged caution in using federal power to enforce Brown, saying that you “do not upset habits and traditions that are older than the Republic overnight.” Most importantly, the Supreme Court itself failed to issue a forceful implementation order for Brown. Rejecting a request from the NAACP for immediate desegregation, the Court remanded the Brown cases to lower courts for enforcement, instructing them that the defendants needed to make “a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance at the earliest practicable date,” with desegregation to occur “with al
l deliberate speed.”
The combination of determined resistance and a lack of enforcement meant that very little desegregation occurred during the decade after Brown. In five southern states, until the fall of 1960 not a single black child attended a racially integrated school, while in others, like North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, only a tiny fraction of the black student body did so. In 1964, a full ten years after Brown, Charleston was the only city in South Carolina that had desegregated any schools. That year, across the South, only 1 percent of black public-school children attended racially integrated schools.
African American Mobilization
The southern mobilization in defense of white supremacy, sparked by Brown, reversed some black gains. Black voter registration in the region fell, in Mississippi from twenty-two thousand in 1952 to just eight thousand in 1956, in South Carolina from two hundred thousand to sixty thousand in the five years after Brown. New southern laws so restricted the NAACP that over two hundred of its southern branches had to shut down and its southern membership dropped by a third. Extralegal racial violence, which had diminished in the years before Brown, rose in its wake, especially in rural areas, as the Ku Klux Klan and other extreme white supremacy organizations blossomed and individual acts of terrorism became more common.
The escalating white southern violence did not go unchallenged. Black migration to the North created interregional networks that could be mobilized to protest violence in the South, and the national media increasingly paid attention to developments in the region, as evident following a particularly horrifying 1955 Mississippi murder. Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American from Chicago, went to a small rural settlement in the Mississippi Delta to spend part of his summer vacation with relatives. A week after arriving, apparently in response to a dare, he walked into a small crossroads store to speak to the young wife of the white store owner, by various accounts whistling at her, speaking cheekily to her, or touching her, all transgressions of the white southern racial code (though some close to the case denied that he did any of these things). When the store owner found out about the incident, he and his brother-in-law went to Till’s great-uncle’s house, took the boy away, beat him savagely, shot him, and threw his weighted body into the Tallahatchie River, where it was found three days later. Though there was no direct connection between Till’s murder and the Brown decision, it came at a moment of heightened white southern anxiety that the system of racial supremacy might be eroding, focused especially on the often expressed fear that school desegregation would lead to interracial socializing and sex.
Till’s mother’s insistence that his mutilated body be returned to Chicago shaped subsequent developments. Thousands of mourners viewed Till’s corpse, and shocking pictures of it were published in the black press. The national and international media gave extensive coverage to the case, making Till one of the few victims of southern racial violence to have his name enter national consciousness. Back in Mississippi, Till’s murderers were almost immediately arrested and put on trial. In an act of extraordinary courage, defying long-established norms, Till’s great-uncle, Moses Wright, a sharecropper, identified them in open court, before fleeing the state to save his own life. Till’s murder and the acquittal of its perpetrators by an all-white male jury spread terror among southern blacks but also enraged them, as did the failure of Brown to lead to meaningful change in schooling.
Heightened impatience with injustice burst the channels of private sentiment into public action just two months after the Till trial with the mass boycott of buses in Montgomery, Alabama. There, as in Baton Rouge, bus segregation grated on the black community, including its leaders, some of whom had suffered personal indignities using public transportation. In 1954 the Women’s Political Caucus, a group of black professional women, asked the city to reform the bus segregation system, making a veiled threat of a boycott if it failed to do so. Meanwhile, the local NAACP chapter, with E. D. Nixon as its driving force, began planning to legally challenge bus segregation. On December 1, 1955, NAACP member and civil rights activist Rosa Parks, who worked as an assistant tailor at a downtown department store, was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white rider in violation of state law. Upon hearing of her arrest, the small circle of Montgomery civil rights advocates swung into action. Nixon, Joanne Robinson, an English professor at Alabama State College who helped lead the Women’s Political Caucus, and Clifford and Virginia Durr, white Popular Front liberals, who had returned to Alabama after Clifford held various posts in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, bailed out Parks, decided to use her case to legally challenge segregation, and distributed a leaflet calling for a one-day bus boycott.
The individuals who initiated the bus protest represented forces long involved in fighting for black rights in the South: the NAACP, black trade unionists, black academics, and a smattering of white liberals. But Nixon, understanding the limitations of the movement he himself came out of, decided from the start that a mass boycott would succeed only if it had a stronger institutional base, and the only place that existed was the church. Nixon pulled together a meeting of local black leaders to organize the protest, at which ministers played the dominant role. In short order the group constituted itself as the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and picked as its president the twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister new to the city, who had few enemies, an impressive speaking style, and gravity beyond his years.
On the day of the boycott, very few African Americans boarded buses. The solidarity displayed and the enormous turnout at a meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church called by the MIA led the group to decide to make the boycott open-ended. King—not well known at the time to Montgomery blacks, let alone to the nation—told the crowd, which flowed out of the church for blocks around (with loudspeakers set up outside) that “there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time . . . when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. . . . We are here this evening because we are tired now.” “The great glory of American democracy,” King declared, “is the right to protest for right.” “We are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Initially, the boycott made modest demands: a first-come, first-served segregation system (like that asked for in Baton Rouge and already used in a number of Alabama cities); courteous treatment of black riders; and the hiring of African American drivers for routes in black parts of the city. Copying the model developed in Baton Rouge, the MIA set up an elaborate transportation system to carry black boycotters using private cars and later station wagons it purchased. Also as in Baton Rouge, frequent mass meetings held in churches disseminated information, raised money, and kept up morale.
The refusal of city authorities and the bus company to make meaningful changes turned what MIA leaders had expected to be a short boycott into a battle of attrition. City officials tried to break the boycott by going after the MIA transportation system and enforcing an antiboycott law, but their efforts failed. Instead, after King was arrested as part of a police campaign harassing carpool drivers, the MIA upped its demand to insist on complete bus desegregation, the private goal of many activists all along. Bombs thrown at King’s and Nixon’s homes failed to derail the protest.
As months went by, the Montgomery boycott and King received growing national publicity and increasing support in the North from African American churches, unions, liberal groups, and politicians. King, influenced by veteran practitioners of Gandhian nonviolence who came to Montgomery to work with the MIA, increasingly described the bus protest as an application of the idea of confrontational nonviolence to the struggle for racial equality, an idea he saw as deeply Christian. But while prophetic Christianity kept the boycott going, its triumph came through the la
w. Even after the Montgomery bus company, seeing its losses mount, indicated a willingness to negotiate an end to the boycott, city authorities resisted any change. In November 1956 they ran out of options; almost a full year after the boycott began, the U.S. Supreme Court declared state and local laws in Alabama requiring the segregation of buses to be unconstitutional.
The Montgomery struggle represented a break from the past. While the NAACP focused on using legal action to push for social change, the MIA made mass, direct action the centerpiece of its strategy, using the courts only as an adjunct. Montgomery also brought the church into a far more central position than it had been in past civil rights efforts. In doing so, it threw up a new southern-based civil rights leadership, most notably in the person of King, whose eloquence and charismatic presence brought him national and international fame.
King and the activists he became close to during the Montgomery struggle hoped to use the excitement it created to launch a new push for civil rights. To coordinate it, they founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which served as the political agency of those black churches that embraced civil rights activism. Its strength lay in local affiliates, like the MIA and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, founded by a militant Birmingham minister, Fred Shuttlesworth, which were being organized in part to fill the vacuum created by the repression of the NAACP. But cash poor and lacking strong central leadership, the SCLC got off to a slow start.
In the meantime, the campaign to desegregate schools remained the main arena of civil rights struggle, as white resistance grew increasingly ugly. It took three years of litigation for Autherine Lucy to win admission to the University of Alabama library school in February 1956. By then, many previously all-white southern colleges and universities had begun admitting black students, at least on a token basis. But at Alabama, white students, joined by older, hard-core white supremacists, rioted to protest Lucy’s admission. When a mob of a thousand threw eggs and bricks at her as she left a class and threatened to kill her, the university suspended her, saying that it was to protect her and other students and staff. It then expelled her when she challenged its action in court. This was the first use of organized violence aimed at a student to try to stop school desegregation, the beginning of a trend by segregationists to try to physically harm black students attempting to attend once all-white schools.
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