by John Egerton
The next morning, James J. Kilpatrick of the Richmond News Leader fired the first volley in the war of massive resistance. He sneered at “that inept fraternity of politicians and professors known as the United States Supreme Court”—they who “repudiated the Constitution, spit upon the Tenth Amendment, and rewrote the fundamental law of this land to suit their own gauzy concepts of sociology.” He cautioned against open defiance of the court, saying that although “the idea [was] not without merit,” it was “impossible of execution.” No use to “enter upon anarchy” when indirect defiance would do just as well: The South should pursue “a long course of lawful resistance. … Let us pledge ourselves to litigate this thing for fifty years.” The court had said “as soon as practicable”; that, said Kilpatrick, “means never at all.”
That summer, outbursts of random violence against black Southerners spread ominously across the South, as had happened after the world wars. In Mississippi, four people were killed in separate incidents that amounted to nothing less than assassinations, lynchings. One of the victims, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till of Chicago, had been visiting relatives in Tallahatchie County. A young white woman claimed he got fresh with her. Two men, one of them the woman’s husband, tortured and killed the boy, and threw his mutilated body into a river. After they had been acquitted by an all-white jury, the men told the whole story to maverick journalist William Bradford Huie, representing Look magazine. The case stirred the nation’s conscience momentarily, but the attention span was short, and the South soon slipped again into the shadows, out of sight, out of mind.
The Washington journalist I. F. Stone summed up this latest manifestation of the American dilemma:
There is a sickness in the South. … Mississippi went through the motions [of seeking justice], and the motions were enough to muffle the weak conscience of the northern white press. … Those whites in the South and in the North who would normally have moved to act have been hounded out of public life and into inactivity. To the outside world it must look as if the conscience of white America has been silenced, and the appearance is not too deceiving. Basically all of us whites, North and South, acquiesce in white supremacy, and benefit from the pool of cheap labor created by it. … The American Negro needs a Gandhi to lead him, and we need the American Negro to lead us.
Two months later, in Montgomery, Alabama, a black Gandhi with a voice like Southern thunder answered the call.
It was after the second Brown decision and the Till murder trial, but before the start of the Montgomery bus boycott, that the Southern Historical Association invited William Faulkner and Benjamin Mays, among others, to discuss the Supreme Court’s school decisions at the group’s annual meeting in November 1955. The SHA had overcome its traditional deference to segregation in recent years, and on this occasion—an integrated dinner meeting at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis—the historians interrupted Mays with prolonged applause several times as the Morehouse College president delivered an eloquent and impassioned “historical sermon” on the immorality of segregation.
The historians who were chiefly responsible for this session—Bell I. Wiley of Emory University, Thomas D. Clark of the University of Kentucky, Philip G. Davidson of the University of Louisville, and James W. Silver of the University of Mississippi—would long remember with special pride the appearance of both Mays and Faulkner, the latter by then a world-renowned author by virtue of his Nobel Prize. Later, when the South’s cancerous racism had broken to the surface, the quiet Mississippian would speak with confused ambivalence about the South’s crucible of race. But on this occasion, his brief remarks (and an appended passage he wrote later) were direct and to the point.
“To live anywhere in the world of A.D. 1955 and be against equality because of race or color,” Faulkner declared, “is like living in Alaska and being against snow.” The only faith “powerful enough to stalemate the idea of communism” is the belief in “individual human freedom and liberty and equality.” The momentous question was “no longer of white against black,” Faulkner asserted—it was the age-old question of slavery or freedom. It also had to do with repeating the mistakes of the past: “We accept insult and contumely and the risk of violence because we will not sit quietly by and see our native land, the South, not just Mississippi but all the South, wreck and ruin itself twice in less than a hundred years, over the Negro question.” He concluded:
We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say, “Why didn’t someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?”
Faulkner was not the first Southerner to “speak now” against white supremacy, and to prepare his listeners for a coming time when segregation would fail and the old social order would be swept aside for the new. He had found enough universal truths in the provincial lives of his fictional Mississippi characters to know that everything changes—that peace and prosperity, mobility and materialism, technology and population growth, and dozens of other factors beyond the control of any man, democrat or demagogue, will inevitably transform a society, ready or not. The segs weren’t going to turn back the clock to the nineteenth century any more than they were going to take Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays out of the lineup, or bar Ralph Bunche from the Harvard campus, or keep Thurgood Marshall from prosecuting Jim Crow, or take away Edith Mae Irby’s University of Arkansas medical degree.
Benjamin Mays, standing on the shoulders of such giants as James Weldon Johnson and W. E. B. Du Bois, had been pointing to Jim Crow’s judgment day since he assumed the presidency of Morehouse in 1940. Numerous other Southern progressives, including half a dozen or more who died in the mid-1950s, right around the time of Brown—Mary McLeod Bethune, Walter White, Osceola McKaine, Maury Maverick, Howard Odum, Charles S. Johnson—had found their own quite different and varied ways to “speak now” in admonition of and preparation for the inevitable demise of segregation, and they had gone on speaking until their voices faded away and new ones filled the silence. Johnson, in a New York Times Magazine article in September 1956, just a month before he died suddenly of a heart attack, took note of the thinning ranks of white liberal advocates of civil rights in the tense post-Brown atmosphere. The South, “provincial and isolationist to the core,” would never reform voluntarily, he concluded—the courts would have to mandate it.
A month after Mays and Faulkner spoke to the historians, events in Montgomery hastened the day of racial justice that would eventually sweep over the South. There were heralds and antecedents to this drama: Two local organizations of black citizens—the Progressive Democratic Association, headed by E. D. Nixon, and the Women’s Political Council, led by Jo Ann Robinson, had long been trying to combat racial discrimination in the city. Nixon, a former president of the Montgomery NAACP chapter, was a Pullman car porter with organizing skills he had learned from his revered labor union boss, A. Philip Randolph. Among Nixon’s local friends were Aubrey Williams, the Southern Farmer publisher, and Clifford and Virginia Durr, the former New Deal attorney and his activist wife (all three of them having been in the news the previous year during their sensational clash with Senator James Eastland in New Orleans). Through Williams and the Durrs, Nixon had met Jim Dombrowski of the Southern Conference Educational Fund and Myles Horton of the Highlander Folk School. Highlander had started summer workshops on school desegregation in 1954, right after the Brown decision. The Montgomery NAACP wanted to send a delegate to Highlander the next year. They chose their youth director, Rosa Parks, a forty-two-year-old seamstress.
The rest of the story is now engraved in civil rights history. Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, after she refused to obey a Montgomery bus driver’s order to surrender her seat to a white person. (On two previous occasions that year, teenage black girls had been dragged from city buses and jailed for alleged violations of the segregation code.) E. D.
Nixon was called, and he took Cliff and Virginia Durr with him when he went to the jail to post bail for Mrs. Parks. A boycott of the bus system was announced, and on Tuesday evening, December 5, a mass meeting was held at one of the city’s black churches to organize a nonviolent Christian protest group called the Montgomery Improvement Association—the forerunner of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It was at that gathering that twenty-five-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., the newly installed pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was chosen to lead the group, and it was there that he first galvanized and mobilized a following with eloquent, soaring rhetorical flourishes:
If we are wrong—the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong—God Almighty is wrong! If we are wrong—Jesus of Nazareth was merely a Utopian dreamer and never came down to earth! If we are wrong—justice is a lie! And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream!
On the wings of the biblical prophets, a new voice—young, black, and unmistakably Southern—was speaking against the day when a confused and divided South would face the inevitable demise of segregation uninformed and unprepared. For the next thirteen years, Martin Luther King would be the transcendent figure in a movement to liberate the soul of the South.
Having survived the shock of Brown I and Brown II and seen little in the way of actual school desegregation as a consequence, some of the South’s political leaders believed that if they could put up a united front against the Supreme Court’s decisions, they might be able to force a reversal. The idea for this “Solid South counterattack” originated with Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina in late 1955, after a second year of school openings had passed with only token desegregation in a scattered few communities, and white resistance arising in most of them.
Thurmond knew that segregation and white supremacy would soon fall if the old guard didn’t throw everything it had against the reformers. He went first to the elder barons of the oligarchy—Harry Byrd of Virginia, Walter George and Richard Russell of Georgia—and found them willing and eager to help him draft what amounted to a proclamation of political war on the court. By the first week of February, they were passing around versions of their “Declaration of Constitutional Principles” and laying plans for a caucus of the entire Southern delegation in both houses.
The Byrd machine in Virginia was preparing for massive resistance to desegregation, drawing venom from the rhetoric of the nineteenth-century South Carolina secessionist John C. Calhoun. Thurmond, a Calhoun devotee, was just as indignant as Harry Byrd about the court decree, and he also sensed the political potency of the issue among his white constituents. Thurmond and Byrd were the two principal phrasemakers for the early drafts of the declaration, which was quickly dubbed “the Southern Manifesto.” Richard Russell, showing a modicum of restraint, toned the document down a bit, and then Thurmond and Russell, joined by John Stennis of Mississippi, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, and Price Daniel of Texas, wrote the final version, removing the references to “interposition” and “nullification” (Calhounese for willful disobedience) and softening the charge that the court’s ruling was the judicial equivalent of an act of treason.
And still the statement bristled with militant defiance. It declared that the justices, “with no legal basis for such action,” had proceeded “to exercise their naked judicial power and substituted their personal political and social ideas for the established law of the land.” The court was “destroying the amicable relations” between the races; it had “planted hatred and suspicion where there [had] been heretofore friendship and understanding.” Uninvited “outside agitators” were “threatening immediate and revolutionary changes” that would “destroy the system of public education” and “the dual system of government which has enabled us to achieve our greatness.” They would not meekly accept these threats to their way of life, the signees declared: “We pledge ourselves to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution.”
This was the separation of the sheep from the goats. What the Walter Georges of the South had been saying since the 1920s, the Harry Byrds and Richard Russells since the 1930s, the Strom Thurmonds since the 1940s—and what the John C. Calhouns had said in the 1840s—was now to be the blood oath of a Solid South in the 1950s: to stand and fight once again for white supremacy, for “our dual system of government.”
Every Southern member of Congress was under intense pressure to sign the document. When Walter George read the Southern Manifesto in the Senate chamber on March 12, 1956, it bore the signatures of 19 of the 22 Democratic senators from the eleven once-rebellious states. In the House, 82 of the 106 Southerners also signed. The 24 representatives who wouldn’t join in this expression of massive resistance included 2 of the 7 Republicans (B. Carroll Reece and Howard H. Baker, Sr., both representing east Tennessee), and these Democrats: Dante Fascell of Florida; J. Percy Priest and Joe L. Evins of Tennessee; Harold D. Cooley, Charles B. Deane, and Thurmond Chatham of North Carolina; and 16 Texans led by the House majority leader, Sam Rayburn.
The Senate majority leader, Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, had ambitions that transcended the issue of the moment. He saw that it was “politically essential to separate himself from southern segregationists if he were going to run for President,” his biographer Robert Dallek wrote. “In his view, the South could never come into the mainstream of American economic and political life until it freed itself from the burden of racial discrimination.” Johnson was able to present himself as standing above the battle, not being asked to sign the manifesto because he had a “different responsibility” as Senate leader.
Two other Southern senators refused to sign: Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore of Tennessee. Kefauver was running for President again, as he had in 1952, and knew that he had to take a national stance. Gore, who was serving his first term, didn’t claim to be a liberal trailblazer, but he saw the manifesto as “a dangerous and deceptive propaganda move which encouraged Southerners to defy the government.” When Thurmond approached him on the Senate floor, Gore pushed the document back at him and turned away.
The bus boycott was then in a critical stage in Montgomery (Martin Luther King’s house had been bombed), and in Tuscaloosa, white students and their off-campus supporters had rioted at the University of Alabama to protest the admission of a single black graduate student, twenty-six-year-old Autherine Lucy. She was expelled after she accused university officials of conspiring with the mob. In that fateful spring of 1956, the South and the nation careened past the last exit, on course for a collision that would be heard around the world.
The Southern governors in this crucial time were about evenly split—six who leaned to moderation, five hard-line segs—but even the best of them, LeRoy Collins of Florida, was at first displeased by the Brown decision, and only later came to see the necessity and the wisdom of it. “I had wanted the states and the Congress to meet their responsibility and abolish the laws on segregation,” he would explain, “but they wouldn’t do it. I finally saw that a Supreme Court ruling was the only way it would ever happen. Segregation was wrong—morally, legally, politically. It had to change. That it should change became deeply implanted in my soul and conscience when I was governor. I felt an enlargement of responsibility to all the people of Florida.”
It was a feeling that no other governor in the region would be openly expressing by 1960. After more than half a century of politics as theater, as spectator sport staged by tin-pot dictators posing as statesmen, the South was still a rebellious colony, still isolated, impoverished, laggard, defensive, and sundered by race and class divisions. The better politicians who came along occasionally didn’t last very long. Ellis Arnall was a one-term governor of Georgia; Jim Folsom won twice in Alabama, but wasn’t effective; Sid McMath lost two races after serving four years as governor of Arkansas; Earl Long of Louisiana got put away in a mental institution. North
Carolinians Charles Deane and Thurmond Chatham lost their seats in the House right after they refused to sign the Southern Manifesto; Frank E. Smith of Mississippi, Brooks Hays of Arkansas, and Carl Elliott of Alabama felt they had to sign in order to keep their seats in the House—and all of them eventually lost to more conservative challengers anyway. LeRoy Collins ran for the Senate eight years after he was governor of Florida, and lost to a Republican.
If there was ever a chance that a liberal or even moderate political spirit would take root in the South after World War II—and that possibility did seem to exist—it diminished rapidly with the crushing defeat of Claude Pepper and Frank Graham in 1950, the triumph of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon in 1952, the Brown decision in 1954, and Eisenhower’s landslide reelection victory in 1956 (he won all but six states). With an overwhelming vote of confidence, Ike was encouraged to keep on standing aloof from the worsening racial and social problems of the South and the nation. In 1957 the rudderless ship of state finally drifted over the falls into a whirlpool of strife and violence, and Eisenhower, the reluctant warrior, had to send federal troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, to put down a calculated act of rebellion by the state’s governor, Orval Faubus. In a classic exhibition of blind rage and futility, the South would thrash about for the next decade in self-destructive combat with its own national government. The sins of the fathers would be visited upon succeeding generations for the rest of the century.