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🪵 The Threshold

Only congressional intervention, not Brown alone, desegregated Southern schools

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tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, recurring, xref, factual_claims, category/causal-relationships

4 min read

Only congressional intervention, not Brown alone, desegregated Southern schools

Evidence

The stances of white churches on the issue of integration were seen by civil rights activists and segregationists alike as the keystone holding the entire Jim Crow ediface together. In the wake of the 1954 Brown decision, with many national Protestant denominational offices approving the ruling, the Mississippi State Legislature moved quickly to protect the ability of local white churches to oppose their national offices and remain segregated, while still retaining their property. One of the authors of what became known as “the church property bill” argued explicitly that such a step was crucial because, he asserted, if integration came to Mississippi, “it will enter through the front door of churches.” — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 127 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

It would take almost six decades for another Supreme Court to pick up where Justice Harlan’s dissent left off. In the 1954 landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, the civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall, who was also director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), argued that Plessy v. Ferguson’s doctrine of “separate but equal” was inherently prejudicial under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the LDF brief, Marshall not only cited Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy but was inspired by it. Marshall had reportedly read passages from Harlan’s dissent to his staff as they brainstormed ways to legally attack segregation. And for once, a majority of the Supreme Court agreed. As a result, all legislation mandating racial segregation in education was finally overturned. But only in education. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 403 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
  • XREF: connects to: Congressional funding incentives, not Brown alone, produced Southern school desegregation. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 1550; After Roe the Court stayed active policing abortion law, unlike after Brown. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 1621; Southern officials mounted coordinated legislative and political resistance to Brown across multiple states — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 2991 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

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