Opposition to Civil Rights in the USA, 1954-65 PDF

# Opposition to Civil Rights in the USA, 1954-65 The desegregation of US schools provoked strong opposition from white Southerners. Mark Rathbone examines whose resistance was the most effective - the subtle moderates or the extreme 'massive resisters'? ## Argument ### Massive Resistance Self-Def...

# Opposition to Civil Rights in the USA, 1954-65 The desegregation of US schools provoked strong opposition from white Southerners. Mark Rathbone examines whose resistance was the most effective - the subtle moderates or the extreme 'massive resisters'? ## Argument ### Massive Resistance Self-Defeating After the Supreme Court outlawed racially divided schools, White Southerners sought to resist desegregation. Extremist 'massive resisters' and violent defenders of segregation were less effective than moderates, whose resistance to desegregation was more subtle. On 17 May 1954 the US Supreme Court ruled out racial segregation in schools and segregation was unconstitutional. Fifty-eight years after the court had determined, in Plessy v Ferguson, that segregation was constitutional, the Warren Court, in a 9-0 unanimous opinion, turned this verdict upside down. Returning to the case the following year, the court ruled that desegregation in schools must take place with 'all deliberate speed', marking the start of a lengthy period in which many Southern states fought to avoid obeying this order. It is this resistance to desegregation and to further progress on African-American civil rights that is the focus of this article. ### Southern Policy of 'Massive Resistance' Senators Strom Thurmond, Harry Flood Byrd and Richard Russell launched a frontal assault on desegregation in March 1956. Their 'Southern Manifesto' accused the Supreme Court of 'a clear abuse of judicial power', encroaching on the legislative role of Congress and the states. In calling for massive resistance to the court decision, they used the doctrine of interposition to claim that states could make federal law void. First put forward in 1798, interposition had never been successfully sustained and the Confederacy's defeat in the American Civil War had buried it. In 1955, nevertheless, James Jackson Kilpatrick, the die-hard segregationist editor of the Richmond News Leader, resurrected the theory. In February 1956 the Virginia state legislature resolved to use all available means 'to resist this illegal encroachment on our sovereign powers'. Thurmond, Byrd and Russell took the dangerous course of endorsing interposition and the Southern Manifesto was signed by 19 of the 22 senators for Southern states, and 77 of the 105 Southern Representatives. The authority of such a large proportion of their elected representatives stiffened the resistance of Southern states to desegregation. ### Pro-Segregationists threaten to resist integration with violence National politicians like Thurmond, Byrd and Russell were careful not to associate themselves with violence. But the campaign of massive resistance that they launched encouraged extreme language, often accompanied by the threat of violence. When officials in Milford, Delaware admitted 11 African-Americans to Milford High School in 1954, Bryant Bowles formed the so-called National Association for the Advancement of White People. At a meeting attended by some 2,000 people, Bowles declared, 'Do you think I'll ever let my little girl go to school with Negroes? I certainly will not!' He threatened that 'a lot of gunpowder will burn'. Desegregation in Milford was postponed until 1962, and the last all-black school in Delaware did not close until 1970, though Bowles was less successful in the neighbouring state of Maryland. He arrived in Baltimore in October 1954 to lend his support to an anti-segregation campaign, but the city authorities stood firm and after less than a week the demonstrations faded away. In Indianola, Mississippi in 1954, the first White Citizens’ Council was formed. By 1957 there were White Citizens' Councils throughout Mississippi, Alabama and other Southern states, with a combined membership of around 250,000. Their main tactic was economic intimidation, helped by their recruitment of bank managers, doctors and insurance brokers. African-Americans who tried to send their children to 'white' schools found they could not get mortgages, medical care or insurance. The Citizens’ Councils cultivated a respectable image, yet their campaigns could be accompanied by violence. John Kasper, secretary of a Citizens' Council in Tennessee, was twice jailed for violent campaigns against desegregation of schools in Clinton and Nashville. After Leander Perez told a Citizens’ Council rally in New Orleans in 1960 that African-Americans would rape their daughters if they were admitted to all-white schools, whites rioted, attacked African-Americans in the streets and boycotted mixed schools. The most notorious incident in the school desegregation campaign, however, was in 1957, when a white mob prevented the admission of nine African-American students to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. President Eisenhower eventually sent 1,000 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne to protect the nine students. This was the first time since Reconstruction had ended in 1877 that soldiers had been sent into a Southern state to assist African-Americans. ### The Escalation of Violence As the civil rights movement grew and its focus moved beyond school desegregation to demands for effective civil rights and voting rights acts, violence directed against it increased. So the Freedom Riders’ campaign to desegregate interstate bus travel in 1961 was met with beatings and bus-burnings. Four African-American teenage girls lost their lives at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan's Robert Chambliss in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in September 1963 Between 1961 and 1965, 26 civil rights workers were killed in the South and in March 1965 the Selma to Montgomery march was halted by Sheriff Jim Clark’s state troopers who attacked marchers with whips, cattle prods and tear gas. In the days that followed, two white supporters of civil rights, James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo, were murdered by white racists. ### Extremism Turns White Opinion In Favour Of Civil Rights Yet as the violent resistance to civil rights became increasingly extreme, it was ultimately ineffective. The Freedom Riders continued their campaign despite the violence and in November 1961 interstate bus travel was desegregated. The scenes of violence in Selma in 1965, played out in front of television news cameras, caused widespread revulsion and within days President Johnson had sent an effective Voting Rights Bill to Congress. So the extreme and uncompromising nature of massive resistance became self-defeating, and it ultimately failed to stop desegregation and the passage of effective laws such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. ### The Response of The Southern Moderates There was more to Southern opposition to civil rights, however, than massive resistance. There was also a group of Southern moderates whose strategy to defend segregation was more subtle. They realised that violent or defiantly illegal resistance to integration would turn white opinion in the rest of the USA against the South and play into the hands of the civil rights movement. A moderate response, deterring violence, talking reasonable language and making token concessions, would enable the South to retain most aspects of segregation. Foremost among Southern moderates were three state governors who used their positions to organise legal resistance to desegregation, while arguing for formal compliance with Brown v Board of Education. So, while Governor Faubus of Arkansas (1955-67) provoked federal intervention by blocking desegregation in Little Rock, Governor J. P. Coleman of neighbouring Mississippi (1956-60) devised a less confrontational means of getting round integration - the pupil placement plan. This assigned students to schools not according to their race but on wider sociological factors, such as 'morals, community welfare and health', while nevertheless excluding almost all African-Americans from white schools. Coleman's strategy postponed genuine integration while keeping both white extremists and civil rights activists under control. ### Conclusion Die-hards like Kilpatrick, who revived discredited constitutional theories to defy the Supreme Court, advocates of massive resistance like senators Thurmond, Byrd and Russell, popular leaders like Bowles and Perez, and above all terrorist killers like Chambliss – none of these were the most formidable opponents of civil rights. Their very extremism turned non-Southern white opinion against them and only assisted the civil rights movement. As Martin Luther King put it, 'The Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate'. The most effective opponents of racial reform in the 1950s and 1960s were indeed moderates like governors Collins, Hodges and Coleman, who openly argued for formal compliance with the Supreme Court and made token concessions on minor matters, while organising legal resistance to desegregation and preserving intact the greater part of the South's Jim Crow society.