Jim Crow's Children by Peter Irons

Author:Peter Irons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

“War Against the Constitution”

Thurgood Marshall completely misread the fierce determination of “white crackers” in the Deep South to maintain the Jim Crow system of segregated schools. One southern politician after another denounced the Court’s decision. It was “the most serious blow that has yet been struck against the rights of the states in a matter vitally affecting their authority and welfare,” Virginia’s powerful Senator Harry Byrd complained. “I shall use every legal means at my command to continue segregated schools in Virginia,” echoed Governor Thomas Stanley, a cog in the Byrd machine. “No matter how much the Supreme Court seeks to sugarcoat its bitter pill of tyranny,” Governor Marvin Griffin of Georgia railed, “the people of Georgia and the South will not swallow it.” In South Carolina, where the first lawsuit against school segregation had been filed in Clarendon County, Governor James Byrnes said that his state “will not now nor for some years to come mix white and colored children in our schools.” Governor Fielding Wright of Mississippi, the most intransigent of the Deep South states, proclaimed that “we shall insist upon segregation regardless of consequences.” Even politicians considered “moderate” on racial issues, like Governor Luther Hodges of North Carolina, bowed to the “redneck revolt” that he feared would destroy public education; Hodges did not speak out when the state legislature resolved that any “mixing of the races in the public schools . . . cannot be accomplished, and should not be attempted.” Newspaper columnists and editorialists joined the critical chorus. “When the Court proposes that its social revolution be imposed on the South ‘as soon as practicable,’ there are those of us who would respond that ‘as soon as practicable’ means never at all,” the Richmond News Leader told its readers.

Many politicians linked the Court’s ruling with its recent—and widely criticized—decisions that struck down state and federal efforts to outlaw the Communist party and its leaders. Senator James Eastland, an openly racist Mississippi Democrat who had refused to support his party’s candidates in the past two presidential elections, blasted the Court for citing the works of Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdahl in the Brown decision. Myrdahl, who had written an exhaustive and penetrating book on race relations, An American Dilemma, was a leading member of the Swedish socialist party and a firm opponent of communism. Eastland did not see the distinction. “It is evident that the decision of the Supreme Court in the school segregation cases,” he growled, “was based on the writings and teaching of pro-communist agitators and other enemies of the American form of government.” Eastland’s office sent copies of this speech to more than three hundred thousand people, and its charges of subversive influence on the Court were echoed in hundreds of newspaper editorials and columns.

Local officials and school board members heeded these calls for defiance of the Court’s ruling. Although most of the border states took the first steps toward integrating their schools in the fall of 1955, after the Supreme Court handed down

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