A continuity of conservatism: the limitations of Brown v. Board of Education.

ON MAY 17, 1954, THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT ISSUED THE landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that laws mandating racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional. Some civil rights activists reacted with caution to the decision, most conspicuously the man who had led the legal challenge against Jim Crow education, Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Nonetheless, many supporters of the civil rights cause saw the ruling as a decisive breakthrough. Charles S. Johnson, president of the black Fisk University, articulated the excited sense of expectation that the ruling would break down social barriers not only in schools but in all areas of public life: "If segregation is unconstitutional in educational institutions, it is no less so unconstitutional in other aspects of our national life." (1) The New York Amsterdam News was even more emphatic, declaring that '"The Supreme Court decision is the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation." (2)

Despite the initial optimism of civil rights campaigners, the process of school desegregation was beset by obstruction and delay. Although the era of massive resistance was relatively short-lived, white southerners subsequently succeeded through less confrontational tactics in restricting the implementation of the Brown decision. The defiance of federal authority by segregationists ignited a broad conservative reaction against the judicial activism of the Supreme Court, while Brown also inspired a southern white backlash against Washington that persists to the present day. My purpose is to assess how white southerners mobilized in opposition to school desegregation and then to turn to the longer-term impact of conservative political strategy.

It has been argued that the Brown decision impeded the gradual process of racial change that had been taking place in the southern states since the late 1940s. According to this interpretation, the Supreme Court seriously miscalculated by selecting education as the target for a judicial assault on segregation rather than choosing the less emotionally sensitive area of voting rights or public transportation. Instead, the ruling undermined the reform of Jim Crow practices by provoking a militant backlash among southern conservatives. The integration of public facilities occurred because massive resistance stirred blacks into mobilizing a more effective protest movement that forced a previously complacent federal government to impose coercive civil rights legislation. (3)

One of the principal criticisms of this analysis is that it overstates the momentum of racial reform in the pre-Brown South. The years during and immediately after World War II witnessed a resurgence in racial violence as whites attempted to repress the growing political assertiveness of the black population. Between 1941 and 1946, white lynchers murdered at least twenty-two African Americans. (4) Despite substantial increases in membership that occurred during the war, civil rights organizations struggled to score any decisive political breakthroughs. The efforts of southern blacks to build a stronger political power base through the integration of labor unions also suffered as a result of the racially divisive tactics of employers. Although there were some signs of change in the air, they were less a strong wind than a faint breeze. In the early 1950s several southern states attempted to preempt a legal challenge to public-school segregation by eliminating the most blatant disparities in educational facilities for black and white students. More than half a century after the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, white southerners were finally taking measures to provide practical meaning to the doctrine of "separate but equal." Yet such action only underlined their determination to protect the social order from federal interference.

Proponents of the backlash thesis are more persuasive in their assertion that the Brown decision was not the principal catalyst for the development of the civil rights movement. Many of the standard movement histories still assigned in classrooms include opening chapters that emphasize the formative influence of the Supreme Court. Yet in recent years scholars have rewritten the master narrative of the civil rights revolution by tracing the mobilization of black political protest to an era that predates the decision. It therefore seems that the civil rights movement was inevitable with or without the Supreme Court. Yet the fact that one of the branches of the federal government had established its principled opposition to racial segregation was still of symbolic power and may at least have accelerated the growth of black activism. The more militant phase of direct action that started with the student sit-in movement of 1960 was also inspired by a sense of frustrated expectation at the failure to fulfill the initial promise of the court ruling. Those students who led the sit-in movement had grown up in the anticipation that they would be the first generation of southern blacks to graduate from integrated schools. Their decision to take to the streets was in part motivated by the fact that even by 1964 less than 2 percent of schools in the former Confederate states had offered even token compliance with the Brown decision. Nonetheless, it is important not to overstate this point. As Gerald N. Rosenberg argues, the Brown decision may have actually retarded the growth of direct action because the ruling encouraged civil rights campaigners to depend too heavily on litigation. (5)

Advocates of the backlash thesis are also absolutely right to emphasize the intensity of white southern reaction to the Brown decision. When compared with other liberation struggles around the world, the civil rights movement seems to have won an almost bloodless revolution. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the civil rights crusade claimed a total of forty martyrs. The sixty-seven victims of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre demonstrate that more people died in a single day of protest against South African apartheid. (6) Nevertheless, racial violence and intimidation were among the most vital methods by which white southerners fought to prevent implementation of the Brown decision. Between the beginning of 1955 and the end of 1958, 225 instances of anti-civil rights violence took place in the South. That total included assaults and murders of black and white individuals and also the burning or bombing of schools, churches, synagogues, and private homes. (7) Educational institutions that attempted to integrate saw their campuses turned into battlegrounds. Although local and state authorities tried to protect their political legitimacy by attributing that violence to the lunatic fringe, the terror and intimidation of African Americans continued to command pervasive sanction from many mainstream elements of the white community. As with the lynchings that had blighted the region since the late nineteenth century, federal authorities failed to assist the prosecution of those responsible for crimes of racial violence, and southern juries therefore felt little pressure to convict.

Northern indifference on the race issue had allowed an earlier generation of southern politicians to legitimate the lawless actions of the lynch mob. By the 1950s the political climate no longer permitted segregationist leaders to lend their explicit support to acts of racial violence. No politician would have dared express sentiments similar to those of Governor Coleman L. Blease of South Carolina, who forty years earlier had proclaimed his readiness to lead a mob against any black man who assaulted a white woman. Segregationist leaders attempted to promote the legitimacy of their opposition to integration by disavowing violent resistance of the law and racist appeals to white prejudice. Instead they tried to appeal to issues of high political principle by framing their resistance to the Supreme Court decision within the strict doctrine of states' rights. This attempt to claim respectability for the segregationist cause was pursued by the White Citizens' Councils of which many southern politicians were members. In some states, groups of segregation proponents chose alternate names to reinforce their claims to be legitimate organizations operating within the existing democratic political process: the Georgia States' Rights Council, the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, and the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties in Virginia.

While segregationist leaders did not advocate violence, their opposition to federal law nonetheless contributed to a political climate that fostered acts of mob intimidation and racial terrorism. In March 1956 more than one hundred southern representatives and senators signed a "Declaration of Constitutional Principles" that declared their intention to use every legal means to resist school desegregation. Political extremists received tacit support from the refusal of elected officials to respect the law of the land, their repeated threats of interposition, and their disavowal of responsibility for the violence they claimed would occur in reaction to federal efforts to enforce school desegregation. One of the most infamous illustrations of this is the Little Rock school crisis. In September 1957 Governor Orval E. Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to obstruct the admission of nine black students to Central High School. When a federal district court ordered Faubus to cease his interference with the desegregation process, he withdrew the National Guard and disclaimed all responsibility for maintaining law and order. The governor was blatantly disingenuous. Although he claimed to have acted in the interests of community peace, his defiant stand had stirred segregationists into open revolt. When the students reattempted to enter the school, they were met by an angry mob of more than one thousand. Other southern politicians were just as guilty of racial demagoguery. The notorious proclamation "Segregation now, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever" made by Alabama governor George C. Wallace did not lend itself to serious interpretative debate.

Although explicit acts of racial violence had lost their legitimacy, segregationists continued to utilize covert extralegal tactics that were no less destructive in their impact upon the black community. African Americans who attempted to register as voters or enroll their children at all-white schools suffered financial reprisals. Some were fired from their jobs; others had their names removed from the welfare rolls. Loans were called in, and further credit was refused. In these and other ways white segregationists exploited the economic dependency of poor blacks as a means of repressing incipient civil rights protest.

As the desegregation crisis progressed, its effects further caused some white southerners to reassess the legitimacy of racial violence. By the early 1960s an increasingly influential number of racial moderates understood that the political and economic stability of the region necessitated at least token compliance with the Supreme Court decision. Civic and business leaders, for instance, feared that the violent reaction to court-ordered integration would discourage the investment of northern capital. While industrial and manufacturing entrepreneurs were no more inclined to support racial integration than other white southerners, they were more prepared to accommodate the demands of black protesters in order to protect economic progress. The threat of public-school closure also pushed concerned white parents to oppose the tactics of militant segregationists. In Little Rock white mothers organized the Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools; in New Orleans they established a campaign group called Save Our Schools. Most moderates were political realists rather than moral idealists. Their recognition that whites as well as blacks would suffer from the refusal to implement even limited racial reform marked the decline of racial violence as a political tactic.

During the 1960s massive resistance was therefore supplanted by a policy of minimum compliance. Although white southerners amended their tactics, the intention was still to preserve the status quo. As Numan V. Bartley astutely observed, "The acceptance of token desegregation was a conservative reaction in defense of southern continuity and represented no real break with the past." (8) The admission of African American students to principally white schools may have been tolerated, but white parents were far less willing to accept sending their own children to majority-black schools. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965--hardly conceivable without Brown and the civil rights movement--only confirmed and added to the conservatism of some white southerners.

The continued strength of social and political conservatism in the southern states can be seen in another important respect. During the 1950s many white southerners responded to the Brown decision by mobilizing in mass defiance of federal power. Segregationists asserted that the Supreme Court had usurped its constitutional authority. The desegregation of public schools, they argued, amounted to an unauthorized experiment in social engineering. The signatories of the Southern Manifesto contended that the Supreme Court ruling was a "clear abuse of judicial power." Efforts to enforce the decision only intensified southern antagonism toward the federal government. Segregationists declared their defiance of Washington at every stage of the desegregation process. When Eisenhower ordered troops to restore law and order in Little Rock, segregationists claimed that they were victims of an act of political dictatorship comparable to the Soviet invasion of Hungary a year earlier. Segregationists also directed their animus toward the federal district judges who were empowered by the so-called Brown H decision to secure the "prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance" by local school boards. Men such as William E. Miller in Nashville and J. Skelly Wright in New Orleans were seen as the instruments of a centralized government intent on crushing local autonomy. Segregationists retaliated against the judges by attempting to ostracize, intimidate, and injure them. White southern resentment toward Washington was further fueled by Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which authorized the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to withhold federal funds from school boards that failed to desegregate. The Supreme Court finally mandated immediate implementation of a unitary public-school system in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (1969). Although segregationists had succeeded in stalling the desegregation process for fifteen years, they still denounced the decision, with Georgia governor Lester G. Maddox claiming that it represented a "criminal act by the government." The ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971) that busing was an appropriate mechanism for the enforcement of school desegregation elicited a similar outcry. Southern conservatives also reacted furiously to federal efforts to deny tax exemptions to private schools that practiced de jure segregation. (9)

The political significance of southern white defiance of federal authority extended further than the immediate issue of school desegregation. White southerners were emboldened by the strength of their opposition to Brown to resist other Supreme Court decisions that were seen as an assault on their culture and tradition. Southern critics of the Brown decision argued that the Supreme Court had precipitated a constitutional crisis through its abuse of power. The Court, they insisted, had allowed social science and political doctrine to prevail over the rule of law. As Mississippi senator James O. Eastland asserted, the Court had been "brainwashed by left-wing pressure groups." (10) Segregationists sought through this strategy to legitimize their own lawless action by insisting they were safeguarding constitutional principles against a Supreme Court that had spun out of control.

This strategy would later be used by southern conservatives as a means of rationalizing their hostility to any Supreme Court decision that threatened their social customs and practices. One example of this is the prohibition of public school prayer in 1962. Southern conservatives denounced the decision in Engel v. Vitale in terms similar to their opposition to Brown. South Carolina congressman Lucius Mendel Rivers criticized the decision in a way that distinctly echoed the earlier attack on the Court by James Eastland. Nothing, Rivers declared, had given "more aid and comfort to Moscow than this bold, malicious, atheistic, and sacrilegious twist by an unpredictable group of uncontrollable despots." The Brown decision therefore had the unintended outcome of stimulating not only a backlash against school desegregation but also a broader assault on the social activism of the Supreme Court. Southern conservatives had fought furiously to prevent Brown from destabilizing one of the foundations of their way of life. In the future they would continue to resist the Court for fear that the entire edifice would be demolished. George W. Andrews of Alabama captured this sentiment in expressing his opposition to the ban on school prayer. As he succinctly put it, "They put Negroes in the school and now they've driven God out." (11) The countermeasures taken by southern legislatures to obstruct implementation of school integration also established a template for further resistance against the Supreme Court. >From 1954 until 1964, the southern states enacted nearly five hundred laws to circumvent the Brown decision. (12) In later years a similar strategy has been used to impede other liberal reform measures such as the legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973).

The forces of massive resistance continue to influence contemporary southern conservatism. In 1984 conservative activist Paul Weyrich asserted that the leadership of the New Right "bears no resemblance to the reactionary Southern icons of the past." (13) Despite such claims, it is clear that segregationist politics have profoundly shaped the ideology and rhetoric of the New Right. Segregationists attempted to use racially neutral language to create a respectable cover for white supremacist beliefs. Instead of base appeals to white bigotry they spoke of unrepresentative liberal elites in Washington who threatened constitutional principles such as state sovereignty and freedom of speech. Hence George Wallace expressed his opposition to the integration of the University of Alabama by declaiming the "march of centralized government that is going to destroy the rights and freedom and liberty of the people of this country." (14) There is a similar racial subtext to much of the antistatist rhetoric of the New Right. Modern conservatism is also characterized by its antipathy toward a federal government that the New Right sees as an instrument of liberal social reform. It also utilizes racially encoded concepts to legitimize attacks on minorities. There is a distinct echo of segregationist rhetoric in the New Right defense of states' rights from the tyranny of centralized government. Conservative opposition to federal efforts to enforce school integration is framed in terms not of the protection of white racial privilege but instead of the need to protect community control and neighborhood schools. Although the New Right may have changed the label, there is still the same racial venom in the bottle. (15)

This sense of historical continuity is underscored by the fact that the forces of contemporary southern conservatism contain among their ranks some of the same segregationists who resisted the Supreme Court fifty years ago. The Council of Conservative Citizens is a case in point. Founded in 1985, the council works to preserve white southern culture and tradition and resolutely opposes governmental efforts to secure racial balance in public schools. Among the group's reported fifteen thousand members are numerous massive resistance leaders, including Robert B. Patterson, the founder of the first Citizens' Council in July 1954.

The strength of southern opposition has succeeded to some extent in restraining the liberal activism of the Supreme Court. In 1968 President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated the racially liberal Abe Fortas to succeed Earl Warren as Chief Justice. Southern Democrats led by Richard B. Russell formed a coalition with conservative Republicans to thwart the nomination through a Senate filibuster. Richard M. Nixon also attempted to consolidate Republican electoral support in the South by appointing conservatives to the Court. Although Warren E. Burger proved more progressive than Nixon anticipated, Nixon nominated Burger as Chief Justice because he had opposed the liberal tendencies of the Court under Warren. Despite the failed nomination of two southern conservatives, Nixon was able to appoint other justices, most conspicuously William H. Rehnquist, who led the Court to retreat from a reformist agenda.

Southern race relations are not the same as they were fifty years ago. At the start of the twenty-first century a greater percentage of black students attended majority-white schools in the South than any other region of the United States. Yet that figure had fallen precipitously from a peak of 43.5 percent in 1988 to 31 percent in 2000. (16) The entrapment of African Americans in the inner cities can only lead in the immediate future to the acceleration of this resegregation process. Long before their recent deaths, conservative politicians such as J. Strom Thurmond and Lester Maddox had publicly distanced themselves from their uncompromising opposition to racial integration. Yet even as the southern states bury the segregationist old guard, their spirit of resistance against federal authority continues to haunt the political landscape of the region.

(1) James T. Patterson Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights" Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (Oxford and New York, 2001), quoted on p. 71. I would like to thank Kevin M. Kruse of Princeton University, to whom I owe a substantial intellectual debt. Some of the arguments presented here are more substantially developed in Kruse's book White Flight: Race, Place and Politics in Atlanta (Princeton University Press, forthcoming). Any interpretative errors are my own.

(2) New York Amsterdam News, May 22, 1954.

(3) Michael J. Klarman, "How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis," Journal of American History, 81 (Jane 1994) 81-118.

(4) Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, 5.

(5) Gerald N. Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? (Chicago, 1991), esp. p. 52.

(6) David L. Chappell, "What the Civil Rights Movement Was Up Against," conference paper presented at Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction, University of Sussex, March 2002.

(7) Michal R. Belknap, Federal Law and Southern Order: Racial Violence and Constitutional Conflict in the Post-Brown South (Athens, Ga., 1987), 28-29.

(8) Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950"s (Baton Rouge, 1969), 342-43.

(9) Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U.S. 294 (1955); Swann v. Charlotte-Meckenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971); Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 396 U.S. 19 (1969); Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, 98 (Manifesto), 154 (Maddox).

(10) William Doyle, An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford. Mississippi, 1962 (New York, 2001), 54.

(11) Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962); Lucas A. Powe Jr., The Warren Court and American Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 188 (quotations from Rivers and Andrews).

(12) Reed Sarratt, The Ordeal of Desegregation: The First Decade (New York, 1966), 357-58.

(13) Jean Hardisty, Mobilizing Resentment: Conservative Resurgence from the John Birch Society to the Promise Keepers (Boston, 1999), quoted on p. 131.

(14) Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York, 1995), quoted on p. 137.

(15) For more information on racially encoded concepts see Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Tares on American Politics (New York, 1991).

(16) Erica Frankenburg, Changmei Lee, and Gary Orfield, "A Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream?" p. 12, Civil Rights Project of Harvard University, January 2003, http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/research/reseg03/ AreWeLosingtheDream.pdf (accessed January 20, 2004).

MR. WEBB is a lecturer in North American history in the American Studies Department, University of Sussex, Brighton, England.