This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court. The ruling declared that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. It overturned the previous “separate but equal” doctrine established by Plessy v. Ferguson in an 1896 Supreme Court decision that ruled racially segregated public facilities were legal as long as the facilities for Black people and White people were equal.
In 1952, Chief Justice Fred Vinson, a Truman appointee from Kentucky, argued that Plessy should be permitted to stand. But in September 1953, just before Brown was to be reargued, Vinson died of a heart attack. “This is the first indication that I have ever had that there is a God,” Justice Felix Frankfurter told a former law clerk. President Eisenhower replaced Vinson with Earl Warren, then the governor of California, who had extraordinary political skills and personal warmth, along with a deep commitment to social justice
In its 1954 decision, the Court unanimously held that segregated schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment which says no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Chief Justice Warren wrote that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” as segregated schools are “inherently unequal.” The decision was a major victory in the Civil Rights Movement and helped pave the way for desegregation across the United States.
The reaction to the Court’s decision in the Southern states was overwhelmingly negative; it was met with significant opposition from white politicians, citizens, and organizations throughout the South. State governments adopted a strategy known as “Massive Resistance” to oppose the desegregation of their public schools. The term was coined by Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr., who called for legal and political measures to resist the implementation of the Court’s decision. Several states took actions designed to circumvent or delay desegregation, including closing public schools rather than integrating them; providing state-funded vouchers for white students to attend private segregated schools also known as “segregation academies”; and changing state constitutions or enacting new laws to preserve segregation.
In some areas, there were violent reactions to the prospect of integration. There was a resurgence of White supremacist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, which used terrorist tactics, including threats, bombings, and physical violence, to intimidate African Americans and civil rights advocates. African American students, such as the Little Rock Nine, who attempted to integrate schools in Arkansas in 1957, often faced harassment and physical violence. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called in the National Guard to block integration; President Eisenhower sent federal troops to protect the students and enforce the court order. Governors in many Southern states became symbols of defiance.
Governors George Wallace of Alabama and Ross Barnett of Mississippi gained national attention by undermining integration efforts in their states, often invoking states’ rights and segregationist rhetoric. Wallace famously declared in his 1963 inaugural address “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Not every Southern governor endorsed segregation. “Big Jim” Folsom, once a popular governor of Alabama, was a moderate who refused to join other governors in a statement condemning Brown; Folsom was defeated in the 1958 election by an extreme segregationist.
Desegregation in many Southern school districts was extremely slow. In its 1955 follow-up ruling, known as Brown II, the Supreme Court instructed the states to proceed with desegregation “with all deliberate speed,” but this vague language allowed for delays. In 1964, a decade after Brown, more than ninety-eight per cent of African American children in the South still attended segregated schools. Justice Thurgood Marshall often said, “I’ve finally figured out what ‘all deliberate speed’ means. It means slow.”
Many school districts did not begin to meaningfully integrate until the late 1960s after further court rulings and federal actions, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, forced them to comply with desegregation orders. In 1976, the Supreme Court issued another landmark decision in Runyon v. McCrary, ruling that even private nonsectarian schools that denied admission to students on the basis of race violated federal civil rights laws.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a major factor in the South’s political realignment, alienating many white Southern Democrats and pushing them toward the Republican Party. President Lyndon Johnson, a Southern Democrat from Texas, predicted after signing the Act, “We have lost the South for a generation.” He recognized that the passage of the Civil Rights Act would alienate many white Southern voters who had long been a part of the Democratic base. Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate in 1964, opposed the Civil Rights Act, calling it federal overreach, though not explicitly supporting segregation. Goldwater’s stance attracted many white Southern voters who were unhappy with Johnson’s embrace of civil rights. He won five Deep South states (and Arizona) in the election, marking the beginning of the South’s shift toward the Republican Party.
American history shows that the roots of White supremacy are long and deep. For example, four articles of the Constitution provided protections for slavery without directly using that term. The Reconstruction period of 1865–1877 following the Civil War led to Jim Crow laws and the rise of White supremacist groups which used violence and intimidation to suppress Black voting and political participation. The fight over school desegregation in the 1950s and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s occurred more than a century and a half after the nation’s founding. Let’s hope today’s racially tinged right-wing extremists will be the last vestige of White supremacy.
Mark Berg is a community activist in Adams County and a proud Liberal. His email address is MABerg175@Comcast.net.
Thanks for your article. White supremacy is a threat to our democracy and the dream that we are a united and safe place for all people.
His article was about a SCOTUS ruling that occurred 70 years ago. It’s time to move on and stop this divisive dialog. We’ve had a black president, and may have another next year. Where is all this white supremacy? I don’t see it but unlike others, I’m not actively searching for it.
If the Civil War was fought to free the slaves in the South, what was waiting for them in the North? More hate from those up North? Did the Northern black slave owners welcome them? Northern blacks who were looking for work and living in the streets? Most Blacks did not migrate up North until jobs were offered in the steel mills during WWII. Just maybe “supremacy” is not about color or race. Maybe it is about the wealthy trying to suppress the lower echelon to divide them by hate and enslave them all. “The struggle of Colored Americans to… Read more »
As Mr. Berg’s Op-Ed is focused on segregation in education, I am having a hard time understanding the relevancy of the question about wealthy transnationals or black folk needing to form alternative economic systems to conduct business.