In the 1950s, from the Deep South to Virginia, opposition to school integration coalesced into a mass movement of resistance powered by a broad swath of segregationists whose tactics included legal maneuvering, school closures, intimidation, economic reprisals, and violence.
In 1952, anticipating how the justices would rule in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, Georgia Gov. Herman E. Talmadge announced he would sooner end public education in Georgia than allow Black children to attend school with white children.
“There is only one solution in the event segregation is banned by the Supreme Court,” Mr. Talmadge declared. “And that is abolition of the public school system.”
Gov. Talmadge was not an outlier. “The mixing of races in the schools will mark the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it,” South Carolina Gov. James F. Brynes, a New Deal Democrat and former U.S. secretary of state, told a group of white teachers in 1954. Defending that civilization fell to Southerners, he said.
After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board that separate education for white and Black children was unconstitutional, Southern legislatures passed more than 450 measures designed to limit, delay, or evade the decision.
The laws denied funding to schools that integrated, enabled firing of school employees who supported desegregation, suspended compulsory attendance in desegregating schools, authorized use of public funds to open hundreds of private white academies, and provided tuition grants to white families that encouraged them to pull their children out of public schools.
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