White Rage

by Carol Anderson

  Already Jim Crow had cost America’s black children dearly. Delaware, a border state, had abdicated all responsibility for the education of its African American citizens: “Blacks were pretty much left to their own devices as far as education was concerned.” By 1910, they had built eighty-one schools throughout Delaware, but, given their lack of resources, these were no more than shacks without decent lighting, plumbing, or enough desks. Even when philanthropist Pierre S. Du Pont launched a program to bring these schools up to code, white residents made it clear that they not only opposed public funding for black schools but were equally resistant to private, philanthropic resources intervening as well.6 The results were devastating. There was only one black public high school in the entire state. As a consequence, by 1950, African American adults in Delaware had finished, on average, only 7.2 years of school; whites had finished more than 10 years. Only 505 blacks in the entire state had earned at least a bachelor’s degree. Not surprisingly, African Americans’ income was “barely one-third of white families’ earnings.”7

  Virginia, despite being the wealthiest Southern state and the fifth richest in the entire nation, with a constitution and statutes requiring the provision of public schools and compulsory attendance, was equally determined not to educate its black population.8 In Prince Edward County, for example, no high school existed for blacks until 1939, and by 1947 Robert Moton High “was jammed with more than twice the number of students it was designed to hold.” White residents, however, refused to use their tax dollars to relieve the overcrowding, ignoring the fact that 45 percent of the county’s population was composed of African Americans, who had clearly contributed to the public till as well. Instead, to handle the overflow at Moton High, the all-white school board erected three tar paper shacks, with neither insulation nor electricity, to house the students. One teenager remembered visitors taking pictures of the shacks “to show the people back home how backward we were.” An elementary school for African American children—“a one-room wooden schoolhouse that housed seven grades”—was no better.9

  The other black schools in Prince Edward County, too, were poorly constructed with no indoor plumbing and thus serviced only by outhouses. The fifteen facilities for 2,000 African American students were valued at $330,000, whereas the seven brick schoolhouses for 1,400 white students, replete with indoor toilet facilities and modern furnaces, had been appraised at $1.2 million.10

  In the Deep South, the educational opportunities were at least as bleak.11 The disparity in student-to-teacher ratios in mid-1930s Atlanta, for example, was staggering. For blacks, there were 82 students for every teacher, while the ratio for whites was 35 to 1. The overcrowding led to significantly shortened school days, as African American students rotated through on staggered, truncated shifts. Even when public funding was finally increased, the disparities not only remained but also actually grew. In 1942, the Atlanta school board allocated $75 more in support per capita for white students than for black students. By 1946, that figure had climbed to a difference of almost $80. African Americans had to contend with “overcrowded classrooms, decrepit school buildings, inadequate numbers of textbooks, schools lacking libraries, cafeterias, gymnasiums,” and double and triple sessions where “85 percent of all black elementary school students attended class for only half the day during the 1947–48 school year.”12

  In Louisiana during the 1943–44 academic year, similar funding disparities echoed throughout the school system. At the elementary level alone, for example, the East Baton Rouge parish spent $67.79 per capita on white children while doling out a mere third of that for each African American student. Orleans parish spent $103.65 on each white elementary school student and $66.76 on each black student. East Feliciana Parish, thirty miles north of Baton Rouge, had a per capita allocation of $121.64 for whites in kindergarten through sixth grades and a paltry $18.92 for each black child in those grades. Overall, Louisiana spent $76.34 per white elementary school child and only $23.99 for each African American one.13

  South Carolina was just as discriminatory. In the early 1950s, the state spent nearly five times more per capita on school buildings for whites than it did on those for blacks, had no high school whatsoever for African Americans in nineteen counties, and assigned only eight school buses throughout the state to transport black children.14 In Clarendon County, there were “thirty school buses for the white children … none for the black children.” And when in 1947 a soft-spoken black preacher asked the all-white school board for just one bus, the chairman, R. W. Elliott, fired back, “We ain’t got no money to buy a bus for your nigger children.” Yet, they had funds to educate white students. The property value of black schools in Clarendon County, attended by 6,531 students, was “officially listed as $194,575. The value of the white schools, attended by 2,375 youngsters, was put at $673,850.” Thus, the county spent nearly ten times more per capita on the white students’ facilities.15

  The result of such widespread disparities in funding was that the U.S. educational system, despite the demands of parents and students craving high-quality schools, had deliberately produced a sprawling, uneducated population that would bedevil the nation well into the twenty-first century. In Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi, with a combined population of 4.7 million African Americans, more than half of all black adults by the mid-1940s had less than five years of formal education. In South Carolina and Louisiana, more than 60 percent of black adult citizens had no more than a fourth- or fifth-grade education.16

  In one court case after the next, from 1935 to 1950, the NAACP had convincingly demonstrated that southern governments were simply incapable of meeting Plessy’s Jim Crow standard of “separate but equal.”17 And because the legal bedrock of the South was predicated on that dictum, the proven inability to have both equal and separate simultaneously left Dixie in judicial danger, which was just as Charles Hamilton Houston intended.18 With the legal precedent duly laid, the time to take down Plessy as fundamentally unconstitutional was now. Houston’s protégé, Thurgood Marshall, led the next phase of this legal battle. Starting in 1950, the NAACP’s lawyers had amassed cases from Delaware, Virginia, South Carolina, Kansas, and Washington, D.C., that were bundled into one, Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. In December 1952, Marshall argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that racial segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth as well as the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. And with that, a series of legal, political, and cultural explosions went off below the Mason-Dixon Line; it was clear that “Jim Crow in the classroom was fast approaching a fatal constitutional rendezvous,” something white Southern politicians were determined to avoid at all costs.19

  This legal challenge was no surprise. Every legislator, senator, congressman, and governor knew that the schools designed for black children were woefully inadequate and had been so for generations. As Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, explained, “By any fair calculation, governors and school boards had had nearly twenty years to see the train coming down the track. It didn’t just roll up to them overnight.” The Association’s first lawsuit had been in 1935 against the University of Maryland, followed by cases against Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas; therefore, Wilkins wrote, “it should have been obvious that change in the high school and grade schools was coming next.”20

  As they had previously attempted with higher education, the states then dangled a series of school-equalization packages before the NAACP and the black community as a bribe to drop the lawsuits and accept separate schools as reality in America. President Dwight Eisenhower sympathized with the white South. At the behest of his “great friend,” South Carolina governor James Byrnes, Eisenhower hosted a small dinner party at the White House to explain to Chief Justice Earl Warren that Southerners “are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside big overgrown Negroes.”21 At the same time, he warned Governor Byrnes, �
�the last-minute southern attempt to put some money into Negro schools” would be prohibitively expensive.22 During World War II, the federal government estimated that it would have taken, in 2014 dollars, $1.2 trillion to equalize the schools in America.23 Byrnes and others, however, believed the expense was worth it to keep Jim Crow the uncontested law of the land. And so, as a gesture of good faith, new black high schools suddenly popped up across the South, while property tax bonds earmarked for black schools sailed through, or were at least earnestly discussed in all-white legislatures.24

  That was the carrot. The NAACP, however, refused to bite. Those new schools—“guilded [sic] citadels of segregation,” the Association called them—were but a sorcerer’s trick in the struggle for real equality. Politicians who had ignored or deliberately strangled black children’s opportunities for decades had not miraculously experienced a change of heart. Only the NAACP’s steady stream of victories in court had caused this sudden loosening of the wallet, and this all-too-recent concern about the overcrowded shacks called schools. African Americans had no doubt that the moment the Association backed off, underlying assumptions of black inferiority and inability would reemerge and continue to translate into public policy—and not just in the schools but also in housing, employment, health care, and the vote. So neither the NAACP nor the black community backed down or backed off.25

  Roy Wilkins scoffed at white Southern leaders’ “scramble … to upgrade black school shanties in the vain hope of heading off pressure to do away with them entirely.”26 The future was at stake here, and African Americans were determined to use every resource at their disposal to ensure that not one more generation fell into the abyss of illiteracy, poverty, and economic vulnerability. “I offered my life for a decadent democracy,” pronounced the Reverend L. Francis Griffin, a black man who had served in the Jim Crow military during World War II and had been one of the firebrands in Prince Edward County behind Brown, “and I’m willing to die rather than let these children down.”27 For those whites who had hoped that equalization would defuse the “Armageddon” of Brown, that kind of trenchant response was as terrifying as it was surprising.28

  When it was clear that the carrot wouldn’t work, and when even once-reliable Negroes, whom the power structure had always been able to count on to preach patience, actually refused to lend their support to equalization schemes to convince the NAACP to withdraw Brown from the Supreme Court’s docket, then the response was emphatic.29 Senator James O. Eastland (D-MS) vowed, “We will protect and maintain white supremacy throughout eternity.”30 Mississippi governor Fielding Wright concurred, adding, “regardless of the consequences.”31

  In Georgia, beating back a 1949 challenge from black parents to equalize the schools, Governor Herman Talmadge had already proposed a constitutional amendment that would authorize the state legislature to scrap the public school system altogether and “channel state funds into tuition grants for [white] students attending private schools.” In other words, while threatening to scuttle public education and provide state-funded tuition for whites to attend segregated private academies, Talmadge, who had vowed, “as long as I am Governor, … Negroes will not be admitted to white schools,” never contemplated any educational alternatives for the 321,255 African American children in the state in 1950.32

  Similarly, Mississippi’s legislature crafted a constitutional amendment to abolish public schools and, in case that didn’t pass, a pupil-placement law using race-neutral language—“ability,” “whether a good fit or not”—to give school boards inordinate power to prevent more than 325,000 black children from gaining access to better-resourced white schools. In South Carolina, Byrnes, who had been a congressman, a U.S. senator, a U.S. Supreme Court justice, and then secretary of state before becoming governor, “added dignity and a sense of solemn purpose to the segregationist cause.” The aura of respectability he lent to a slew of legislative proposals—selling public school property to private individuals, pupil-placement laws, and “a constitutional amendment relieving South Carolina of its obligation to provide a free public school system”—made them seem the work of reasonable, learned statesmen. “Of only one thing can we be certain,” he swore. “South Carolina will not now, nor for some years to come, mix white and colored children in our schools” even if, he continued, that meant shutting down the entire education system.33 Similar reaction spread throughout the South, and threatened to erupt more seriously in the event that the Supreme Court ruled Plessy, and therefore Jim Crow, unconstitutional.34

  That day of reckoning came. After nearly sixty years of racial purgatory, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown that Jim Crow schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and, in the D.C. case, the due process requirement of the Fifth Amendment. Even the taciturn Roy Wilkins could barely contain himself. “May 17, 1954, was one of life’s sweetest days,” he later recalled.35 Nor was the significance of this judgment confined to the education of black children. “If segregation is unconstitutional in educational institutions,” observed Charles Johnson, president of Fisk University, “it is no less so unconstitutional in other aspects of our national life.”36 At that moment, it appeared that citizenship—true citizenship—might finally be at hand for African Americans. It was “the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation,” wrote the New York Amsterdam News. Robert Jackson, a black professor in Virginia, exclaimed that “a heavy burden has been lifted from [black students’] shoulders. They see a new world opening up for them and those that follow.”37

  To Southern leaders who had already been readying their political arsenal, the decision in Brown was but a declaration of war. Wilkins later admitted, “My sense of euphoria was a bit naïve. Swept away, elevated, exalted, I failed to anticipate the ferocity of the resistance that quickly grew up in the Deep South.” There was a “cold, clinical cruelty of the response.”38

  Traditionally, white Southern resistance to Brown has been captured by the visual images of violence that followed the Supreme Court decision: the horribly mutilated body of Emmett Till; the angry mob of housewives surrounding traumatized Elizabeth Eckford on the first day of school at Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas; and the disturbing Norman Rockwell painting of little, pigtailed six-year-old Ruby Bridges surrounded by towering National Guardsmen and racial epithets scrawled on the wall as she walked up the steps to desegregate her elementary school in New Orleans. None of that violence would have happened, however, and certainly would not have been given the broader societal stamp of approval, if the respected elements in white society—governors, legislators, U.S. senators, congressmen, and even, more tepidly, the president of the United States—had not condoned complete defiance of and contempt for the Supreme Court and the constitutional provision that its decisions are the law of the land.

  In the North, where racial segregation was intense, the defiance was subtle but effective. In 1957, for example, Milwaukee’s school board instituted “intact busing” that carried black children to white schools, kept them isolated in a separate classroom, and then ferried them back home again.39 The overt, even violent response to Brown did not occur until much later, in the 1970s, most spectacularly in Boston.40

  On the other hand, the Southern states made clear that they were ready for war. The first step was to ensure that only those who felt threatened by Brown could vote.41 Ever since the rise of Jim Crow in the 1890s, Southern officials had been vigilant in eviscerating black access to the ballot box. By 1944, in the states of the old Confederacy, only 5 percent of age-eligible African Americans were registered to vote, which left millions of blacks politically voiceless.42 In the late 1940s, the NAACP launched a series of voter registration drives to provide local Southern communities with resources to deal with the tangle of requirements—the poll tax, literacy tests, understanding clauses—blocking African American access to the ballot box. But the going was hard and, in places like Mississippi, lethal, with well-coordinated campaigns
of racial terrorism leading to the murders of residents aiding the NAACP’s efforts.43

  As difficult as voter registration had been before Brown, it became much more so after the ruling. Mississippi reinforced an amendment requiring superior literacy and an ability to “understand” and interpret the state’s constitution.44 Given that nearly 53 percent of Mississippi’s adult African American population had fewer than five years of education, compared with only 10 percent of whites of voting age, the emphasis on literacy and interpretation of a complicated legal document, while appearing race-neutral, was, in fact, targeted directly at black Mississippians.45 Even more, state authorities required already registered African Americans to go through the gauntlet of literacy tests, understanding clauses, and the whims of registrar scrutiny once again to re-register. That move alone caused the number of black registered voters in Mississippi to plummet by two thirds.46 Moreover, the ever-present threat of violence was pervasive, with the full support, and sometimes participation, of law enforcement. As J. W. Milam, the Mississippian who tortured and murdered fourteen-year-old Emmett Till only to be found “not guilty” in 1955 by a jury of his peers, remarked, “Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did, they’d control the government. They ain’t gonna go to school with my kids.”47 The same sentiment animated officials 110 miles away in the capital of Jackson, who worked tirelessly to reduce the power of the black vote until in many counties not a single African American was on the voter rolls.48 Even as late as 1960, more than 98 percent of Mississippi’s black adults were not registered to vote.49

  Similarly, in 1953, in Alabama’s so-called Black Belt, “where the black population equaled or exceeded that of whites,” only 1.3 percent of eligible African Americans were registered. Two counties had no black voters whatsoever.50 In 1954, the year of Brown, the Alabama legislature modified the state’s constitution to raise significantly the threshold on access to the polls by adding comprehensive-understanding and good-character clauses.51 Just as in Mississippi, in Alabama the disparity between white and black adults with five years or less of education was so wide (16.3 percent versus 54.1 percent, respectively) that a requirement to read and interpret the state’s constitution could yield only one result.52