The Racist Backlash to Brown v. Board

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The Racist Backlash to Brown v. Board

The history behind the elaborate techniques that today’s Republican Party uses to suppress Black and Latino votes is rooted in the “Massive Resistance” movement in reaction to Brown v. Board of Education that has also led to systemic resegregation.

Although the end of the Civil War and the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were, in theory, supposed to grant equal status and station between Black and white citizens, that is not the case to this day. After the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, which determined that “separate but equal” met the “equal protection” demands of the 14th Amendment, virtually every public school system in America that hadn’t already been segregated along racial lines set out to do so.

Thus, in 1953 the case of Linda Brown, a Black child who’d been assigned to the all-Black Monroe Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas, came before the Supreme Court. Linda had to walk past a nearer white school to get to Monroe, and her father, Oliver Brown, knowing from his own experience the impact of racial segregation on education, joined with the NAACP to bring the case to the Court.

On May 17, 1954, a unanimous Court ruled that Linda Brown should have the right to attend the closer all-white school—and, striking down Plessy, ruled for the first time since Reconstruction that separate did not, in fact, mean equal. The white supremacist political structure, particularly in the former slave states, immediately went into a frothing fury: as the lead plaintiffs’ attorney, Thurgood Marshall for the ACLU, said, “The fight has just begun.”5 Senator James Eastland, D-Mississippi, proclaimed, “The South will not abide by nor obey this legislative decision by a political body,” defying the ruling while taking a swipe at the Court.6

Senator Harry Byrd, D-Virginia, vowed to block the Brown decision legislatively, and within 20 months he had organized what he called a nationwide program of Massive Resistance, including a collection of laws that would pull funding from any public school that was integrated. His 1956 “Southern Manifesto” was signed by 82 US representatives and 19 US senators. It urged former slave states to use “all lawful means” to resist integration of their schools.

In 1957, citing Brown, nine Black students attempted to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The backlash from local whites was so massive and potentially violent that President Eisenhower called out the National Guard to protect the students. That led to the Court’s reaffirming its stand in Brown in the 1958 Cooper v. Aaron decision.

Across the South, local groups of whites established “private academies” to educate their children. For example, on May 1, 1959—following a court order to integrate its schools— Virginia’s Prince Edward County closed its entire countywide public school system and kept it closed for a full five years.

It wasn’t until President Lyndon Johnson pushed through the 1964 Civil Rights Act that there was a specific legislative remedy for school segregation. That year, most Black students still attended all-Black schools. But after the Civil Rights Act passed, nearly a third of Black students were attending integrated schools within five years; and by 1973, the number had reached 90 percent.7

The past few decades have seen a steady slide back from that 1973 peak, and the foundations of Brown were severely shaken in a 2007 Supreme Court case combining Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. In a 5–4 decision, the Court’s conservative members agreed with Chief Justice John Roberts that “[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

In other words, no more mandated busing or other efforts to bring Black and white students together.

Justices Stevens and Breyer wrote—and delivered from the bench with unusual ferocity—scathing dissents much like those from a later Court in 2013 when Chief Justice Roberts proclaimed, while gutting the Voting Rights Act, that discrimination in America was essentially over and no longer needed legislative remedies.

In the years since Roberts and his conservative colleagues gutted Brown, America’s schools have been segregating again. Today, Black students who go to integrated schools typically attend schools where only 29 percent of their peers are white.9