Elected officials and schools mobilized en masse against desegregation

Evidence

THE MOST NOTORIOUS victim of what was to be called “massive resistance” to desegregation was fourteen-year-old Emmett Till on August 28, 1955. For hissing at a Mississippi White woman, hooligans beat Till so ruthlessly that his face was unrecognizable during his open casket funeral in his native Chicago. The gruesome pictures were shown around the enraged Black world. On March 12, 1956, nineteen US senators and seventy-seven House representatives signed a southern manifesto opposing the Brown v. Board of Education decision for planting “hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.” The Klan fielded new members, and elite segregationists founded White citizens councils. Southern schools ensured that their textbooks gave students “bedtime” stories, as historian C. Vann Woodward called them, that read like Gone with the Wind. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 932

Categorization

• XREF: Backs reader’s causal framework: policy/institutional resistance (senators, schools, textbooks) precedes and drives the racist ideas Kendi argues follow. — connects to: Congress and the executive, not just courts, drove Southern desegregation — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 3007; The Court’s remedial endorsements emboldened aggressive district court desegregation orders — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 3015; Suburban school district fragmentation structurally enabled white flight from desegregation. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 3026 (+5 more)