The Choice We Face Read online

  On the other side of the American racial divide that cut across Pike County and the rest of the nation, however, Whites vilified the decision. They cursed it. They broadcast their disdain for the decision through the pages of the southern press. As one editorial in Jackson, Mississippi, stated, “May 17, 1954, may be recorded by future historians as a black day of tragedy for the South.”4 The Jackson Clarion-Ledger editorialized, “The ruling will go down in history as the most unwise, unnecessary, unfair and ineffective decision that the Supreme Court has ever made.”5 The very prospect of desegregation prompted the Speaker of the House in Mississippi, Walter Sillers, to state in 1953 that “if a non-segregated system of school were established the white race would be mongrelized.” He asserted, “I would gladly give up my property and my life if necessary to preserve the integrity of segregation.”6 The New Orleans Times-Picayune expressed skepticism at best: “The disappointment and frustration of the majority of southerners at the revolutionary overturn of practice and usage cannot immediately result in the improvement of race relations.”7

  After the Brown decision, there was no issue likelier to stir turmoil in the United States than education. People of color demanded a better education, which included additional litigation in support of Black children’s right to enroll in White schools across the nation. Students joined civil rights activists and used other nonviolent means such as walkouts, peaceful demonstrations, and boycotts to reform the schools. Activists demanded a curriculum more inclusive of Black history, stronger representation on student councils, and fairer treatment in schools. Whites, by and large, resisted vehemently, employing every legal and extralegal means at their disposal.

  During John Lewis’s accomplished career as a student, civil rights movement leader, and statesman in the US House of Representatives, equal and quality education would become defined as a civil right by many African Americans and movement allies. But White segregationists defined school choice as an inherent right. The right and struggle to “choose” schools stems from this deep-seated, racialized tension. John Lewis and those Black children who came after him would never know the equality promised by the Brown decision. The educational landscape forever changed to accommodate the “right” for White families to choose the school they wanted to attend.

  School choice in its contemporary form developed in fierce opposition to desegregation. Instead of complying with the Brown edict, Whites initially opted for what US senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. of Virginia dubbed “massive resistance”—a system of local and state laws designed to thwart desegregation. In the 1956 “Southern Manifesto,” ninety-eight southern US senators and representatives vowed to resist desegregation: “We decry the Supreme Court’s encroachment on the rights reserved to the States [and] commend the motive of those States which have declared the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means.” The southern delegation pledged to “use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of [the Brown] decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation.”8

  Southern lawmakers changed their state constitutions and passed new laws that funded tuition waivers for White families who wanted to enroll their children in private, all-White schools. They allowed locally elected school officials to close public schools if ordered to integrate. The legislative agenda of massive resistance comprised the most serious constitutional overhaul of the South’s educational infrastructure since Reconstruction. To those predisposed to use violence to preserve the social order of Dixie, the Southern Manifesto implied that their representatives supported them. Recalcitrant racists felt protected if not justified in what they viewed as a noble defense of the southern way of life. It emboldened many to think—not inaccurately—that White policymakers would look the other way if their less sophisticated constituents opted for violence to register their discontent. Whites could lynch African Americans in broad daylight with impunity. The murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till proved this to the world just one year after the Brown decision.

  These acts of violence would eventually become part of the nation’s collective memory of desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. The first cases of integration in the South, where a small number of African Americans entered all-White schools, were met with scorn and terrorism. On September 4, 1957, Black student Dorothy Counts walked alone to Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, to integrate the school. White students surrounded Counts to mock her. They spit on her, verbally assaulted her, and tormented her.9

  That same day in Little Rock, Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to “maintain the peace and good order of the community” by physically blocking nine Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School. What followed was a display of massive resistance that would become iconic thanks to national news coverage. In one infamous picture captured that day, a White student, Hazel Bryan, exhibits vitriolic fury against a Black student, Elizabeth Eckford, who walked alone to school that day. Protected by city police, a White mob and the state National Guard turned the Black students away. Three weeks later, President Eisenhower issued an executive order that sent soldiers from the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division to ensure that integration would take place. Though federal troops would escort Black students into the school, a horrific ordeal followed. White students physically assaulted, verbally berated, and socially ostracized the designated nine every day for the remainder of the school year, leaving emotional (and sometimes physical) scars on both the students and those who witnessed it.

  Melba Pattillo Beals, one of the nine students to desegregate Little Rock Central High School, would later write about the experience. Her powerful narrative, Warriors Don’t Cry, opens: “In 1957, while most teenage girls were listening to Buddy Holly’s ‘Peggy Sue,’ watching Elvis gyrate, and collecting crinoline slips, I was escaping the hanging rope of a lynch mob, dodging lighted sticks of dynamite, and washing away burning acid sprayed into my eyes.”10

  The reality of the situation stood in marked contrast to the hopes and dreams of John Lewis, who felt that the highest court in the land had promised him a chance of attending a better school in the fall of 1954. Yet Lewis and his peers got nothing but the same discrimination and segregation they’d had the year before. “As I began my sophomore year in the fall of 1954 by climbing onto the same beat-up school bus and making the same twenty-mile trip to the same segregated high school I’d attend the year before,” Lewis later recalled, “Brown v. Board of Education notwithstanding, nothing in my life had changed.”11

  By any measure, White southerners successfully maintained their sacred doctrine and practice of segregation, much to the disappointment of Lewis and the millions of others who read promise and opportunity in the Brown decision. Though school choice would eventually dominate the discussion of educational policy and reform, children like John Lewis had little to no choice after Brown. After the decision—and massive resistance—Whites closed some public schools and opened many private ones. If Whites allowed Black students to enter White schools, it was often a living hell for them. Within the decade there were indeed some desegregated public schools, but, with predominantly Black student populations and greatly declining public support, virtual segregation continued. New legislation at the state level was passed to ensure that White supremacy would remain protected—that it was up to Whites whether or not to desegregate.

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  Southern legislatures had already been occupied with evading desegregation well before the Brown decision. White southerners were cognizant in the early 1950s of the possibility that courts would order desegregation. By 1953, the NAACP had engaged in litigation that directly challenged school segregation in South Carolina, Virginia, Kansas, Washington, DC, and Delaware. Often led by grassroots organizations who mobilized local support, the challenges caused segregationist legislators to rethink their strategy.

  In an effort to appease local Black communities if not federal
courts after the Brown decision, state legislatures adopted “equalization plans” in an effort to live up to the “separate but equal” doctrine upheld in the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The Plessy verdict upheld a New Orleans train segregation ordinance and was subsequently used to sanction all Jim Crow laws, including those pertaining to formal education. If Black schools were equal to White schools, many White legislators reasoned, then African American families would opt to voluntarily maintain segregation. Governor James “Jimmy” Byrnes of South Carolina captured the rationale behind equalization in 1954, stating, “I believe the vast majority of Negroes . . . would prefer to send their children to the splendid schools now being constructed for them.”12 Though reluctant to part with already scarce funding, southern legislatures in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia consented to investing more in Black education. South Carolina passed a 3 percent sales tax, the first such tax in the state, and a $75 million bond issue in 1951. Two years later, Mississippi legislators considered spending $34 million annually with over $140 million to begin the equalization process. That same year Georgia proposed a sales tax and bonds to secure over $86 million to equalize Black education. Legislators earmarked these funds to invest in teacher salaries, brand new facilities, buses, textbooks and other supplies.13

  Though new and unprecedented forms of investment in Black education were promised, genuine support for equalization never materialized. Greater investments were made, to be sure. New buildings for Black students were constructed. Black teachers made a little more money. Facilities were upgraded. But southern states only halfheartedly supported equalization efforts. It was more of a distraction meant to delay desegregation indefinitely.14

  Southern legislators also opted to amend their state constitutions and to pass new laws that protected segregated school systems despite Brown. Once the Brown decision was reached, they worked overtime and met in extraordinary sessions beyond their required terms to identify legally defensible solutions. They established special commissions and held focused hearings to craft the means to circumvent integation.15 South Carolina voters in 1952 overwhelmingly passed a referendum to eliminate the constitutional requirement to provide free public schools. Legislators in the same state also repealed compulsory education laws and passed other legislation designed to strengthen the authority of local school boards to determine pupil placement laws.16 Legislators in Georgia proposed an amendment to the state constitution to provide publicly funded grants to cover the tuition of private education and eventually passed legislation funding such scholarships. Mississippi ratified a constitutional amendment to make the provision of public education a legislative option as opposed to a constitutional requirement. Louisiana passed legislation that repealed the compulsory education laws in districts subjected to any federal decisions mandating desegregation, which effectively meant all districts by the late 1960s.17 In John Lewis’s home state of Alabama, legislators passed a bill in 1955 that delegated to local school boards the authority to place students in schools according to their discretion alone.18 Other new codes permitted states and local districts to preserve the right to abolish public education if they so desired when faced with federal integration orders. The result of all these changes was a convoluted web of laws, policies, and constitutional amendments that made it exceedingly difficult to desegregate.

  The option to indefinitely close the public schools constituted the most extreme form of legal resistance. In notable instances, southern governors and school boards shuttered their public schools to avoid desegregation orders. For southern policymakers contemplating the decision, it would be the first time since the creation of a public education system during Reconstruction that schools would actually close. Governor Faubus in 1958 closed all public high schools in Little Rock for one year after the desegregation of Central High, ending the widely publicized showdown. District officials in Virginia closed schools instead of succumbing to integration, with intended dramatic effect. With desegregation cases still pending in the federal courts, Virginia governor J. Lindsay Almond closed schools for the 1958–59 school year in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Warren County. The most nefarious instance of school closure occurred in Prince Edward County, Virginia. In this case, the local school board, in consultation with the state legislature, closed the public school system for five years from 1959 to 1964—the longest school closure in history—to avoid desegregation orders.19 Such resistance ended when federal courts, in cases such as Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (1964), reopened schools and insisted on at least token desegregation. Yet southern legislators showed their hand in their embrace of extreme methods that circumvented integration.

  While passing new legislation, southern officials simultaneously condoned, encouraged, and participated in unofficial methods of intimidation. Segregationists founded the first Citizens’ Councils in Mississippi in 1953, organizing chapters in seventeen counties, many with high Black populations or where African Americans were challenging segregation. Drawing members from the middle and upper classes of southern society, the Citizens’ Councils became the South’s revered “moderate” incarnation of segregationist organization, committed to resisting desegregation through social and economic means rather than violent ones. Within two years of the Brown decision, Citizens’ Councils enrolled between 250,000 and 300,000 dues-paying members in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina.20

  The strategies embraced by the Citizen’s Councils, though nonviolent, were deeply harmful. Many Black parents who tried to enroll their children in all-White schools were fired from their jobs. They were denied credit at banks and grocery stores. Their names were printed in local newspapers. Crosses were burned in their yards. They received incessant telephone calls late at night “encouraging” them not to apply for their children to enroll in a White school. News of the harassment of Black students spread like wildfire in the Black community, which slowed efforts to integrate.21

  White segregationists also founded private schools to avoid integration while preserving access to education for their children. Segregationists carefully created an alternative system of private schools to educate those Whites whose parents had taken them out of public schools after federal orders to integrate. South Carolinians had explored privatizing their school system a full decade before the Brown decision. When a handful of Black students sought admission to the College of Charleston in 1944, the school privatized to preserve its all-White student body. It was a move fully endorsed by the conservative press. Thomas Waring, editor of Charleston’s influential News and Courier, stated that orders for integration were “without justice.” He urged readers to leave public schools and establish their own private schools to save themselves from the massive “burden” of funding Black education.22 Three years before the Brown decision, Governor Jimmy Byrnes articulated how privatization would be an unfortunate but necessary outcome: “If the Court changes what is now the law of the land, we will, if it is possible, live within the law, preserve the public school system, and at the same time maintain segregation. If that is not possible, reluctantly we will abandon the public school system. . . . The White people of South Carolina could pay for the education of their children [but] Negro citizens would suffer.”23 Public views by leaders such as Byrnes led to a spike in private school enrollment.

  The architects of segregation after Brown leveraged funding to establish all-White private schools with public money. South Carolina legislators passed laws denying funds to schools that had been “forced” to integrate by federal decree. Virginia legislators approved a state constitutional amendment to publicly fund tuition grants for White families attending private schools. Voters in Georgia ratified a state constitutional amendment that allowed the state legislature to provide “grants of state, county or municipal funds . . . for educational purposes, in discharge of all obligations of the state to provide an adequate education for its citizens.” Mississippi legislators pas
sed similar legislation to use tax dollars to defray the cost of attending private schools established to avoid desegregation.24 Such publicly funded tuition grants would eventually become known as “vouchers”—an effective means of abdicating the public and constitutional responsibility to fund an equitable public school system.

  Through public funding, tax cuts for those who enrolled their children in private schools, and other modes of state support, segregationists across the South established a network of nonsectarian “segregation academies,” private schools established immediately prior to and well after the Brown decision to avoid desegregation. These private schools enjoyed the support of Citizens’ Councils, adding ideological depth and significance to the schools’ presence across the embattled South. Legislators in South Carolina passed the Tuition Grants Bill in 1963, which allocated $250,000 to cover the tuition costs carried by families to enroll in schools founded solely to provide refuge from desegregated public schools. By 1967, the state operated forty-four private academies. Mississippi underwent a similar pattern of privatization and growth. By 1968, there were forty-three state-supported private academies and hundreds of other private schools outside the jurisdiction of the state.25 When the Supreme Court finally enforced full-scale desegregation of every grade level by 1969, Mississippi doubled the number of private schools it funded, to at least one hundred, about 40 percent of the private schools in the state. Across the South, between three hundred and four hundred state-supported private schools were part of an informal private school system of over fifteen hundred private schools that served approximately three hundred thousand children. The Southern Regional Council, an organization committed to “interracial peace,” estimated that five hundred thousand students enrolled in segregation academies after the US Supreme Court’s Green v. County School Board (1968) and Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (1969) cases that effectively vacated guidelines to desegregate with “all deliberate speed” and ordered desegregation in all grades immediately. The private school population doubled in less than two years.26