Resistance Over Compliance
Lowndes County, GA and the failure of freedom-of-choice plans to promote school integration
In early August 1967, representatives from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) met with the Lowndes County Board of Education (BoE) in Valdosta, GA. HEW made clear that they weren’t very happy with the pace at which the Lowndes County Schools were desegregating.
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.