Brown v. Board of Education Overview

Overview of Brown v. Board of Education

• Described by historian Charles Payne as a "milestone in search of something to signify"
• The case had a redemptive cultural significance and acted to emancipate the white South and the Supreme Court
• Served as an ideal to measure current inequalities, though equal protection disputes involve rival interpretations of its principle

Brown's Cultural Load and Significance

• Brown is a milestone, but its significance lies in contributions to understandings of race and racism and its relationship to American democracy
• Powerful producer of "racial common sense"
• Contributes towards a "mystification of race" by simplifying the complexities of white supremacy into something called "segregation"

Early Successes Challenged

• The reading of massive resistance to school desegregation is challenging yet draws from historical understanding
• Lassiter describes Southern politics and Sun Belt agenda defined by meritocracy
• Moderates articulated a "strategic constitutionalism"
• Robert Cover's pioneering work rearticulates the shift from massive resistance to state constitutionalism intensifying racial violence

Remembering Civil Rights

• It was commonly believed that the meaning is largely contained within a narrative of racial progress, bounded by prejudice and color-blind justice
• Massive resistance to desegregation disrupts that narrative and is suppressed or contained
• Wilkinson stated that King and the Southern Christian Leadership sought to redeem to the soul of America

Actions of Reynolds

• William Reynolds is quoted stating they did not endorse positions impossible to reconcile with color-blind conservatism
• Reynolds quotes Marshall, Warren, Muskie, Humphrey, Wilkins, Greenberg, King, and Harlan.
• Quotes King's Washington Monument speech but ignores calls for reparations
• Quotes Marshall's Brown appeal but ignores affirmative action defense

Supreme Court Perspectives

• Justice Thomas defends color-blind constitutionalism and authorizes it as the authentic meaning of Brown and the civil rights movement
• Justice Thomas views segregationists in Brown as embracing arguments endorsed in Plessy
• Memory of resistance to school desegregation must be suppressed for the narrative to achieve desired political effect

Long Civil Right Movement

• Racism was considered illegal and unjust and contained in the past, in the South, in crude racialist prejudice, and overt acts of Jim Crow
• Pairing of condemnation and exoneration is effective within popular memory of massive resistance to school desegregation
• Racist demagogues shifts to a modern rhetoric

Segregation Policies

• Mississippi Citizens' Councils Are Protecting Both Races, places responsibility for potential violence
• Waring cautions that white people could erupt into animosity if race pressure became unbearable
• Top-down explanations of massive resistance to opportunistic racial entrepreneurs are widely accepted

Modern Adaptations

• Fairclough adapts the model and reads resistance chiefly as an internal conflict
• Badger agrees that Numan V. Bartley demonstrated over thirty years ago that it was a top-down policy
• Webb declares responsibility rests with racist demagogues who stirred whites into open revolt

Mass Resistance

• There were many visual components to massive resistance
• The crowd was mostly students at the University of Alabama who have gathered to burn desegregationist literature
• The image is meant to disturb. Positions the subject of the essays as a terrible episode in race

Virginian-Pilot

• The Virginian-Pilot newspaper has a photo of open schools showing white women dressed in skirts holding signs
• "The majority of white southerners are somewhere between the few liberals who openly embraced the principle and the vocal segregationists"

Massive Resistance vs Moderates

• Massive Resistance is described as total exclusion, defiance, rejection,
• Moderates vs token integration, gradualism, evasion
• Constitutions remove language that set the stage for closing schools
• Southern moderates were late to organize because they opposed the excesses of massive resistance
• Prospect of school closures increased the costs where many whites were unwilling to pay
• Modern preferences had little to no difference when compared to public policy

Moderates and Mass Resistance

• Kiaman states "the absence of an effectively organized opposition to massive resistance between 1956 and 1958" is not active support
• Some Southern Moderates propsed local option legislations with a pupil placement plan
• He boasted 99% of schools were kept segregated because they were defended by tokenism
• Pearsall plan which avoided confrontal rhetoric

Segregation and Equality

• The Intricate administrative problems, physical facilities, and psychological factors were a part of massive resistance
• It was more than a denial of constitutional validity more that it also represented a violation
• The Court said "Racial imbalance is not segregation."

Southern Resistance

• Southern moderates offer over massive resistance has been understood as a rejection of a Jim Crow
• The techniques reveal continuities with the present serves to undermine popular that level sincere condemnation of racism
• Civil rights historians offered a counterbalance to Southerners who contained repsonsibility

State Violence vs Integration

• There was not much discussion of the legacy of massive resistance
• The movement evidently failed to preserve total segregation is hard to get into public schools
• Historians supplies a framework for legal evasion that would otherwise require force

Citizen Council Actions

• The Citizens’ Councils created by moderates provided historical examples to what was considered respectable
• The violent component often overshadows their law/violence dichotomy and defines their legal and racial standing
• This lead them to undermine moderates and resisters

Views in Plessy v Ferguson

• The violence that has happened was in an effort to influence constitutional law
• A sheriff acting as agents of law did not render them any less criminal
• It sought to influence constitutional law

New Constitutions

• The new law terms a creation of a state or federal district
• For cover this was brave and social as it allows you to over throw complicity of the justices
• The goal is a just Genesis and not rejection of violence

What is needed?

• The article touches on what may be needed to create new law for Violence and the Word
• Civil rights activists must push judges to face to confront violence through the lens
• It could have been the intention of both groups all along to win out