Within five years, black defiance, courage, and sheer will in the face of such impediments pushed that 1.3 percent registration percentage to a little over 5 percent. Yet, by 1960, Wilcox and Lowndes Counties, with more than 11,000 voting-age African Americans, still had no registered black voters, while in Bullock County a mere 5 blacks had registered out of a total of 4,450 (or 0.1 percent). In Dallas County, with Selma as the major city, just 0.9 percent of eligible African Americans were registered to cast a ballot. On the other hand, six Alabama counties in the Black Belt actually listed more than 100 percent of eligible whites registered to vote, with Lowndes County topping the list at 117.9 percent.53
States relied as well upon another mechanism of insidious discrimination to silence blacks and ensure that the rule of a few would shape the course of the South and the nation for years to come: Legislative apportionment gave overwhelming and disproportionate power to rural counties, especially those that held the most ardent white segregationists and the largest black populations outside the urban areas. For example, Alabama, up to the 1960s, used the census from 1900, when the state was overwhelmingly rural, to determine the number of representatives each county sent to the state legislature. The result was that growing urban centers like Birmingham were underrepresented while Black Belt counties generally had twice as many legislators as their populations warranted. That disproportionate power was further aggravated by the massive disfranchisement of the black population. With cities thus electorally emasculated, and blacks in the rural counties silenced, there would be no countervailing force in the legislature to moderate or curtail the stranglehold at the statehouse.54
On May 31, 1955, the Supreme Court handed down an implementation decision, Brown II, stating that desegregation in public schools must happen “with all deliberate speed.”55 Recognizing that disfranchisement and legislative apportionment would not be enough to stop the progress stemming from Brown, the Deep South and Virginia soon added to their arsenals the discredited legal hocus-pocus of interposition, which argued that the state could put itself between federal law and U.S. citizens to stop enforcement of any ruling with which the state disagreed. State representative Sam Engelhardt declared that interposition would “serve notice on the rest of the nation that Alabama and the South will not accept integration.” At a January 1956 meeting in Richmond, Georgia governor Marvin Griffin announced that the Southern leadership, all by itself, had determined that the federal courts did not have “jurisdiction over any State of the Union except in the case of suits between States respecting boundary disputes.” Mississippi declared Brown “unconstitutional and of no lawful effect within the territorial limits of the state of Mississippi,” while South Carolina’s new governor, George Bell Timmerman, endorsed the unanimous legislative resolution that “condemns … the illegal encroachment by the central government” on the state’s sovereignty.56
Just as at Fort Sumter at the start of the Civil War, the first shots were aimed at the federal government, which, in the Southern states’ view, had no authority that they were bound to respect. Georgia’s legislature even went so far as to pass a resolution to “repeal the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America and to impeach the members of the Supreme Court.”57 On July 1, 1956, the state adopted a new flag, designed by segregationist John Sammons Bell, which “featured a prominent confederate battle flag. It was Georgia’s way of letting the NAACP and the rest of the nation know that white Georgians, once willing to die to protect slavery, were also willing to die to protect segregation.”58 Meanwhile White Citizens’ Councils, made up of the “sort found at Rotary meetings or dancing at the country club,” sprang up throughout the South with but one objective: destroy Brown.59 The Texas White Citizens’ Council issued the disclaimer, “We do not advocate violence or any form of illegal activity.” But the organization vowed to “prevent the integration of Negroes into white schools” and “do so by any means at [its] command which falls within the law.” The Texas Council therefore proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would require the Supreme Court to answer to Congress.60 First, this would, by design, destroy the central concept of checks and balances in the Constitution. Second, the proposed amendment would also ensure that the Supreme Court, given the stranglehold that Southern Democrats had on both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, would be at Dixie’s beck and call. And in Louisiana, the governor empowered state police to arrest any federal judge or U.S. marshal who tried to implement Brown.61
The so-called Southern Manifesto, however, was the shot heard around America. On March 12, 1956, Representative Howard Smith (D-VA) and Senator Walter George (D-GA) introduced “the Declaration of Constitutional Principles” before their respective chambers in Congress, asserting that the Supreme Court had violated states’ rights, abused judicial authority, and undercut the separation of powers. Signed by 101 members of Congress, all from states of the old Confederacy—Senator Lyndon Johnson (D-TX) was one of only a handful of holdouts—the Southern Manifesto signaled to their constituencies that Massive Resistance to Brown was not some base, primeval white supremacy but rather a principled, patriotic stand to defend the Constitution. The Southern Manifesto gave sanction from the highest levels to use the levers of government to defy the U.S. Supreme Court until, with the federal judiciary and African Americans tiring of the fight, Brown simply collapsed.62
The game plan of stall and defy was now in place. Southern states used and abused the legal process to pass one unconstitutional law after the next, knowing that the process to overturn the statutes would be costly. “We might as well be candid,” Georgia attorney general Eugene Cook admitted. “Most of the laws will be stricken down by the Courts in due course.”63 But in the meantime, all the motions, hearings, affidavits, rulings, and appeals kept Brown at bay. Those extended legal battles allowed year after year to drizzle by while the continued existence of separate and decidedly unequal schools consigned black children to some of the worst education that America had to offer. Proud of the consequences, one man bragged, “As long as we can legislate, we can segregate.”64 Indeed, by 1963, not one black child attended a public school with a white child in South Carolina, Alabama, or Mississippi. In Virginia, the birthplace of Massive Resistance, a full decade after Brown, only 1.63 percent of blacks were attending desegregated schools.65 In North Carolina, generally billed as having a “more genteel” Jim Crow, fewer than 1 percent of black pupils in the state attended schools with whites.66 African American students who once saw in Brown their “opportunity to step forward and prove to the world that the Negro is as capable as any human being,” now saw the lives and futures of nearly 2.7 million black children hanging precariously in legal purgatory in the old Confederacy.67 African Americans faced a Hobson’s choice: back down and accept the inferior, unequal, and unconstitutional education that states insisted black children deserved, or call the South’s bluff and risk no public schools at all.68
Black parents chose to fight and hauled the states back to court. Arkansas became the site of a landmark lawsuit and U.S. Supreme Court decision. African Americans were furious at how Little Rock, with a district judge’s approval, shut down the city’s schools after “violence and disorder” caused by “the actions of the Governor and Legislature” rained down on nine black teenagers.69 The subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Cooper v. Aaron was unequivocal: Brown “was the supreme law of the land and had to be obeyed.”70 The “state could not deprive black children of their constitutional rights in the face of the violence and disorder that the state had brought upon itself.” But that ruling, like Brown, only baited white officials in the South. In an amazingly wrongheaded interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, Arkansas argued that it was the state’s governor, not the U.S. Supreme Court, who had the right and power to determine the law of the land. With Governor Orval Faubus “doing just about everything he could to secede from the Union,” Roy Wilkins defined it as an “insurrecti
on.”71
Faubus’s Fort Sumter moment happened the minute the governor closed the public schools in Little Rock and all the legislative machinery of privatization that had been previously holstered came out blazing.72 Between donations totaling more than $300,000, state funding of $176 per year per student, and taxpayer-subsidized busing to private academies, Little Rock had the means for most white children to remain in school while the state simultaneously defied the Supreme Court by keeping blacks locked out.73 As one white student recalled, “When they said there was going to be a private school” and that “it would not cost you anything, my parents said ‘you’re going.’ ”74 As a disconsolate Wilkins understood, though, while “white parents sent their children to private academies” funded by the state, “we had no such recourse”; “black children in Little Rock were without school altogether.”75
Delaware had witnessed the first act of Massive Resistance to Brown in the town of Milford, where approximately 1,500 people descended on the high school shouting “Keep our schools white!” and “Dynamite the schools!” A subsequent district court ruling snubbed both the landmark 1954 decision and Cooper v. Aaron by authorizing a twelve-year delay in implementing Brown—or, essentially, another complete era of black children in the swamp of Jim Crow education, despite the well-stated law of the land. “At least implicitly,” the federal judges “conceded … that white people’s prejudices and lack of self-restraint were justification for continuing to deny blacks their constitutional protections.”76
In Virginia, when local school boards in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Front Royal were under federal court orders to admit black students, Governor James Lindsay Almond closed, in his words, every “school threatened with desegregation.” Ironically, because the white, well-funded schools in those cities matched that description (no one was clamoring to integrate overcrowded Moton High in Prince Edward County), he had shut out nearly thirteen thousand white children from getting an education.77 But despite their own actions in bringing Virginia to this point, Governor Almond and his supporters “placed full blame for education disruption at the feet of the ‘NAACP agitators.’ ”78
School closures spread now to besieged Prince Edward County. This time, black children were in the crosshairs, where they would remain for nearly a generation. With Brown looming over their heads, Virginia’s political officials passed a series of laws to close the public schools, siphon tax dollars into private academies, and pay tuition for white students, while ensuring that there was nothing in place for African American children to continue their education. On November 11, 1955, the Gray Commission (named after State Senator Garland Gray) rolled out a phalanx of recommendations to keep Virginia’s schools separate and unequal. Gray first cherry-picked the commission’s members, providing disproportionate representation to those in Black Belt counties, and then narrowed discussion even further by tapping only the most ardent segregationists to sit on the all-important executive council.79 Another, more “moderate” alternative, the Perrow Plan (named for State Senator Mosby Perrow), would have at least saved the public schools, but just barely. This plan developed a formula to divert the lion’s share of tax dollars into a private school system while cutting public schools’ funding and operational abilities to the bone. The governor shelved that one and eventually chose Gray’s.80 The state of Virginia was hurtling toward an educational apocalypse. Since 1954, nearly 20 percent of the state’s public schools had closed in response to Brown. Moreover the Gray Plan required Virginia to spend one million dollars for every 1 percent of the student population that chose the private school system. Savoring this Pyrrhic victory, State Senator Gray proudly boasted, “I guess we won the Civil War.”81
The Gray Commission’s plan was put into action after a 1959 Fourth Circuit decision reversed a district court ruling that had given Prince Edward County a full seven years to comply with Brown. With the Fourth Circuit now ordering the schools to integrate by the fall of 1959, county supervisors immediately abolished the property tax that funded public schools and diverted the money into a cache for tuition grants to support the all-white Prince Edward Academy.82 The supervisors added their county funds to grants offered by the state to ensure that the costs for this private education were covered with public dollars. In addition, sixty-seven of the sixty-nine teachers at Prince Edward Academy were all from the now-closed public schools.83
While white children were educated, 2,700 black children were locked out. The defiance of Prince Edward County was singular—no other school system in the nation remained closed for five years (1959 to 1964) rather than comply with Brown.84 The impoverished but determined African American community managed to send some children away to relatives, but only thirty-five black students were able to attend those out-of-state schools on a full-time basis.85 During those five long years, critical in terms of child development, most African American students spent their formative education time in activity centers that the black community cobbled together.86 The Baltimore Afro-American reported that these makeshift centers, some in basements, some in churches, others in abandoned shacks, staffed overwhelmingly by housewives and those with only a high school diploma, could not provide anything approximating an adequate education. The resources were simply not available to be open more than three days a week, for half a day and have a curriculum of “little more than a scant program of reading, singing and discussion.”87 These years had taken a great toll on the children.
Once again, black parents, with the determined Reverend L. Francis Griffin as the plaintiff, had to haul Virginia back to court. But as the Washington Post reported, when the lawsuits hit, Prince Edward County supervisors simply “denied that the Virginia constitution requires the operation of public schools in any county.”88 Finally, cutting through that absurdity, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down two unequivocal decisions that forced the schools to reopen.89 Even then local and state authorities “employed every weapon in their arsenal to ensure that the newly reopened system remained segregated, impoverished and academically substandard.”90 The most popular method of foot-dragging was the school board’s freedom-of-choice plan, which ensured that white parents could move their children away from any school “threatened” with desegregation.91 The result was that by 1969, Prince Edward County Schools were now 98 percent black, and, once again, starved of resources.92 Stall and defy had transformed into stall and undermine, but the results were the same: devastating.93
During the series of court cases swirling around Prince Edward County, a judge had noted that “an interrupted education of one year or even six months at that age places a serious handicap upon a child, which the average one may not overcome.”94 The federal government agreed and in 1963 backed the privately funded Free School to serve as an educational bridge to get the black children of Prince Edward County academically ready for when the public schools finally reopened.95 But it was too late. One black teen, Skip Griffin, spoke of how “embarrassing” it was to sit in a classroom and look at an assignment, unable to do anything more than write his name at the top of the page. He had two crippling words to describe himself: “very dumb.” His mother had tried to help him, but the schools she herself had attended in Prince Edward County were nothing but shanties and hovels with the equipment to match.96 The psychological devastation was equally debilitating. Henry Cabarrus recalled one of Prince Edward County’s white officials declaring that he would “rather his children be baked in the oven” than go to an integrated school. Cabarrus was taken aback. “When you have such strong white resistance against you as a person such that they can take away the most fundamental thing—education—if someone can take that away from you, your esteem is so small that … you’re always looking over your shoulder for who is going to attack or criticize.”97 The damage had been done. Eventually, Skip Griffin, along with legions of African American children, became discouraged and simply dropped out.98
Prince Edward County is emblematic of the way that systematized racism
not only destroys black lives but also undermines the very strength of the United States. Even as thousands of African American children were left behind educationally, the economy was beginning a seismic transformation that would require even more of its citizens. Factory jobs, the ones that President Franklin Roosevelt had once called “the arsenal of democracy”—the living-wage-with-barely-a-high-school-diploma jobs—were rapidly disappearing.99 It wasn’t quite perceptible then that a sector that at one time had accounted for some 25 percent of all paid employment in the United States would be near collapse by the 1970s.100 But the first cracks in the armor of industrial America were already there in the 1950s.101 By the time Prince Edward County finally decided to implement at least parts of Brown in the 1970s, the heyday of industrial America, where gainful employment had not required a strong education—just a strong back—was already well over, with the knowledge-based economy taking hold.102 That economy was primed for those who had had the benefit of years of good schools and, in particular, for whites who had a well-funded public school system that went all the way through the twelfth grade and graduated the lion’s share of them as college-ready.
By contrast, an entire generation of black children who had fought long and hard to receive a quality education was now forced to face this cold, hard new economy with neither the necessary education nor work skills. It was not just black America, however, that suffered the cost of this waste of human lives and talent. The brutally relentless tactics of stall and defy, then stall and undermine—tactics that went on for at least four decades—left the United States with millions of citizens who lacked the education needed to be competitive in a global, technology-driven economy. This, in turn, left the United States lagging far behind other developed countries and placed the nation at enormous economic risk.103
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