Many local boards of education—especially in rural areas and in border states—closed their Black schools and laid off their Black teachers as they integrated their schools.

In a new report I co-authored with Alyssa Ignaczak published by Saint Louis University’s PRiME Center, we trace the consequences of this response to Brown. Alyssa and I document what happened to Missouri’s Black teachers between 1954-1970. While integration in Missouri expanded school access to Black students, it displaced thousands of Black teachers—especially in rural and small-town districts across the state.

Missouri’s Voluntary Desegregation

When the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Missouri’s state constitution required separate schools for Black and white children. Nevertheless, a couple of months after the Court’s ruling Missouri Attorney General John M. Dalton pointed out that the state’s constitutional requirements for segregated schooling could no longer be enforced. As such, many local boards of education began voluntarily desegregating their schools.

Albert P. Marshall of the HBCU Lincoln University, writing in 1956 at the beginning of Brown’s implementation, believed that integration might come quickly. Missouri “has been one in which the Constitutional law of the United States has been respected,” Marshall wrote, which might explain “the average citizen’s willingness to accept the Supreme Court decision on education.”

Missouri’s voluntary movement toward integrated schools, however, does not mean that desegregation went smoothly. Many school districts—especially in areas where there weren’t very many Black students—simply closed their Black schools and laid off their Black teachers as they complied with Brown.

This displacement of Black teachers in Missouri post-Brown was the focus of our PRiME Center report.

A Shrinking Black Teacher Workforce

Using data compiled by the Southern Education Reporting Service, we tracked changes in the percentage of Black teachers employed in Missouri’s public schools. We compared this percentage to the percentage of Black students who attend those schools. The numbers tell a stark story.

During the 1957-1958 academic year, the state of Missouri had racial parity between the percentage of Black teachers (approx. 10%) and Black students (approx. 10.2%).

The next academic year (1958-1959), as many rural and small town local boards of education integrated their districts by closing their Black schools and laying off their Black teachers, the percentage of Black teachers employed in Missouri’s classrooms dropped to approx. 7.7% while the percentage of Black students stayed close to 10%—creating a racial parity gap that only increased as Missouri continued integrating its schools.

By the 1965-1966 academic year, the percentage of Black teachers hovered around 7.9%; whereas, the percentage of Black students in Missouri public schools had increased to 13.2%.

In addition to the data from the Southern Education Reporting Service, Alyssa and I reviewed several reports from the 1960s-1970s to get a broader sense for how integration affected the Black teacher workforce in Missouri. A report by John W. Smith and Betty M. Smith, for example, found that 2,230 Black teachers were displaced across the state—which cost their communities approximately $18,042,930 (in 1973) or about $132.2 million in today’s (2026) dollars.

Why This History Still Matters

The displacement of Black teachers was the result of individual and community-based prejudices. But that’s not all it was. It was also about institutional choices.

Integration cost many Black teachers their jobs (31,584 across the seventeen southern and border states, according to some estimates) because of the way in which racial prejudice was built into structures and systems: about how school boards defined integration, whose jobs they protected, whose expertise was treated as disposable, and whose schools were deemed most valuable.

Black teachers were more than just teachers staffing classrooms. As I told a journalist from St. Louis Public Radio:

There were a number of losses that occurred, because oftentimes people had to seek other employment… it’s easy to measure income; it’s more difficult to measure the mentorship, the kind of spiritual leadership that some of these individuals may have participated in at their local church communities, and I think that is something that is hard to get back.

Missouri’s experience reminds us that early or voluntary compliance with Brown did not necessarily mean equal outcomes. In many cases, white resistance to integration simply took on bureaucratic and administrative forms of expression through the closure of historically Black schools, the non-renewal of contracts of Black teachers, and with hiring practices and desegregation processes that maintained white control over classrooms.

This history also shows us why we can’t rely solely on the courts or the law to help us create a more inclusive way of living together. As I pointed out in that St. Louis Radio feature on this research:

There are limitations to what courts can do when it comes to questions of racial justice and equity. We, as a society, have to do a better job of engaging in community-based conversation about what those questions are and how we work through them, because that’s where you really create a democratic society that extends justice, equity, and opportunity to everyone.

In future posts, I’ll dig deeper into individual small towns in Missouri, provide more details about some of the displaced Black teachers, and discuss how these early decisions shaped the racial composition of the teaching workforce beyond the post-Brown era.

More to come soon.

References

• Carroll, Boyd F. “Dalton Rules State May End Segregation in Schools at Once.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. July 1, 1954.

• Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

• Fultz, Michael. “The Displacement of Black Educators Post-Brown: An Overview and Analysis.” History of Education Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2004): 11-45.

• Henderson, Andrea Y. “Missouri Lost Thousands of Black Teachers after Integration, and the Issue Persists. St. Louis Public Radio. October 13, 2025.

• Nichols, Joseph R., and Alyssa Ignaczak. Displacement of Black Teachers in Missouri Post-Brown, 1954-1970. Policy Research in Missouri Education (PRiME) 7, no. 22.

• Smith, John W., and Betty M. Smith. “For Black Educators: Integration Brings the Axe.” The Urban Review 6, no. 3 (1973): 7-12.

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When nine Black families sued the Atlanta Public Schools for noncompliance with Brown, it looked like Georgia might follow Arkansas’s led and simply close its schools rather than integrate them. In September 1958, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had closed all public high schools in Little Rock—including Central High School—for the 1958-1959 school year. But that’s not what ended up happening in Georgia.

Georgia’s public schools remained open. It wasn’t because the state’s segregationists suddenly had a change of heart. They still preferred segregation (and would continue to work to maintain as much as possible).

It was from political pressure from a group of middle- to upper-class white women from Atlanta’s Northside neighborhoods who lobbied for open schools. Help Our Public Education (HOPE), as their organization was called, played a crucial role in Georgia’s school integration crisis.

In a new article I co-authored with Alyssa Ignaczak, published in the Georgia Historical Quarterly, we tell the story of HOPE and argue that this group of white women contributed to the demise of massive resistance in Georgia. By framing the desegregation case against the Atlanta Public Schools as a problem about children, education, and democracy, the women of HOPE neutralized the race issue—creating political cover for the state’s white segregationist leadership to keep public schools open.

This post introduces that research and explains why HOPE still matters today.

Open Schools Without Race Talk

HOPE formed in December 1958. The women of HOPE were not civil rights activists in the conventional sense. They didn’t publicly endorse integration. Nor did they challenge segregation as morally wrong.

Instead, HOPE adopted a single, carefully constructed objective: keep Georgia’s public schools open.

HOPE avoided talking about race. The women of HOPE framed their position on open public schools as concerns about children and education. Their strategy worked to reframe the school closure crisis from one about race and integration to one about what was best for the future of Georgia’s kids.

From our article:

To accomplish its goal of promoting open schools, HOPE focused its campaign for keeping schools open solely on questions and conversations about the importance of public education as a state-supported good—ignoring any discussion of segregation or integration.

HOPE’s grassroots campaign to keep the state’s public schools open made it possible for white Georgians to abandon massive resistance without having to publicly renounce segregation.

The Politics of Concerned Motherhood

HOPE’s leaders presented themselves as concerned mothers. They hosted tea parties, coffee talks, and backyard playdates. They networked with other mothers. Whenever they wrote letters or talked about open public schools, the women of HOPE always referenced their children and their roles as homemakers.

By taking advantage of traditional images of white womanhood, HOPE members claimed moral authority on the decision about what to do about schools. Their use of a politics of concerned motherhood allowed the women of HOPE to speak about open public schools while, at the same time, claiming political neutrality.

From our article:

This politics of concerned motherhood allowed them to legitimately engage with the school closing crisis without having to argue that they deserved a seat at the table. The women of HOPE made clear they needed to be involved in political issues like education because they had expertise as mothers.

HOPE’s political strategy was rooted in gender, class, and race. They chose to remain an all-white organization. HOPE’s leaders acknowledged that including Black women would undermine their credibility with the state’s white segregationist politicians.

As Alyssa and I point out:

Even as HOPE expanded its network of concerned mothers, the women of the executive leadership committee carefully policed its membership rolls. For all the maternal approaches and appeals that drove their political activism, HOPE’s influence rested on Whiteness. HOPE’s leaders insisted on a Whites-only membership, arguing that including Black supporters would undermine their credibility with most White Georgians.

Their version of the politics of concerned motherhood, they argued, carried weight precisely because they were a white organization made up of middle- to upper-class white women who were operating within Jim Crow’s racial order.

Why HOPE Helped End Massive Resistance

Georgia avoided closing its public schools. In response to the changing politics of segregation, Governor Ernest Vandiver created a commission to study the school closure issue. On April 27, 1960, the commission recommended a new path forward: a path that would keep public schools open. In 1961, the state legislature repealed Georgia’s massive resistance laws and allowed integration (albeit at the token level).

HOPE, having successfully accomplished its goal, disbanded.

Historians have documented many reasons for the demise of public forms of massive resistance in the South: federal court orders, pressure from business elites, Black civil rights activism, and regional concerns for national image, to name a few.

Alyssa and I argue that HOPE was one of these contributing factors. It wasn’t the reason, but it was a reason. By organizing white mothers to support open public schools, HOPE created a statewide white constituency against Georgia’s school closure laws. As we argue in our article, HOPE helped create political cover for the state’s segregationist leadership to back down from noncompliance with Brown. HOPE allowed white political elites the ability to keep public schools open without looking like they had capitulated to civil rights activism.

Here’s how we put it:

The women of HOPE took advantage of a shifting political landscape characterized by multiple flashpoints and crises. White parents—especially White mothers—ever-growing anxieties regarding their image as good law-abiding citizens who cared about their kids’ education allowed HOPE to launch its successful grassroots campaign for open schools. The women of HOPE simply created the political mechanisms for those White mothers to express their changing views on segregation.

HOPE served as an intermediate institution: the women of HOPE helped mediate federal authority with state power and white public opinion. They acted as a necessary ingredient for ending massive resistance in Georgia.

HOPE helps us understand how segregationists systems collapse through a strategic redefinition of what is politically acceptable.

Why This History Still Matters

HOPE complicates simple narratives about the politics of massive resistance. The women of HOPE were not integrationists. Many of them would have preferred segregation, many were uncomfortable with desegregation, and many of them distanced themselves from Black civil rights activists. Yet, their support for open public schools—even if that meant some form of integration—helped move the state away from its noncompliance with Brown. The women of HOPE’s call to keep the public schools open undermined the most extreme forms of white resistance.

This tension highlights the complex nature of this history and is central to understanding how racial inequality changes over time and, unfortunately, often adapts rather than fully disappears. The women of HOPE didn't promote racial justice. They simply prioritized open public schools. Segregation persisted and white resistance to integration and the building of a racially inclusive democracy took up new forms.

The story of HOPE reminds us that education politics is rarely (maybe even never) just about schools. Education politics is also about society. It’s about power, legitimacy, whose voices get to be heard, and who gets to determine how to build and who to include in a community. Education politics is, ultimately, about what democracy means or if it exists at all.

To Read the Full Article

If you’re interested in reading the full article, you’ll find it linked below (full Chicago style citation, of course).

• Nichols, Joseph R., and Alyssa Ignaczak. “Help Our Public Education (HOPE), Concerned Motherhood, and Integrating Atlanta’s Public Schools.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 109, no. 4 (2025): 352-376.

I’m sure I’ll return to HOPE in future posts as I continue to explore the history of schools, civil rights, public policy, and the remaking of American education after Brown.

The key takeaway for now, though: HOPE makes clear that sometimes consequential political changes happen not by challenging power directly, but by simply reframing the debate.

More to come soon.

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It’s written by me (Joseph Nichols). I’m a historian of American education. My academic research focuses on education, civil rights, and public policy—with specific emphasis on the desegregation era after Brown v. Board of Education. I write about how power, political governance, and institutional strategies shape schooling and democracy. Most of my work exists in the academy. Yesterday’s Classrooms is the place where I bring my work to a boarder public.

Why This Site Exists

Schools are contested terrain. Contemporary debates in education—over race, curriculum, governance, and authority—have deep historical roots. Many of the conflicts that feel so urgent today were shaped decades ago. When we miss that history, we often misunderstand “how we got here.”

Yesterday’s Classrooms is my attempt to bring this history to light.

This site isn’t about hot takes, daily commentary, or easy cookie cutter solutions. It’s a place for historically grounded essays that will (hopefully) help us see the present with a clearer set of glasses.

What You’ll Find Here

The writing on Yesterday’s Classrooms falls into a few overlapping categories that mirror my scholarly research:

• Structures of White Resistance - Essays that examine how white opposition to school desegregation operated through law, policy, rhetoric, and everyday institutional practices. These pieces focus on the durable social and political structures that shaped and supported southern massive resistance against the federal government’s enforcement of Brown.

• Institutional Responses - Essays that trace how institutions (e.g., courts, schools, legislatures) responded to desegregation mandates and racial change. Rather than assuming that institutions simply absorbed and/or enforced legal changes, these writings emphasize how political authority was interpreted and reinterpreted, and redirected and reshaped into new forms of politics.

• Archival Case Studies - These are posts that are document-centered and grounded in specific pieces of historical evidence to case study specific schools, communities, or individuals. They draw directly from archival sources—highlighting them and uncovering how I’m making sense of the crafting of history.

• Broader Political Contexts - Essays that situate education within the wider political, economic, and ideological contexts of 20th Century America. These pieces provide essential background for understanding why schools became such a central area of conflict.

These categories are where my thinking and writing are currently situated. So, they might shift and sharpen over time.

You don’t need any prior knowledge to read these posts. The whole point of Yesterday’s Classrooms is to provide an entry-level primer for the history of race, schooling, and American democracy.

How This Site Connects to My Academic Work

My scholarly research examines how Americans responded to school desegregation in the aftermath of the Brown decision. I’m especially interested in institutional strategies like privatization, political realignment, and the restructuring of public authority.

I publish most of my research in academic journals—which, of course, have pretty limited audiences. On Yesterday’s Classrooms, I try to bring my scholarship out into world beyond the academy’s walls.

Yesterday’s Classrooms is not separate from my academic work. It’s a companion to it.

How to Read Yesterday’s Classrooms

If you’re new here, I’ve got a couple of bullet points with some suggestions on how to make sense of what’s on the site:

• If you want an overview, check out one of the guides in the Start Here section. These posts are designed as on-ramps. They’re not exhaustive lists but they’ll get you going.

• If you just want to make sense of the history of American education, look for essays that trace the longer political and institutional struggles that shape contemporary issues with schools and education.

• If you’re a teacher or a student, visit the archive-based posts that pull back the curtain on how historical arguments are built from primary source documentation.

These are just some starting places but, as they say, the world is your oyster.

What This Site Is and Isn't

Yesterday’s Classrooms is a historically grounded, evidence-forward site of essays for curious and thoughtful readers of history. It’s committed to clarity without oversimplification (or easy answers). It’s a site that’s comfortable with the gray space.

Yesterday’s Classrooms is not a personal blog, a newsletter chasing hits or shares, a substitute for academic scholarship, or an attempt to settle contemporary debates (or a commentary site on those debates, for that matter).

I’m not a serial poster. New essays will appear when they appear. That’s intentional. I will write when there’s something work explaining.

My goal is modest: to help readers understand how the past continues to structure the present.

A Note on Images and Sources

You’ll notice that many posts are text-first (or text exclusive). I can’t help it. I’m a writer not a graphic designer. Images appear when they add historical or argumentative value.

You’ll also notice each post has a reference list at the bottom. Sources matter.

To Start Reading

All that’s left to do is to go forth and click through the pages.

If you want to start with one of the guides, make your way to the Start Here page.

If you want to jump right into reading and get the triple caff latte introduction, I’d recommend starting with two essays that really capture the spirit of the site:

• Closing Black Schools to Achieve Integration on how desegregation often unfolded in ways that undermined Black communities.

• “Everybody Knows the Reason. I Don’t Have to Tell You.” An essay on how segregation academies spread across the American South without their supporters needing to say what they were about.

These pieces showcase what much of this site tries to make clear: how power, resistance, and institutional choices shaped schooling in ways that continue to matter.

Happy reading. More to come soon.

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The same is true for the history of American education.

The common narrative is that schools moved from legally enforced, state-mandated segregation to desegregation and toward integration. The outlawing of racial segregation in schools with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 seemed to put the segregation issue to rest. In this version of the story, modern day racial segregation in schools is viewed as the result of natural events—of things outside the government’s control.

This story is misleading.

The history of race and schooling in the United States does not (and has not) moved in a straight line. Progress isn’t inevitable: it often feels like one step forward, two steps back. Advances in racial equality have consistently produced counter-backlash movements—often disguised, performed through institutions, and constructed in ways that make them legal. The push and pull between racial progress and backlash illiberalism have shaped and reshaped the school landscape in ways that make schools a central location in fights over American democracy.

Why Schools Matter So Much

Schools are contested places. They have always carried meaning beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Schools have a civic mission. They are sites of citizenship, political control, local community identity, and public investment. Decisions about who attends which schools, who governs them, how they are financed, and how they are resourced have always been entangled with questions about race, democracy, and fairness.

Brown v. Board of Education took up questions about the foundational identity of American public schools. Writing in Supreme Court’s ruling, Chief Justice Earl Warren pointed out that:

schools are the very foundation of good citizenship. [They are] a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him adjust normally to his environment.

Ending legally mandated, state-sponsored school segregation challenged many white southerners’ views about how schools cultivated citizenship. Brown wasn’t just about challenging racial hierarchy; it was about confronting deeply held assumptions about the make up of communities and the political control embedded within them.

Understanding the desegregation and resegregation that followed Brown requires paying attention to court rulings, institutions, and the politics of educational authority.

What Brown Did—and Did Not—Do

Brown v. Board of Education declared legally enforceable, state-sponsored segregation in public schools unconstitutional. It nullified the laws the mandated segregated schooling. Brown did not, however, specify how, when, or under what conditions desegregation or integration should occur.

That gap mattered.

Almost immediately after the Court handed down its decision on May 17, 1954, many white southerners vowed resistance. Governor-elect Marvin Griffin of Georgia, for example, warned that his incoming administration would take no action to comply. “If the United States Supreme Court is so unrealistic as to attempt to enforce this unthinkable evil upon us [the evil of integrated schools],” he railed, “I serve notice now that we shall resist it with all the resources at our disposal.”

In the years that followed, federal courts issued orders, states passed noncompliance laws, and school districts devised plans in an attempt to mediate this tug-of-war. Some willingly moved toward desegregation, but many did not. Southern and border state segregationists—and white political elites across the country—found ways to technically satisfy the Court’s legal mandates while minimizing actual integration.

Brown did not result in a clean transition from segregation to equality. Instead, it kicked off a prolonged struggle over implementation and a back-and-forth policy battle over the future of American schooling.

To understand this struggle, it helps to abandon the idea that desegregation was a single event or a brief fifteen year moment in time. School integration has been a long, protracted social conversation that’s been playing out in real time for over fifty years—one that’s been uneven, constantly contested, and shaped by federal, state, and local political decisions.

Progress and Harm at the Same Time

One of the hardest things to wrap your head around is that desegregation could produce both gains and losses simultaneously.

In many communities, integration expanded access to resources and provided new educational opportunities for Black students. But, in other communities, integration came at the cost of Black educational institutions as white school leaders closed Black schools, demoted Black principals, and dismissed Black teachers.

These outcomes were not inevitable nor were they accidental. They were the result of specific choices—choices made by courts, white political elites, white school board members, and white school administrators who treated integration as a technical problem rather than a social one.

Recognizing this complexity does not diminish the moral force of desegregation. It clarifies the struggle over its implementation. It highlights why true integration has been so hard to achieve.

How White Resistance to Integration Adapted

Shortly after the Supreme Court ruled on Brown, many southern states—under the control of white political elites—embarked on campaigns of legislative and regulatory massive resistance. Georgia, Virginia, South Carolina, and Louisiana, for example, all passed laws disallowing the funding of desegregated education.

When the use of state policy levers to preserve segregated public schools became untenable, white resistance began to move into private spaces. Discussing the need for white families to flee integrating public schools, Governor Hugh L. White of Mississippi said in a television and radio address that he would be working on a private school solution for white Mississippians.

White opposition to desegregation increasingly took on institutional forms:

• private schooling

• district boundaries and school attendance zones

• administrative discretion

• and appeals to neutrality, efficiency, or local control

These new institutional forms of resistance often avoided explicitly racial language. White resisters didn’t need to use the overtly racist language of their segregationist forefathers.

Racial segregation persisted in public education—and even intensified as white flight from urban city centers picked up steam in the 1970s—under the banner of choice, reform, and compliance.

This is one reason why the history of schooling post-Brown can feel paradoxical: why it often feels like one step forward, two steps back. Formal equality expanded while, at the same time, substantive equality remained (and still remains) elusive.

Why Institutions Matter

Institutions are an important (if not the key) part of this story.

It’s tempting to explain the history of American education after Brown as the result of individual motives and decisions—as racism, fear, or good intentions gone awry. But even though those things are part of the story, they're not the whole story.

What mattered just as much were the institutions at play in the drama. These included courts that prioritized order, districts that centralized decision-making and wrote boundary policies, political entities (e.g., politicians, legislatures, departments of education) that legitimized certain responses through speech, silence, or regulation.

Institutions shape what happens not only through what they do but also by what they allow.

Understanding the role of institutions helps explain why similar patterns appear across regions, over decades, and when actors and contexts differ.

What Yesterday’s Classrooms Tries to Do

The essays on Yesterday’s Classrooms take this non-linear history seriously. Rather than asking whether desegregation worked, they ask:

• how it was implemented

• who bore its costs

• how resistance appeared and reappeared as avenues opened and closed

• and why the past matters so much for making sense of today’s schools

Some posts focus on specific cases, documents, or communities. Others look into the broader political and social structures that shape schooling. The writing on Yesterday’s Classrooms attempts to make visible the history behind the school conflicts that often feel contemporary.

How to Read This History

It helps to read history with nuance and care. This guide encourages us to look past historical outcomes to the processes that produced them.

• Instead of asking “did schools become integrated;” ask “how did decisions about school desegregation get made.”

• Instead of stopping with the question “why did segregation persist;” continue on to ask “what institutional pathways made it possible.”

These questions don’t have simple or easy answers, rather, they provide a framework for reading—one that will result in a better understanding of how we got here.

Where to Go Next

If you’re new to this history, you might want to begin with essays that show how desegregation unfolded in practice and how white resistance to integration reorganized itself in the late 1960s.

Two good places to start:

• Closing Black Schools to Achieve Integration which shows how integration often proceeded through political decisions that harmed Black communities.

• “Everybody Knows the Reason. I Don’t Have to Tell You” which examines the private, whites-only academies that emerged as many white families fled integrating public schools.

These two essays highlight what Yesterday’s Classrooms tries to do. They show how desegregation unfolded in real time and uncover how white resistance reshaped the school terrain around it.

If You’d Like to Read Further

If you’re interested in deeper contexts and some scholarly analysis from historians working in this field, I recommend starting with the following books:

• Brown’s Battleground by Jill Ogline Titus which provides a clear account of school desegregation in Virginia.

• The Politics of White Rights by Joseph Bagley which examines white resistance strategies to school integration in Alabama.

• The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein which documents how public policy structured racial inequity.

This short list will get you going in the right direction.

More to come soon.

References

• Bartley, Numan V. The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s. Louisiana State University Press, 1969.

• Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

• “Legislature Given Stand-By Powers to Aid Segregation.” The Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), December 17, 1954.

• St. John, M. L. “Legislature Fight Hinted as School Proposal Passes. The Atlanta Constitution, November 4, 1954.

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With the guise of protecting kids from indoctrination by critical race theorists (CRT) and anti-American liberals, conservatives across the country are going after diversity, equity, and inclusion programs—including teaching about race and racism as well as gender identity and sexual orientation. Take the Rockwood School District in suburban St. Louis, for example. Starting during the 2020-2021 school year, the district has felt the brunt of a conservative backlash against what some folks have viewed as a CRT takeover of the curriculum.

“I send my kids to school for an education,” Adam Whittington told the Rockwood School Board during a hearing on May 6, 2021. “I don’t send them to get a moral lecture. A political lecture… an evil ideology.”

Like many districts under conservative scrutiny about their curriculum, the Rockwood situation got going as a revolt against public health measures and mask mandates during the pandemic.

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The uproar in Rockwood started with a debate over virtual learning during the pandemic and has moved to a focus on the district’s curriculum and reading lists. Protests became commonplace at School Board meetings, and fiery debates erupted among parents on social media.

These conservative attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in schools have prompted a upwelling of conservative challenges to open boards of education seats. And this is where the group Moms for Liberty comes into play.

Moms for Liberty has become the standard bearer for the conservative backlash against schools—leading culture war battles by hyping up hysteria about CRT and pushing a conservative takeover of local school boards.

Ali Swenson of the Associated Press described the group this way:

To its members, it’s a grassroots army of “joyful warriors” who “don’t co-parent with the government.”

To anti-hate researchers, it’s a well-connected extremist group that attacks inclusion in schools.

Moms for Liberty has been so successful at dismantling DEI-focused curriculum, pushing DEI leaders out of their jobs, disrupting school board meetings, and getting their supporters elected that the 2024 Republican candidates for president are lining up for the Moms for Liberty stamp of approval. They’re all clamoring for keynote speaker spots at the upcoming Moms for Liberty Joyful Warriors Summit in Philadelphia at the end of June.

Here’s Ali Swenson again:

The high interest in the event underscores how fights surrounding gender and race have become core issues for Republican voters. It also spotlights Republicans’ eagerness to embrace a group that has drawn backlash for spreading anti-LGBTQ+ ideas and stripping libraries and classrooms of diverse materials.

And, of course, the 2024 Republican field of candidates are vying for a Moms for Liberty endorsement at the same time:

[The group] has expanded its activism in local school districts to target books it says are inappropriate or “anti-American,” ban instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, require teachers to disclose students’ pronouns to parents, and remove diversity, equity, and inclusion programs from schools.

None of this is new, though. Moms for Liberty’s playbook harkens back to the John Birch Society’s push to take over schools in the early 1960s. Concerned about communists creeping into every aspect of American society, Robert Welch—the founder and director of the Birch Society—“urged his followers to take over Parent-Teacher Associations [PTAs] on the theory that local offices would be easier to attain than statewide seats.” Welch also viewed PTAs as susceptible to rabble rousing: good platforms for ginning up support for its causes.

According to political historian Matthew Dallek, events surrounding a small school district in western Montana illustrate how the John Birch Society attacked what it viewed as anti-Americanism in schools.

From Dallek’s book Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right:

The Darby School District in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana showed what was possible when a handful of local members took an idea from the society and put it into practice. When the district’s superintendent decided to replace Bibles that were deemed to be in bad condition, a local minister advised that it would be okay to burn them. After approximately two dozen Birchers learned of the bonfire, their outrage sparked a multiyear crusade to remake the school district. A principal grew so concerned that Birchers were “using the local PTA as a springboard to infiltrate” Darby’s schools that he asked Montana’s Democratic Senator, Mike Mansfield, to send the principal any information Mansfield had on the operation. The Senator’s office reported that a local Birch chapter sought to establish review committees to study the school’s humanities textbooks for evidence of subversive teaching and expurgate what it saw as socialist propaganda from the school library. The school board voted down these Birch proposals, but the chapter members largely succeeded in their scorched-earth campaign of aggression and intimidation. They made menacing phone calls to the superintendent, trashed his home, and stalked him, and eventually he resigned. According to historian Kristian Gates, within a few years, the Darby School District lost sixteen of its twenty-three teachers, victims of the Birchers’ tear-it-all-down assault.

It’s not hard to imagine a straight line from the John Birch Society to Moms for Liberty.

More to come soon…

Primary Sources

• Bernhard, Blythe. “Conservative Wave Sees Mixed Results.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 6, 2022.

• Bernhard, Blythe. “Lockwood Board Defends Inclusive Curriculum, Pleads for Civility as Uproar Grips School District.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 7, 2021.

• Llorico, Abby. “Rockwood Forum Turns Heated During Discussion of Race and Class Curriculum.” KSDK (NBC), April 30, 2021.

• Swenson, Ali. “Moms for Liberty Rises as Power Player in GOP Politics after Attacking Schools Over Gender, Race.” PBS NewsHour, June 12, 2023.

Secondary Sources

• Dallek, Matthew. Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. New York, NY: Basic Books.

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When the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, many white southerners responded with defiance, delay, and outright noncompliance. Southern states adopted strategies and implemented politics to avoid integration. Once it became clear in the late 1960s that these southern states could no longer maintain their dual school systems, many white parents simply abandoned their public schools and opened private segregation academies.

But the political foundations of the white resistance against integration were laid in the decades before Brown. To understand the white response to school integration, we must go back to the 1930s and the political conflicts surrounding President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

In Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965, historian Jason Morgan Ward traces how southern segregationists built a defense of white supremacy decades before the civil rights movement of the 1950s-1960s. According to Ward, a white backlash against Black civil rights had been building since the 1930s and can be traced to a slowly unfolding southern reaction against the New Deal.

What happened in Georgia provides a good case study.

Governor Eugene Talmadge and the New Deal

In the early 1930s, most (if not all) of Georgia’s political leaders supported President Roosevelt and his New Deal programming. The economic shock of the Great Depression, federal relief funds, and a wave of infrastructure spending created strong incentives to cooperate with Washington.

But, by the mid 1930s, Governor Eugene Talmadge had turned against the president by attacking the New Deal. Talmadge began warning white voters that the New Deal threatened white supremacy and the South’s racial order.

Ward described Talmadge’s actions this way:

When he lashed out at the president and his Georgia allies with provocative racial warnings, Talmadge connected the rise of the New Deal to the decline of Jim Crow. While few prominent southern politicians were ready to take that leap with him, Talmadge and other militant white supremacists foreshadowed a broader confrontation between southern racial conservatives and the national Democratic Party.

According to Talmadge, Roosevelt’s New Deal policies were not simply economic supports to alleviate the pain caused by the Depression. Talmadge viewed the New Deal as federal social reform dressed up as economic policy. In this sense, Talmadge viewed the New Deal as a radical threat to white society.

By providing expanded opportunities of Black Americans, the New Deal could, Talmadge argued, weaken the southern racial hierarchy and put white political dominance in danger.

A Divided White South

Talmadge’s views were not adopted by everyone. Many white southerners continued to support Roosevelt’s policies. The New Deal, however, did create divisions within the South’s white leadership about what to do about active federal intervention into state affairs.

After Roosevelt won re-election in 1936, this broader confrontation picked up steam. Ward argued that:

Serious devision arose among white southerners over the New Deal and its implications for the region. The scattered racial confrontations of the New Deal years convinced more than a few white southerns that they would have to fight to maintain their racially exclusive brand of democracy.

Form some white voters, federal policy raised unsettling questions about the future of Jim Crow. In the case of Georgia’s governor and his supporters:

Talmadge allies charged early and often that the New Deal imported “social equality” to Georgia… [and thus] white supremacy’s survival, Talmadge warned, was at stake.

In other words, some southern segregationists viewed Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition as a threat to the white supremacist hierarchy of the American South. White political elites like Talmadge benefited from the racial wedge segregation created between lower class whites and the Black population—a wedge that was threatened by the economic and social supports offered by the New Deal.

The Politics of White Democracy

Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge and those that supported him framed their defense of segregation in ideological terms. They claimed to be defending what they called white democracy. According to southern segregationists, Jim Crow was not simply a structure for maintaining segregation. It was a radicalized version of democracy in which political power belong exclusively to the South’s white citizens.

If federal New Deal policies weakened segregation, Talmadge argued, then the white South’s entire political order would collapse. So, according to Ward’s analysis, the South’s massive resistance to Black advancement didn’t just spring up overnight in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling against school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Rather, it was rooted in a 1930s movement to support white political control and authority.

Why This History Still Matters

White resistance to school desegregation did not appear suddenly in the aftermath of Brown. The ideological framework that drove post-Brown stonewalling against integration was built in the decades leading up to Supreme Court’s decision. All throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, many southern segregationists warned that any kind of federal intervention threatened white supremacy and the South’s racial hierarchy.

When the Supreme Court acted against school segregation in 1954, southern white political elites marshaled the anti-federal government rhetoric people like Eugene Talmadge has used throughout the 1930s to justify their refusal to desegregate schools. As such, public education became one of the central—if not the central—battlegrounds in a much larger struggle over the future of southern society.

More to come soon.

References

• Ward, Jason Morgan. Defending white democracy: The making of a segregationist movement and the remaking of racial politics, 1936-1965. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

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Then, when the Supreme Court ruled these freedom of choice plans unconstitutional in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County on May 27, 1968, white southerners who had hoped to avoid the integration issue were faced with the reality of imminent desegregation. As such, many white families abandoned public schools for private academies.

On November 24, 1969, Dr. Franklin Shumake, president of the Georgia Education Association, told a reporter for The Atlanta Constitution that he had detected a new “nose-against-the-wall” attitude from school leaders. One principal reported that his superintendent told him, “I’m going to integrate, but it might be the last thing I’ll do.” And another principal warned, “there is good money” supporting the private school movement that had gotten underway in his county.

Most of the public school principals the Constitution’s reporters talked to agreed that the status of the new private schools didn’t matter: not the quality of their teachers; not their curricular resources; not the state of their facilities. The only thing that mattered was how white their student populations would be. As one school leader put it, “They [the whites] just don’t want to be going down to what was a Negro school.” While the public schools integrated, many white families pulled their kids out and put them in the new private classrooms.

These new private schools—schools we now refer to today as segregation academies—opened up (sometimes literally) overnight. According to the Constitution’s report, even though quality was problem:

The State Education department, the GEA, and the organization of well-established private schools in the state all support legislation to set standards for private schools. But political opposition is stiff. Such legislation has failed in the past, and many observers give it little chance for the future.

Once the inevitability of public school desegregation took hold across the South, the southern segregationists who had pushed back against any and all integration initiatives found a new form of massive resistance: un-regulation of and support for the new private schools.

A vote to regulate these private schools was a vote for integration. But it was also a vote against what segregationists believed to be true Americanism. Governor Lester Maddox, talking at the grand opening of one of these new private academies, Valdosta Christian Schools, put it this way:

It is wonderful to be with God’s people—people who love the American way of life and who believe that education should include discipline, integrity, and character building.

So, the white abandonment of public schools in the South wasn’t just ignored; it was encouraged.    

More to come soon…

Primary Sources

• Bowler, Mike. “Principals Gloomy Over Private Schools.” The Atlanta Constitution, November 24, 1969.

• Maddox, Lester. (1969, September 7). Text of remarks prepared for delivery by Governor Lester Maddox to the Valdosta Christian Schools, Valdosta, GA, on Sunday, September 7, 1969, at 1:30p.m. RCB 9282: GOVERNOR – EXECUTIVE DEPT. – GOVERNOR’S SPEECH TRANSCRIPTS – 1969, August thru 1970, March – Gov. Lester Maddox: Speech Texts, Georgia Archives, Atlanta, GA.

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When asked about Mississippi’s response, one state official said the state could postpone integration for another “50 or 75 years” because Mississippi legislators had “an almost endless variety of methods” available to them to kick the can of compliance down the road. Mississippians, this state official noted, could avoid integrating their classrooms by doing something like constructing one high school with two buildings. According to the official, “Negroes would go to one building of the high school, whites to another.” In other words, the state could just figure out ways to address the integration issue without really addressing it.    

Another strategy for non-compliance with Brown Mississippians could use would be to simply dissolve their public schools. The Supreme Court ruled on Brown in May 1954. By December 1954, the Mississippi legislature had proposed a constitutional amendment that would remove the state’s constitutional obligation to provide some form of free, public schooling to its citizens.

According to Mississippi Governor Hugh L. White, the amendment would give the state legislature direct authority to operate the public schools. And, by extension, the governor was quick to point out that:

It would authorize the Legislature by two-thirds vote of those present and voting in each house to abolish the public schools in the state, should the need arise. It would [also] authorize the Legislature to enact legislation through which the counties and school districts might abolish public schools, should the need arise.

In the event the Mississippi legislature decided to abolish the public schools, the governor pointed out that the amendment “would authorize the Legislature to appropriate funds in order to finance the education of the educable school children of the state.” This proposed constitutional amendment would give the Mississippi legislature the authority to replace the state’s public schools with a private ones. Here’s how the governor put it:   

It [the amendment] is not a threat to public education. It is my view that under it the people can continue to expect the operation of public schools in the State of Mississippi, and that, if our separate public school system is destroyed by the federal courts—not by the Mississippi Legislature—our people can still continue to have their children educated in separate schools, at state expense, through a system operated under provisions of this constitutional amendment.

This strategy was the no segregation, no public schools response to Brown. And, regardless of Governor White’s assurance that all Mississippians could continue to educate their children in separate private schools should the state end up closing the public schools, it’s clear the governor was only talking to and about white Mississippians. According to the governor, the Mississippi legislature would be authorized to disperse money only for the private education of the “educable school children of the state.” And, in 1950s Jim Crow Mississippi, the word “educable” was a dog-whistle. It acted as a racial code word. The white supremacist politics of the Mississippi legislature would prioritize and ensure the funding for private education of white Mississippians—at the expense of all other citizens of the state, especially the state’s Black citizens.

These “let’s build a school with one building for Black students and another one for white students” and “why don’t we just abolish the public schools and replace them with private ones” methods for non-compliance with Brown weren’t the only massive resistance ploys attempted by the southern states. In an essay in History of Education Quarterly, educationalist Michael Fultz pointed out that by 1957:

8 Southern states passed states’ rights interposition resolutions, while 2 others passed manifestos of protest; 4 states abolished their constitutional requirements for public education; 6 states passed legislation denying funds to schools which desegregated; and 11 states repealed or modified compulsory attendance laws.

So, even though the tools for non-compliance were many and were varied across the southern states, the goals were the same: avoid integration at all cost. By upholding white supremacy and perpetuating injustice, many white southerners roadblocked democratic society.

Post-Brown school desegregation wasn’t just a conversation about education, classroom resources, or whose kids could go to which schools. It was also a conversation about democracy, justice, and the values that define American society. We must continue to confront this history because the white supremacist politics of folks like Governor Hugh L. White of Mississippi still lingers in the politics of today. And, of course, this politics still leaves a trail of destruction along the way: damaging our democratic aspirations, throwing up obstacles to building a socially just America, and depriving us of our shared humanity.    

More to come soon…

Primary Sources

• “Showdown Could Be Postponed 75 Years, State Official Says.” Hattiesburg American. May 18, 1954.

• “White says state fighting to survive in school vote.” The Clarion-Ledger. December 17, 1954.

Secondary Sources

• Fultz, Michael. “The Displacement of Black Educators Post-Brown: An Overview and Analysis.” History of Education Quarterly 44, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 11-45.

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Like many southern politicians of the late 1800s to early 1900s, Smith was a white supremacist who believed the reconstruction period was a tale of horrors. The popular history consisted of stories of newly freed Blacks running rough shot through the South, dismantling everything that white southerners viewed to be good and right about southern society. As such, it’s not surprising that Smith focused his campaign for governor on whiteness. After making a case for removing Black Georgians from politics, Smith continued his Baxley speech by pointing out that Georgia was “white man’s country” and by making clear that “not only in the state at large, but in every county and in every community the white man must control by some means, or life would not be worth living.”

And so it was. After he won the governorship, Smith made sure that whites, and only whites, would rule Georgia. He shepherded an amendment to the state constitution that virtually eliminated the Black vote. “By the beginning of the new century,” according to historian Andrew W. Manis, “the arrival of Jim Crow and black disfranchisement had done much to reverse black progress and return African Americans as nearly as possible to their former, inferior place in the Southern pecking order.” Over the course of the next fifty years, white Georgians erected a white supremacist society that expanded Smith’s vision—making sure they claimed Georgia as “white man’s country.”

Georgia’s white supremacy, as well as the white supremacy of the rest of the Jim Crow South, depended on what Emory Univeristy professor of history Jason Morgan Ward has called white democracy. In his book Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965, Ward described it this way:

When southern conservatives spoke of defending “white democracy,” they referred simultaneously to a racial worldview and a political order. They considered black disfranchisement and segregation essential to maintaining a society governed by and for whites. The survival of this racial order rested upon regional allegiance to the Democratic Party, which had long been the refuge for Jim Crow’s architects and guardians. As an outspoken white supremacist argued in the 1940s, “orthodox” southerners traced their political heritage back to Thomas Jefferson’s vision of “constitutional government and individual liberty.” But they rejected any attempt to update Jefferson’s qualified egalitarianism with “the newly evolved theory” that “men of all races have been found to be equally capable in every respect and… should be merged without distinction.” From its inception, the ideal of a “white democracy” rested upon allegiance to the “White Democracy” envisioned by the party founders.

As the new century matured and time raced toward the 1950s, many civil rights activists began questioning the legitimacy of this white democracy. Even so, southern segregationists found it difficult to let go of their understanding of democracy as white. For example, immediately after the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, a city official from Macon, GA said that the ruling was “a direct violation of states’ rights” and, as such, the Court’s “infringements have taken away the meaning of the word democracy.”

In the case of school segregation, the entrenched nature of white democracy throughout the American South guaranteed massive resistance to integration. Because white democracy placed the vast majority of political power in the hands of white political elites, the restructuring of society would require white acceptance. Commenting on combing the Black and white school systems in Macon, E. H. Houseworth, an African American math teacher at Ballard-Hudson Senior High School for Negroes, said, “everyone must accept it, especially the white people.” But several of those white people never did. And, as a result, the troubling legacy of white democracy still lingers in the politics of today.

More to come soon…

Primary Sources

• Bennett, Howard. “Bibb School Men Expect to Work Out Problems.” Macon Telegraph, May 18, 1954.

• “Hon. Hoke Smith on Taking the Ballot from the Negro.” Macon Telegraph, December 10, 1905.

• Murphy, Reg. “Time Held Need for Segregation.” Macon Telegraph, May 18, 1954.

Secondary Sources

• Manis, Andrew. Macon Black and White: An Unutterable Separation in the American Century. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004.

• Ward, Jason Morgan. Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

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In 1959, the folks in charge of Prince Edward County, Virginia actually used their authority to close the county’s public schools. According to the Virginia Museum of Culture and History:

After Virginia’s school-closing law was ruled unconstitutional in January 1959, the General Assembly repealed the compulsory school attendance law and gave the state’s counties and cities the option of operating public schools—the “local option” allowed officials to choose to close public schools. Most localities, some after legal disputes, moved to integrate their school systems. That was not the case in Prince Edward County, however. Ordered by two courts on May 1, 1959 to integrated its schools, the county instead closed its entire public school system.   

It would take five years to reopen the schools.

During the late 1950s and 1960s, as civil rights activists took their local school districts to court, the threat of public school closure was heightened. As such, several open schools political groups sprung up across the American South. Lead by mostly middle- and upper-class white women, these groups were grassroots organizations. They worked to keep their state’s public schools open—attempting to keep the focus on education; not integration or segregation.

Among these groups were:

• Help Our Public Education (HOPE) in Atlanta;

• Mississippians for Public Education (MEP) in Jackson;

• Save Our Schools (SOS) in New Orleans; and the

• Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC) in Little Rock.

In Georgia, HOPE was founded to counteract a potential school crises brought forth by the state’s segregationist political leaders.

In response to the Brown decision, the Georgia General Assembly passed a series of laws to fight desegregation—including a law that called for closing the state’s public schools should they be forced to integrate. The law basically said: no integration or no schools.

By January 31, 1960, as the Atlanta Public Schools were facing court ordered integration, the crisis had reached a boiling point. As the New York Times reported:   

The approach of the Deep South’s first showdown over school desegregation has stirred widespread concern here [in Atlanta] because of the accompanying threat to the continuance of public education. But neither Gov. S. Ernest Vandiver nor the Legislature has shown any inclination to change segregation laws that might ultimately close every classroom in the state.

So, a group of women from Atlanta’s Northside sprung into action, created the HOPE organization, and used their lobbying power to put pressure on the governor and state legislature—trying to convince them to change the law and keep the schools open.

HOPE, like the other open schools organizations, relied on women’s gender roles to accomplish their political goals. Specifically, they leaned-in on the image of the southern lady as a warrant for meddling into the integration question.

Here’s how historian Michael Lassiter described it:

As an organization that entered the public arena under the rubric of parenthood, framing its rhetorical appeals around the protection of innocent children, HOPE was tapping into a political tradition with deep historical roots. Although men played key roles in the open-schools movement from the very beginning, HOPE elaborately cultivated a public image of concerned motherhood, speaking not only as respectable middle-class housewives but even more powerfully as genteel southern ladies.

But this southern lady(ness) was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, southern white women activists used their image as ladies to protect themselves from segregationist vitriol. As professor of American studies Anne Stefani has pointed out, this is why “lady manners and dress became part and parcel of the women’s tactical apparatus during the school desegregation crisis.”

Reflecting on the importance of manners and dress in an interview in 1983, HOPE member Frances Pauley said:   

I remember it was a very hot day and there wasn’t any air conditioning but I had dressed properly to go before them [the Georgia legislature] and I had on a black dress or a navy blue dress with a bit of white trim on it with white gloves and a white hat, and I remember how hot my hands were and how I wished I didn’t have to keep on those white gloves but I kept them on.

Of course, Frances Pauley and the other women fighting to save Georgia’s public schools understood the political necessity of keeping on their white gloves.

This southern lady identity, on the other hand, limited what these women activists could do. Because, as Stefani has made clear, “the ideal of the southern lady was also a powerful instrument of control within the white community.”

Historian Elizabeth Jacoway summarized the submissive and white supremacist identity of the southern lady this way:

In return for male protection, the lady became the arbiter of morality, the custodian of conscience—within the sphere of her household. The mythological contract of “the lady” did not fade away after the Civil War: it remained a characteristic and unifying element of the “southern way of life”…

The proper southern women continued to aspire to elevated standards of “ladylike” behavior, admonished by fathers and husbands to cultivate a deferential attitude and to function in subordinate roles… the southern lady’s complicity in this whole scheme was the key to the maintainence of elite white male dominance of southern society…

At the heart of the arrangement was the lady’s absolute protection against sexual advances by black men: as the guarantor of the purity of white bloodlines, she bore the ultimate responsibility for the preservation of white civilization.

In other words, the southern lady fulfilled specific duties within the white supremacist patriarchy that governed the American South. But, by arguing for open schools (and, by extension, for desegregation), women like Frances Pauley began to redefine what it meant to be a southern lady. And, in doing so, they chipped away at Jim Crow’s racial structures as well as its gender ones.

More to come soon…

Primary Sources

• Associated Press. “Atlanta Faces Historic Decision: Desegregate or Close Schools.” Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel. January 11, 1959. MSS 427, H.O.P.E., INC. (Help Our Public Education) Records, Box 5, Folder 3, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, GA.

• Pauley, Francis. Interview by Lenecia L. Bruce and Rosalie Fitzpatrick on September 20, 1983. Manuscript Collection No. 773, League of Women Voters of Dekalb County (Dekalb County, GA), Box 17, Folder 11 (Oral Histories), Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archive, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.

• Sitton, Claude. “Georgia Aroused by School Crisis.” The New York Times. January 31, 1960.

Secondary Sources

• Jacoway, Elizabeth. “Down from the Pedestal: Gender and Regional Culture in a Ladylike Assault on the Southern Way of Life.” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 56, no. 3 (Autumn, 1997): 345-352.

• Lassiter, Matthew D. The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

• Stefani, A. “Image, Discourse, Facts: Southern White Women in the Fight for Desegregation, 1954-1965.” Miranda 5 (2011): 1-17.

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Robert Shaw Elementary was the only Black school DeKalb County planned to keep open. But, as School Superintendent Jim Cherry pointed out, there would be “considerable negotiations” about its future. The April plan created new school attendance zones. The Black students who had attended the five Black schools slated to close would be reallocated to white schools. The attendance zone for Robert Shaw, however, would require some white families to send their kids to this traditionally Black elementary school. That’s where the “considerable negotiations” that Cherry warned about would come into play.

In a court hearing on April 29, 1969, Paul Rilling, regional director of the federal government’s Health, Education, and Welfare department’s Office of Civil Rights, “raised the question of whether the DeKalb system could minimize the racial identification at Shaw by redrawing the attendance zone lines.” The Board of Education’s plan to integrate the Shaw school depended on guesswork about residential patterns in the school’s neighborhood.

According to C. Murphy Candler, the school board’s attorney, DeKalb County was banking on two new apartment complexes being built just around the corner from the school. The board hoped these apartments would attract white residents who would then send their kids to Shaw Elementary. But, in a court hearing on this integration plan, Judge Peter Ridskoph had questions about whether or not DeKalb’s predictions about this projected white enrollment would come true. “I gather that you discount the optimism of the defendants [the DeKalb School System] that the Shaw school imbalance will right itself this fall,” he said, adding, “I’m skeptical.”

By June 1969, the skepticism surrounding DeKalb County’s ability to integrate Robert Shaw Elementary had grown. During another hearing in front of Judge Newell Edenfield of the U.S. District Court, “witnesses for the school board admitted… that their hopes for a racially balanced school population in the Shaw area were greatly optimistic, if not illusory.” Accordingly, Judge Edenfield said that the only way the DeKalb County Board of Education could come into compliance with the court’s integration order was to either: (1) close the Shaw school and reallocate its student population to other schools, or (2) redraw the Shaw attendance zone to guarantee more white enrollment.

The Board of Education decided to close the Shaw school. Thus, in an attempt to create a unitary school system for both Black and white students, the board ended up closing all the county’s traditionally Black schools. “In making this choice, the board contends, and the court agrees,” Judge Edenfield ruled, “that a redrawing of school lines in this area or a paring of Shaw school with some other school, while bringing about desegregation on a temporary basis, would almost certainly lead to resegregation within one to two years by reason of the white population moving out of the area.” As such, the court concluded that “the only solution offering any promise of any permanence is to close the Shaw school as the board suggests and distribute its pupils among neighboring schools.”

So, like I pointed out in my last post, DeKalb County integrated its dual school system into one unitary system by closing all its traditionally Black schools while leaving the traditionally white ones open. Commenting on DeKalb County’s initial desegregation plan, State Representative James Dean of Atlanta made clear that the Black community felt “that integration should be a two-way street.” But, as we see with Robert Shaw Elementary, those holding the political power to make integration decisions often felt otherwise. And we are still living with the consequences of their misguided anxiety and fear.

More to come soon…

Primary Sources

• Hurst, Margaret. “Desegregate, DeKalb Told.” The Atlanta Constitution. Jun 13, 1969.

• Hurst, Margaret. “DeKalb to Get School Order.” The Atlanta Constitution. April 30, 1969.

• Hurst, Margaret. “DeKalb Schools File Plan.” The Atlanta Constitution. April 11, 1969.

• Simowitz, Lee. “Negroes March in DeKalb Protest.” The Atlanta Constitution. April 26, 1969.

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“We got the same run-around we’ve been getting,” said Robert Brown, a Georgia Tech student and an alum of Hamilton High School, when asked why the group couldn’t work through the school board to resolve their complaints. “We don’t mind going to white schools. We want integration. We want desegregation.”

But, by only closing Black schools, DeKalb County’s desegregation plan placed the burden for integration solely on the county’s Black residents. As State Representative James Dean of Atlanta made clear, this was the reason for the gathering at Hamilton High. The Black community, he said, felt “that integration should be a two-way street.”

Closing Black schools to achieve integration

The situation in DeKalb County was not unique. After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, many southern states were tasked with combining their Black and white dual school systems into unified and integrated ones. And, like DeKalb County, many local school boards approached integration by closing Black schools. According to historian Charles C. Bolton:    

School desegregation plans often called for the closing of Black schools or the alteration of their identities as Black schools in order to allay White fears about their children going to schools in Black neighborhoods.

Of course, these integration plans—the ones that called for closing Black schools while leaving white schools open—were supposed to be illegal. As legal scholar Thomas S. Martin wrote in The University of Chicago Law Review in 1972:

Even those courts willing to intervene in school closing decisions apply very narrow standards of review. The Fifth Circuit, where the majority of cases arise, has held that only a showing of a racially discriminatory motive will prevent the closing of formerly black schools. Thus, courts have found denials of equal protection where black school closing are based solely on the reluctance of the school board to require white students to attend schools in black areas. This intent standard also voids closing based on fears that whites will flee the public school system…

Use of the intent standard to protect against discriminatory administrative decision making is, however, subject to severe infirmities. Motive is a very elusive factor, and unless courts are willing to infer discriminatory intent form the fact that black schools alone are closed, the doctrine merely provides protection against the unwise and uninformed discriminator who verbalizes his racial motive.

When unifying their dual school systems, local school boards were supposed to close schools for educational reasons only. But this educational rationale was often used to cover the racial motives driving many local board’s decisions about which schools to close. As Martin was quick to point out in his analysis, the educational reasons rationale didn’t do much to protect Black communities from facing integration on white terms:

By refusing to deal with the complex issues underlying the educational rationale [for closing schools] espoused by school boards, courts have failed to provide even minimal protection against discriminatory closings of black schools.

So, to take white flight as one example, Martin pointed out that:

All cases have, of course, precluded formal consideration by school boards of the white flight problem; such consideration would be evidence of racial motive invalidating the school closing decision… thus, there is some evidence that courts perceive the problem as a choice between a school system integrated on terms acceptable to whites (including black school closings) or one abandoned by whites.

As such, many courts allowed integration outcomes to be driven by white fear. The end result was a desegregation effort that didn’t work.

Why didn’t it work?

Vanessa Siddle Walker, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of African American Educational Studies at Emory University, has pointed out that Black educators and advocates fought for an additive model of school integration: one that would fold Black expertise into the integration process; to how states approached how they unified their school systems.

Here’s how Siddle Walker described it:

They [the Black educators] knew how to do aspiring climates. They knew how to advocate. And they wanted access to materials, facilities, and resources that had been previously denied. In an additive model, the children would’ve had all three: attention to climates that created aspiration, advocates, and access.

But, as the situation in DeKalb County made clear, that’s not what happened. Instead, because white anxiety about Black civil rights drove integration policy, desegregation was not additive. According to Siddle Walker:   

In real time, that’s [the additive model] not what we did. In real time, what we did was an exchange model. Instead of maintaining wonderful climates and advocacy… the teachers were fired—those who knew how to create these wonderful climates, 50,000 or so by some estimates. The advocacy networks were sacrificed as the teacher organizations were fully integrated with agendas that were different from what they had had. And the access that they were given was never full. It was limited.

So, to bring things back to State Representative James Dean of Atlanta, integration should’ve been a two-way street. It should’ve been additive: not the transactional exchange driven by white fear that it was.

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I will continue this history in next week’s post with a story about Robert Shaw Elementary School. More to come soon…

Primary Sources

• Hurst, Margaret. “DeKalb Parents Ask Court to Stop Racial Segregation.” The Atlanta Constitution. July 6, 1968.

• Hurst, Margaret. “DeKalb Schools File Plan: Would Close 5 Negro Units.” The Atlanta Constitution. April 11, 1969.

• Simowitz, Lee. “Negroes March in DeKalb Protest.” The Atlanta Constitution. April 26, 1969.

Secondary Sources

• Martin, Thomas S. “Inequality in Desegregation: Black School Closings.” The University of Chicago Law Review 39, no. 3 (Spring, 1972): 658-672.

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This is why they had decided to meet—to take action against the Court; to rouse white southerners to their cause; to defend segregation.   

When it was all said and done, 19 Senators and 82 Representatives had signed the response. The Declaration of Constitutional Principals or, to use its more common name, the Southern Manifesto, would be read into the congressional record on March 12, 1956. Discussing the importance of the Manifesto, Sen. Stennis, talking to a reporter from the Jackson, MS Clarion-Ledger, said, “even though on previous occasions some individuals, notably Abraham Lincoln, have directed stronger criticism at the Supreme Court and its decisions, for the first time in our national history, 100 members of the Congress have jointly signed a severe indictment of the Court for its judicial legislation and usurpation of power.”   

The Southern Manifesto aimed to call out the Court for this perceived unconstitutional behavior:

We regard the decision of the Supreme Court in the school cases as a clear abuse of judicial power. It climaxes a trend in the Federal judiciary undertaking to legislate, in derogation of the authority of Congress, and to encroach upon the reserved rights of the states and the people…

We decry the Supreme Court’s encroachments on rights reserved to the states and to the people, contrary to established law and to the constitution.

And, because the signers of the Southern Manifesto viewed Brown as unconstitutional, they made sure to “commend the motives of those states which have declared the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means.” Given the white supremacist politics that ruled the Jim Crow South, it’s not surprising that the vast majority of southern Senators and Representatives signed the Manifesto.

Who Didn’t Sign and What Did That Mean

Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas who, at the time, was the Senate Majority leader wasn’t asked. And it’s unclear what would’ve happened had the drafters of the Manifesto asked him to sign his name. As historian Anthony Badger pointed out in the Journal of Policy History, “Johnson was following a delicate balancing act keeping his power base in Texas, retaining the support of the southern senators, yet trying to establish a record on civil rights that might win him northern support for a presidential bid.”      

The other two senators who refused to sign the Manifesto were the two senators from Tennessee: Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore. Like Johnson, Kefauver was never asked. Here’s Badger again: “The manifesto was issued in the midst of Estes Kefauver’s battle in the Democratic primaries for the 1956 presidential nomination. As a southerner chasing national office, he had little choice but to denounce the manifesto. The drafters did not even bother to ask him to sign it.”

Gore also had national ambitions. He was after the 1956 vice-presidential nomination—which, by the way, would end up going to Kefauver. And even though Gore showed his support for civil rights by refusing to put his name on the Manifesto and by actively signing pieces of rights legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1957, he would end up withholding his support from other legislative endeavors like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and from amending the U.S. Constitution to eliminate the poll tax—thus leaving a mixed record.   

The point here is this: the southern senators who refused to sign the Manifesto did so to protect their national ambitions, did so out of legal moderation (e.g., the law is the law and must be complied with), or did do out of both. What they weren’t doing was taking a strong stand against segregation or a stand for integration. As Badger made clear in his essay:

Most of the nonsigners recognized that the Brown decision was inevitable, that it was the law of the land, and outright defiance was futile, but few of them were in any hurry to give up the privileges of segregation and, like other moderates, they feared the power of white public segregationist opinion… They feared an aroused white citizenry. What Johnson, Kefauver, and Gore… objected to in the manifesto was the fact that it stirred up that white sentiment and created the false hope that the Court could be defied.

So, these southern moderates might not have signed the Manifesto. But their reluctance to sign the document didn’t mean they lobbied for compliance with Brown either. Instead, according to Badger, “their fatalism guaranteed the outcome they most feared: an enraged white public opinion that would listen to the demagogues and resist racial change.” And there were plenty of demagogues to hitchhike with as the white South traveled the road ahead.

What This History Still Matters

The debate over the Southern Manifesto was never just about constitutional interpretation. It was a political strategy. After the Supreme Court ruled state-sponsored school segregation unconstitutional in Brown, many southern politicians faced a choice: comply, stage outright defiance, or delay through institutional accommodation and rhetorical manipulation.

Public schools became the central arena where these strategies played out. And the choices made by white political elites during the integration era shaped the remaking of American education post-Brown.

The history of American education is a struggle over who controls schools, who gets taught what, and the role schools play in cultivating social and political norms. Who has authority over schools has been and remains an enduring and constantly fought over political question.

More to come soon.

References

• Badger, Anthony. “The South Confronts the Court: The Southern Manifesto of 1956.” Journal of Policy History 20, no. 1 (2008): 126-142.

• “Manifesto Text on Integration.” Clarion-Ledger. March 13, 1956.

• Ray, Kay. “Manifesto Signed by 100 as Stennis Points to Strength.” Clarion-Ledger. March 13, 1956.

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On August 1, the U.S. Justice Department filed a blanket lawsuit against the State Board of Education seeking to force immediate desegregation of all Georgia public schools. Of the state’s 192 public school systems, 159 still operated in a segregated fashion. And, according to the suit, only 15 percent of the state’s Black student population attended schools with whites.

The state’s political leadership responded with defiance.

Governor Lester Maddox, who viewed federal intervention into the integration issue as a violation of state’s rights, responded to the court action by stating that his administration would continue to fight the federal government. “I call upon the attorney general to use all the legal and financial resources at the command of this state,” the governor said. “I hope we will be successful because I think it criminal for the Justice Department and officials of HEW [Health, Education, and Welfare] who are in violation of the U.S. Constitution to demand that we disobey the Constitution or face jail.”

Even though Governor Maddox remained committed to massive resistance, he faced a changed legal landscape that would force Georgia to finally confront full-scale public school desegregation.

In October 1969, when the Supreme Court ordered the immediate desegregation of all public schools in the South, the writing was on the wall. Commenting on the racial anxiety white Southerners felt about continued Black advancement in civil rights, Governor Maddox pointed out that “children in school in parts of the country where there is a greater percentage of Negroes would suffer more than in parts of the country where there are relatively few blacks.” So, many white families pulled their kids from public schools and put them in new private academies.

Why White Families Left the Public Schools

Why would children in the South suffer more than children in other parts of the country? And what drove these white families to jump from integrating public schools to private academies?

The answer was not complicated. It was one word: race.

Buck Maddox (another Maddox), head of Greenfield Academy in Weston, GA, argued that Black students would not be able to keep pace with the white students in their schools. Integration, he argued, would create “an impossible learning situation.” Here’s how he described the thinking behind the segregation academies movement:

The new movement is based on a philosophy that is now beginning to be a racist philosophy, that achievement levels of black and white students start the same in the first grade and that as the children mature a gap develops and widens.

Buck Maddox believed the racist trope that Black kids couldn’t handle academics and school as well as white ones. Maddox’s worldview reflected a long-standing racist assumption held by many white segregationist: that racial inequality in education resulted from Black intellectual inferiority rather than structural effects of segregated schooling.

For many white families, this belief justified abandoning the public schools. As one public school superintendent warned:

There’s already been some talk about a private school here by some and I imagine they’ll revive the idea after the Supreme Court’s latest decision. I can foresee the day when I’ll be running a predominately black school system while the whites go to private schools.

So, once it became clear that integration could no longer be avoided, many white families began to look at leaving the public schools.

They Sprung Up Everywhere

On November 9, 1969, The Atlanta Constitution published a front page exposé by education editor Junie Brown titled “They Spring Up Everywhere.” The piece was about the private schools we now refer to as segregation academies.

Brown began this way:   

In their panic over integration, many Georgia parents are attempting to turn the calendar back to 1900. With what they see as a black tidal wave lashing at the public schools, many white parents are compromising education for the right to remain segregated.

Many white Georgians had been fleeing the public schools since the 1954 Brown decision. But the 1969 Supreme Court order, along with the blanket federal suit against the state Board of Education, meant the road of resistance was coming to an end.

These new segregation academies were built in short order. Across the state, white communities organized fundraisers, purchased land, and opened whites-only private schools to keep segregation in tact.

Gubernatorial Support for White Flight from Public Schools

Segregation academies benefited from state-level political support.

Governor Maddox, using the bully pulpit of the governorship, made clear his support of this white abandonment of public schools. He donated $100 (about $776.00 in 2022) to build a private academy in Coffee County in Southwest Georgia. And, according to a member of the Washington-Johnson Community School in Harrison in Middle Georgia, Maddox attended a groundbreaking fundraiser where he bought several $100 cakes to support their new school.

Speaking at the school a year later (on August 16, 1970), Gov. Maddox described the Washington-Johnson Community School’s white families this way:

I thank God for patriotic Americans like you. People with your kind of dedication and willingness to flight for your beliefs are the sort of men and women who have made America the land of liberty and greatness it is today.

Gov. Maddox also commended these white families for exercising their “freedom of choice” by refusing to send their kids to integrated schools. He said:

You won’t throw away your freedom of choice for a handful of federal sliver. And you won’t sit idly by while greedy politicians, hungry for more votes and more dollars, sell out your country to the communists, the socialists, and those who play into the hands of our enemies.

The youngsters who attend the Washington-Johnson Community School are fortunate, my friends… they are taught not just the academics of education, but also what it means to be an American, and what they as citizens can do to defend and strengthen their heritage.

With the statement “defend and strengthen their heritage,” Gov. Maddox was, of course, referencing whiteness and white supremacy. He was arguing that segregation was a key part of Americanism. By framing white flight from public schools as an act of patriotism and an expression of liberty, Maddox used the authority of the governor’s office to legitimize the creation of whites-only private schools.

What Segregation Academies Were

To many white families, segregation academies were a way to maintain control over their children’s education in the face of federal action on civil rights. Race was the central issue for why these private academies were being built. And it was the reason why white families were choosing to send their kids to them.

“Everybody knows the reason,” John Mitchell of Lamar County in Central Georgia said when asked why his family had started the Holy Bible School. “I don’t have to tell you.”

Segregation academies marked a shift in the institutional landscape of southern education. As federal courts forced public schools to integrate, thousands of white families migrated into these new private institutions so they could preserve racial hierarchy, white educational authority, and the segregation they had long enjoyed under Jim Crow.

The public school system did not disappear. But, in many communities, its white students did.

Why This History Still Matter

Segregation academies were a white backlash against Black civil rights and federal intervention into the southern states social arrangements. But they were more than that.

Segregation academies represented a migration of white educational authority and control from one institutional space to another. This pattern—resisting democratic change by shifting political power across institutions while, at the same time, avoiding the democratic accountability that comes with that change—has appeared repeatedly in the history of American education.

Schooling has often been a site of political conflict. Understanding the rise of segregation academies in the South in the late 1960s helps explain how educational inequality can persist even in the face legal justice.

More to come soon.

References

• Bailey, Phil. “Choice Plan Preferred.” Atlanta Constitution. November 3, 1969.

• Brown, Junie. “The Spring Up Everywhere.” Atlanta Constitution. November 9, 1969.

• Hurst, Margaret. “U.S. Suit Demands State Desegregate All Public Schools. Atlanta Constitution. August 2, 1969.

• Text of Remarks Prepared for Delivery by Governor Lester Maddox at the Washington-Johnson Community School, Harrison, GA, on Wednesday, August 26, 1970, at 7:30p.m., RCB 9283: GOVERNOR – EXECUTIVE DEPT. – GOVERNOR’S SPEECH TRANSCRIPTS – 1970, April thru October – Gov. Lester Maddox: Speech Texts, Georgia Archives, Atlanta, GA.

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Public schooling in the Jim Crow South had long been a central mechanism of white political control. Through local boards of education and the segregation provisions in state constitutions, white citizens maintained exclusive governing power over taxation, teacher employment practices, curriculum decisions, and use of buildings and facilities.

School segregation created an institutional arrangement of white educational authority.

Brown represented a threat to this power.

Defending White Educational Authority Through Constitutional Interpretation

Shorty after the Supreme Court ruled against state-mandated segregation in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Jule W. Felton, the Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals of Georgia, wrote an essay titled “An Appeal to Save Our Written Constitutional Form of Government.”

Felton’s essay gives us insight into how southern segregationists used constitutional originalism to perpetuate unjust social arrangements in the Jim Crow South. Writing about the Supreme Court’s role interpreting the United States Constitution, Felton argued that:

The law of the land as to provisions of the Constitution, the meaning of which is uncertain, is in effect the initial decision of the Supreme Court ascertaining and defining the original intent of the framers and adopters because it becomes in each instance in effect a part of the defined words of the Constitution… the Supreme Court has no right to reverse an initial decision ascertaining intent and extracting a constitutional principle.

Judge Felton’s view of constitutional law can be summed up this way: once the Supreme Court makes a constitutional interpretation, we must live with that particular interpretation until the document itself is amended—regardless of what might change in our society, how much we might broaden our understanding of the world, or how much more inclusive our interpretations of justice and rightness become. In other words, unless we go through the burdensome process of amending the actual document, we’re stuck with antiquated thinking—thinking, I might add, that has usually worked to advantage a narrowly defined segment of the population (e.g., the white aristocracy).

By overturning the “separate but equal” clause established by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, Felton believed the Supreme Court had overstepped its bounds. The only way, according to Felton, to re-interpret the constitution was through amendment: all other actions would be a violation of law.

Here’s how he put it:

The Constitution is a contract between the several sovereign States and the Federal Government. That contract provides that the States surrender certain attributes of sovereignty to the Federal Government. The rest are reserved to the States. One provision of the contract is that the contract cannot be amended except as provided in the (contract) Constitution. The Federal Government has been violating the contract since 1937. Up to 1954 we acquiesced in the unconstitutional actions. We do not acquiesce in the 1954 decision or in any subsequent ones. By our acquiescence in the decisions prior to 1954 we are not estopped to call a halt now and that is just what we do. We want the contract complied with.

For folks like Judge Felton, the inclusiveness of school integration was a bridge too far. The Brown decision, many white southerners argued, represented illegitimate judicial activism.

Judge Felton framed desegregation as a constitutional crisis—not as an issue of racial equality or as a moral reckoning. According to Judge Felton, the crisis wasn’t segregation. It was federal overreach and the preservation of white educational authority.

Constitutional arguments, like the one advanced by Judge Felton, became one of the tools through which white officials attempted to stall, slow, reinterpret, and resist compliance with Brown.

Once the explicit white supremacists structures of the Jim Crow South came under direct attack by grassroots activists in the 1950s, southern segregationists turned to constitutional originalism to maintain their unjust society. After all, our constitution’s words weren’t as inclusive in the 1790s when the ink dried on the parchment paper as they were aiming to be in the 1950s when the civil rights movement challenged our notion of who should be included in the American community.

If racial segregation was built into longstanding legal structures and court interpretations, then dismantling it, according to Felton’s argument, would require formal constitutional revision. Felton’s “appeal to the written constitution” helped create the legal justifications for massive resistance and established the foundation for a myriad forms of procedural delay.

Constitutional Originalism as Democratic Evasion

Judge Felton’s essay shows how southern segregationists used constitutional originalism to support their efforts to maintain Jim Crow. It allowed them to present themselves as guardians of a constitutional order. School segregation, for many white southerners, wasn’t about racial hierarchy but about the fidelity of the Constitution.

The Court’s decision on Brown threatened the exclusive educational authority and control white southerners had built into Jim Crow society.

Brown did more than deem state-sponsored, legally mandated school segregation unconstitutional. It destabilized a long running system of white racial governance of public education in the South.

The struggle over desegregation was a struggle over who controlled schools and the constitutional structures that govern them. Brown highlighted two tensions that run through the story of American history:

• Liberalism: The idea that people’s democratic participation matters; that society should focus on the expansion of civil rights, equality, tolerance, and pluralism.

• Illiberalism: The idea that there should be constraints on people’s expressions of their rights; that cultural homogeneity should be promoted; and that only certain groups have claim to the national identity.

Jim Crow was illiberal. Racial segregation was one of the ways the white South expressed their illiberalism and maintained their claim on the region’s identity. To argue for segregationist schooling was to argue for anti-democratic political structures.

The constitutional originalism expressed in Judge Felton’s essay provided southern segregationists the legal language for supporting illiberal social structures. In this sense, constitutional originalism operated as form of democratic evasion.

Why This History Still Matters

Brown v. Board of Education was an interpretative response to the people’s call for inclusiveness and change. And the Warren Court’s decision to strike down Plessy v. Ferguson with Brown in 1954 was an illustration of a different interpretation of constitutional law than the one held by the likes of Judge Felton. Brown was the result of a view that the constitution is a living document that should be argued and reargued as society changes and as we continue to figure out what it means to be American.

Carolina Fredrickson, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, refers to this approach to constitutional law as one of participatory action. Writing in the Washington Monthly, she argued:

The delegates in Philadelphia were not its only framers; the Constitution has been shaped by the millions of Americans who have voted for, organized for, and at times literally fought for change.

We, the people, can shape the constitution. But we also need judges and justices who carve out a place for us in their interpretation of constitutional law. As Fredrickson made clear in her article:

Past judges have understood the Constitution’s malleability, and future ones may as well. As Justice Thurgood Marshall once said, “We the People no longer enslave, but the credit does not belong to the Framers. It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of ‘liberty,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality,’ and who strived to better them.” The “miracle” of what came out of Philedelphia, he continued, “was not the birth of the Constitution, but its life, a life nurtured through two turbulent centuries of our own making.”

Some of the constitutional changes we’ve forged over the course of our history were through actual amendments such as the Thirteenth—which abolished slavery— and the Nineteenth—which gave women the right to vote. But other changes were enacted through a reinterpretation of how we the people have made sense of the words that make up our constitution—such as was the case in Brown v. Board of Education.

Can separate really be equal? In 1896, the Fuller Court said yes. But in 1954, the Warren Court said no—not because the words on the paper had changed but because we had changed; and, in that particular case, we had changed for the better.

This history reminds us that building democratic society is an always unfinished endeavor. The people’s work matters.

More to come soon.

References

• Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

• Felton, Jule W. “An Appeal to Save Our Written Constitutional Form of Government.” Alabama Lawyer 21, no. 4 (1960): 390-398.

• Fredrickson, Caroline. “A Constitution of Our Own Making.” Washington Monthly. August 29, 2021.

• Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

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The Declaration, know by its moniker the Southern Manifesto, was a public comment condemning the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. The 19 Senators and 82 Representatives from the South who signed the Manifesto accused the Court of committing “a clear abuse of judicial power.” They called on the southern states to resist the decision by “all lawful means” necessary to prevent its implementation.

The Southern Manifesto did more than simply protest Brown. It articulated a constitutional theory designed to legitimatize noncompliance with the Court. The Manifesto was one of the earliest examples of how southern segregationists would turn the politics of segregation away from race—toward a rhetoric of freedom, liberty, and choice.

The Southern Manifesto would provide foundation for the legal and political language segregationists would use to structure white institutional resistance in the aftermath of Brown.

From Judicial Authority to States’ Rights

By overturning the “separate but equal” concept from Plessy v. Ferguson, the 101 singers of the Manifesto called out the Court for acting outside its power.

Here’s how they put it:

We regard the decision of the Supreme Court in the school cases as a clear abuse of judicial power. It climaxes a trend in the Federal Judiciary undertaking to legislate, in derogation of the authority of Congress, and to encroach upon the reserved rights of the States and the people.

The problem, these lawmakers argued, was not segregation. Rather, it was judicial activism and overreach.

The Southern Manifesto used originalist logic—arguing that because the constitution didn’t explicitly reference education, the federal government couldn’t meddle in a state’s educational affairs. It was off limits.

According to the Manifesto:

The original Constitution does not mention education. Neither does the 14th amendment nor any other amendment. The debates preceding the submission of the 14th amendment clearly show that there was no intent that it should affect the system of education maintained by the States.

The Southern Manifesto claimed that education belonged under state authority and that the federal courts had no legitimate power to disrupt the established social and political arrangements that created and maintained school segregation.

By focusing on constitutionalism rather than race, the signers of the Manifesto transformed a defense of segregation into a defense of federalism or states’ rights. They reframed white resistance to compliance with Brown as a form of constitutional guardianship.

Legal Language as Political Strategy

The Southern Manifesto has often been described as a protest. But, of course, it was more than that. It was a political strategy.

On the surface, the Southern Manifesto reads like a legal document. It purports to make constitutional arguments about the limits of federal power—and, in doing so, it dances around segregation. As historian Brent J. Aucoin pointed out in his essay “The Southern Manifesto and Southern Opposition to Desegregation” published in The Arkansas Historical Quarterly:

The document does not defend the institution of segregation; rather, it concentrates on criticizing the Court’s manner of reaching its decision in the Brown case. In sum, the manifesto resembles a legal brief, focusing solely upon issues such as constitutional interpretation, historical facts, and legal precedents.

The Southern Manifesto signaled to governors, state legislators, school boards, and local officials that resistance to Brown could be justified with legal and constitutional language.

Compliance was not inevitable, the 101 southern lawmakers argued, it was contestable. The Manifesto created a means for pushing back against Brown by:

• Questioning the Supreme Court’s legitimacy.

• Reframing desegregation as federal encroachment.

• Providing political cover for organized white resistance.

The Southern Manifesto made clear that those in noncompliance with or stalling the implementation of Brown did not need to declare themselves defenders of segregation. They could, instead, claim to be defenders of constitutional order, local control, and state sovereignty.

The rhetoric of “all lawful means” became the calling card for the white South’s massive resistance against Brown.

Massive Resistance as Institutional Practice

The Southern Manifesto was a racial document disguised as a legal document. Its purpose was to maintain white supremacy by masking its racial intent with legalese.

In a play to point out what the Southern delegation was really up to, Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, “dared the Southerners to submit a constitutional amendment allowing race segregation practices.” He took things a little further by predicting there would be very little support for such a measure because, when it came down to it, even most of the Southerners, Morse pointed out, knew they were trying to defend the indefensible.

The Southern Manifesto didn’t make an explicit argument for segregated society. It didn’t have to. Instead, it created the logic for white southerners for using non-race-based tools in ways that would lead to segregationist outcomes.

In the years that followed the Manifesto, southern states pursued a wide range of colorblind-looking policies to maintain segregation:

• Pupil placement laws.

• School closure statutes.

• Private school regulatory supports.

• Freedom-of-choice plans.

The Southern Manifesto was a keystone for the rhetoric of states’ rights and constitutionalism that backed up each of these administrative strategies of resistance. The document reassured sate officials that opposition to Brown could be framed as constitutional fidelity rather than racial reaction.

The Southern Manifesto was a political tool that allowed white political leaders to advance segregationist goals while, at the same time, avoiding the public use of explicit racial language.

The Southern Manifesto as Blueprint

The Southern Manifesto was part of a broader political strategy that aimed to turn the politics of segregation into the politics of freedom, choice, and states’ rights. It aimed to:

• Redefine constitutional authority.

• Reassert state sovereignty.

• Question to the role of the federal government.

• Legitimatize noncompliance.

• Protect white educational authority.

In this sense, the Southern Manifesto helped lay the groundwork for shifting segregation into more mainstream conservatism.

The Manifesto’s language—that of federal overreach, judicial activism, states’ rights, and local control—did not disappear once the South started integrating its schools. These were concepts that were central to the party realignment that took place in the decades after Brown.

Here’s how historian John Kyle Day summarized the role the Manifesto played in helping make segregationists’ arguments palatable to the broader American public:

In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), intransigent segregation or moderation dominated southern politics at every level of government. The Declaration of Constitutional Principles, popularly known as the Southern Manifesto, fused these distinct yet similar ideologies together. More than any other single statement of its era, the Southern Manifesto articulated the political doctrine of the white South towards the Civil Rights Movement. The authors achieved their objectives because they composed a statement supported by both intransigents and moderates within the Southern Congressional Delegation. In turn, the statement momentarily persuaded most Americans that the white South’s opposition to Brown was, if not justified, at the very least not just irrational hysterics, and thus worthy of consideration. The Southern Manifesto made the white South’s definition of race relations a legitimate point of debate in the national discussion over the emerging Civil Rights Movement. Meaningful desegregation and related civil rights legislation was thereafter stalled for years.

The Southern Manifesto was one tool by which the politics of segregation transformed into a constitutional politics of freedom, choice, and local control.

Why This History Still Matters

The ideas outlined in the Southern Manifesto were not buried with the 1950s. The document showed how opposition to racial equality could be translated into non-race-based arguments about the design of institutions and the processes of governance. It showed how legal rhetoric and constitutional language could hide racial motive.

The Southern Manifesto demonstrated how political actors could resist structural change and more inclusive versions of society while appearing to defend democratic principles.

The story of the Southern Manifesto helps us understand how educational politics can often become the battleground for larger constitutional and community-based struggles.

It reminds us that resistance to civil rights and racial justice rarely announces itself as such. The story of the Southern Manifesto highlights how freedom, choice, and local control can, ironically, be anti-democratic concepts.

More to come soon.

References

• Associated Press. “George’s Manifesto Tender Spurs Oratory.” The Atlanta Constitution. March 13, 1956.

• Aucoin, Brent J. “The Southern Manifesto and Southern Opposition to Desegregation.” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 55, no. 2 (1996): 173-193.

• Day, John Kyle. The Southern Manifesto: Massive Resistance and the Fight to Preserve Segregation. Jackson, MS: The Univeristy of Mississippi Press, 2014.

• “The Declaration of Constitutional Principles.” Found in the appendix of the Aucoin (1996) article.

• White, Williams S. “Manifesto Splits Democrats Again.” The New York Times. march 13, 1956.

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The HEW team had reviewed the district’s freedom-of-choice desegregation plan and found it lacking. Black students remained concentrated in the historically Black schools. The white students had avoided integrated classrooms. Faculty integration was also almost non-existent.

“We are disappointed, especially in the faculty plan for this year, and the student increase is practically nothing,” Everett Waldo, a HEW representative, said. “This really doesn’t show much progress.”   

HEW saw Lowndes County’s freedom-of-choice plan as a ruse to avoid Brown. The Lowndes County BoE, on the other hand, viewed it as strategic compliance.

This standoff—between HEW and the Lowndes County BoE—reveals something essential about the politics of school desegregation in the 1960s. Freedom-of-choice was not simply an imperfect integration tool; rather, it was a mechanism of white institutional resistance.

Federal Action and the Illusion of “Freedom” in Freedom-of-Choice

Following the Supreme Court’d decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, many local board of education across the southern states adopted a variety of tactics to completely stonewall or delay integration. By the mid-1960s, one of the most common ways in which district’s maintained as much segregation as possible was by adopting freedom-of-choice plans.

On paper, these plans appeared race neutral. Any family in the district—Black or white—could choose which schools (the historically Black or historically white ones) their children would attend. In practice, however, freedom-of-choice did virtually nothing to change attendance patterns. Entrenched social pressure, intimidation, transportation control, and faculty assignment policies ensured segregation remained mostly intact.

Lowndes County had been operating under a freedom of choice plan—which, purportedly, facilitated integration by allowing individual students to choose where to go to school. But, by 1967, when HEW officials traveled to Valdosta to meet with the Lowndes County BoE, the federal government had begun to loose patience with district’s using freedom-of-choice to essentially stall integration.

HEW pressured the Lowndes County School District to demonstrate measurable progress in the following areas:

• Increased Black enrollment in historically white schools.

• Meaningful faculty integration.

• Concrete timelines for structural change.

• Clear accountability measures for judging progress.

Everett Waldo’s finding that the district’s actions “didn’t show much progress” captured more than bureaucratic failure and frustration. Waldo’s comment reflected a growing federal recognition that local authorities were using procedural and administrative compliance to preserve segregation.

HEW told the Lowndes County BoE they should prepare a full-scale desegregation plan. HEW wanted to see a plan outlining how Lowndes County would guarantee fully integrated schools over the next two to three years. In the meantime, HEW officials said, “Lowndes County should have at least 14 faculty crossovers this fall [the fall of 1967] and a minimum of 15 percent student desegregation.” By meeting these goals, the Lowndes County BoE would show HEW that they were making a good faith effort at integration.

That’s not what happened. The Lowndes County BoE didn’t submit that plan.

Retaliation as Policy: The Exercise of White Institutional Power

HEW official expected reform but the white-controlled Lowndes County BoE signaled defiance.

Instead of complying with the HEW request, the Lowndes County BoE took retaliatory action against several Black employees in the district. Board member L. M. Tomlinson, a farmer who was supported by the segregationist organization Lowndes County Committee for Better Schools, brought forth a motion recommending the removal of Black teachers who were teaching in the county’s predominantely white schools. “Let’s put them back where they belong,” Tomlinson said before noting, “I’m ready to go tend to my tobacco now.” For Tomlinson and and the majority of the board, a vote to non-renew the contracts of the district’s Black teachers didn’t require much debate.

Closing traditionally Black schools, retaining only the traditionally white schools, and terminating (or demoting) Black faculty were among the most powerful resistance tools white-controlled local boards of education had at their disposal.

These administrative levers became a form of administrative massive resistance against the federal government’s enforcement of Brown.

The Political Context: Governor Lester G. Maddox and Public Legitimization

The Lowndes County BoE’s removal of Black teachers from the county’s traditionally white schools was not an isolated event. It happened—and was reinforced—with the support of the state’s political leadership.

“You don’t give a damn about the [district’s] white children,” Tomlinson told an HEW official during their meeting. The Lowndes County BoE’s actions were all about protecting and maintaining white educational authority and control. And, of course, their actions found favor with Georgia’s governor.

Governor Lester Maddox had risen to power through his defiance of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Shortly after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the act into law, Maddox chased away three Black ministers from his Pickrick restaurant with an ax handle and a gun. After a lengthy court battle, Maddox chose to close the restaurant rather than integrate it. Two years later, he capitalized on a white backlash against Black civil rights advancements by becoming Georgia’s 75th governor.

Maddox had built his reputation on public defiance of federal civil rights mandates and a staunch defense of segregationist principles.

When the Lowndes County BoE resisted or retaliated against integration efforts, they did so within a broader political culture that validated such resistance and retaliation. Maddox publicly congratulated communities that stood firm against the federal government. His rhetoric framed local defiance not as obstruction but as a values-based defense of freedom.

So, when Maddox received word of the Lowndes County BoE’s stand against integration, he telegraphed them his support:   

I commend you for your strong stand against Federal encroachment on your local school system… the greatest enemy of education in the United States is our own federal government—those who would force local citizens and their local representatives to surrender to the socialists in Washington and neglect our children, their teachers, their parents, and education… their dictates are contrary to the U.S. Constitution and the principles of Americanism.

This political legitimatization mattered. It gave white-controlled boards of education permission for their administrative resistance and the segregationist ideology that backed their actions.

The Lowndes County BoE’s response to HEW pressure was not a one-off case study. It was a response that was embedded within a wider network of white political power that sustained segregation through institutional mechanisms that helped maintain white educational authority.

Freedom-of-Choice as Transition

The Lowndes County situation illustrates a broader pattern of white institutional response to federal action on integration.

Freedom-of-choice plans acted as transitional mechanisms that preserved racial hierarchy while appearing to comply with federal law. They slowed integration long enough for white communities to reorganize and build new systems and structures to advance white authority and control over education.

In this sense, freedom-of-choice was part of a larger architecture of white resistance that included:

• Procedural compliance paired with substantive structural obstruction.

• Retaliatory institutional responses through actions such as the displacement of Black teachers and school administrators.

• Political legitimization from state officials that built on a race-absent rhetoric of freedom.

• Community mobilization around the language of local control and anti-federal government political framing.

In 1969, Maddox would travel to Valdosta to commend this same community’s white citizens for safeguarding exclusive white control over education by opening a private segregation academy—thus, facilitating, at least rhetorically, the white abandonment of public schools.

Why This History Still Matters

It is tempting to narrate desegregation and integration as a linear story of progress: one day we had state-sponsored school segregation that maintained racial hierarch and the next day we didn’t. Brown declares legally-mandated segregation unconstitutional; federal official enforce compliance; and states comply and schools integrate.

Lowndes County’s freedom-of-choice plan and their response to the HEW officials visit to Valdosta complicates this narrative.

Federal mandates alone did not produce integration. Local actors retained powerful tools—hiring authority, student assignment policies, school closure and consolidation decisions—that allowed them to reshape compliance into resistance. The dismantling of state-sponsored, legally-mandated segregation did not automatically dismantle the white-controlled institutional habits and structures that had maintained it.

Lowndes County reminds us that educational change is rarely a simple matter of law, policy, or regulation. It is a contest over institutional power.

More to come soon.

References

• Baird, Joseph H. “Lester Maddox: Puritan in the Statehouse. The Reporter, October 5, 1967. Retrieved from the Lester Maddox Personality File, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, GA.

• Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

• “Negro Teachers Going, Lowndes Schools Reply.” The Atlanta Constitution, August 2, 1967.

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