Civil Rights and the Private School Movement in Mississippi, 1964–1971

2002 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. Fuquay
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Private School ◽  
Black Children ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Housing Discrimination ◽  
Civil Rights Act

The signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was heralded as a tremendous victory for the civil rights movement, the fulfillment of a decade-long struggle to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Along with measures against job and housing discrimination, the Civil Rights Act included provisions specifically designed to overcome the white South's massive resistance campaign and enforce school desegregation. Despite the continued intransigence of segregationists, these measures proved successful and white public schools across the South opened their doors to black children. With segregationists in retreat and the Voting Rights Act on the horizon, this was a time of celebration for civil rights activists. But this was not the end of the story.

Strictly Political

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Maxwell Hayter
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
City Council ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Political Machine

Chapter 1 reimagines the origins of the civil rights movement by examining the suffrage crusades that predated the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. The women and men of the Richmond Crusade for Voters were the legatees of a drawn-out struggle against racist civility and white paternalism in Virginia. Moderate racial reforms, led by men such as Gordon Blaine Hancock, characterized race relations in Richmond before the 1950s. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ended racist civility in Virginia. The Crusade and the National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) more immediately emerged in opposition to massive resistance to public-school integration and racist urban-renewal policies. This organization eventually outmobilized Harry Byrd’s political machine by paying poll taxes. With the help of the NAACP and its “Miracle of 1960” campaign, the Crusade elected an African American, B.A. “Sonny” Cephas, to the Richmond City Council in 1964.

The Private School Pivot: The Shrouded Persistence of Massive Resistance in the Black Belt and Beyond

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-486
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Edmonds
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Private School ◽  
Educational Equality ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Greene County

In 1969, four years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, African Americans in Greene County, Alabama, reclaimed control of local government, becoming the first community in the South to do so since Reconstruction. A half century later, however, Greene County remains an impoverished and largely segregated area with poor educational outcomes, especially for Black children. This essay explores the history of Greene County from 1954 to the recent past, with a particular focus on Warrior Academy, a segregated private school (“segregation academy”) founded by Whites in 1965. As a case study of “school choice” in the context of the “long civil rights movement,” it complicates scholarly definitions of “massive resistance.” Furthermore, it demonstrates the ways in which an emerging “color-blind” conservatism premised on White concerns about “educational quality” thwarted Black efforts to achieve educational equality, even in places where African Americans achieved significant political victories.

A Chink in the Armor: The Black-Led Struggle for School Desegregation in Arlington, Virginia, and the End of Massive Resistance

2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
James McGrath Morris
Keyword(s):  
Public School ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Student ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
School Integration ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
White School

As it had for countless other children in Arlington, Virginia, the idyll days of summer had come to end for eleven-year-old Edward Leslie Hamm Jr. on the morning of 5 September 1957. After donning a pair of clean khaki pants and a freshly pressed, short-sleeved white shirt, Hamm was heading back to the classroom along with twenty-one thousand other students in this Northern Virginia community. That alone was enough to put a pit in any child's stomach. But for Hamm the day possessed an added dimension. Instead of riding a bus for forty-five minutes to the Negro school six miles across the county, his parents were dispatching him, along with two other black pupils, to challenge the continued exclusion of blacks from the all-white school, one mile from their isolated exclusively black neighborhood. A full three years after Brown v. Board of Education, not a single black student had yet attended a white public school in Virginia, seen by many observers as the frontline state of resistance to school integration. The three children were nervous and took no comfort in thinking of themselves among a vanguard of the civil rights movement. “I wasn't into an integration thing,” recalled George Tyrone Nelson, who was fourteen at the time and among the trio challenging the segregated schools that day.

The White Man’s Tax Dollar

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camille Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Private School ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
State Action ◽  
White Backlash ◽  
Legal Identity ◽  
Tax Exempt ◽  
To Come ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

Chapter Five examines how the responses to Brown in defense of segregation were consistently framed in terms of "taxpayer" citizenship and the rights of whites to unequal and better funded schooling. In addition, this chapter identifies the tax-centric debate in Virginia in the era of massive resistance, and the private school/state action questions raised in the wake of Brown v. Board, including its impact on tax exempt institutions like Girard College in Philadelphia. This chapter builds on and combines the recently expanded historiography of the white backlash to the "long civil rights movement" by tracing the continuous assertion by segregationists of a legal identity as "taxpaying citizens." This rights claim drew deeply on the debate over whether taxation and education should facilitate equity or facilitate privilege and the use of the claim to "taxpayer" identity by segregationists anticipated the justification for racially unequal schools in decades to come.

Race Relations: Between Emancipation and Subjugation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Burt
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Vulnerable Groups ◽  
District Courts ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Race Discrimination ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
The Supreme Court

This chapter discusses race relations as the paradigmatic judicial effort to protect vulnerable groups under the commitment made in Footnote Four. After the Supreme Court correctly held in Brown I that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional, and in Brown II wisely paused to enlist the assistance of district courts, the federal Congress, the executive, and others, the Court then failed to continue this approach after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing law in 1968 by requiring past intentionally imposed race discrimination in public schools to obtain judicial relief. The chapter then offers suggestions on what the Court could have done—an approach of less intervention by the Court imposing its views of equality on the parties and more promotion of deliberation among the parties to achieve democratic equality.

Civil Rights Gone Wrong

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 256-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynnell L. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Boston Public Schools ◽  
Children's Book ◽  
Historical Moment

On May 14, 2014, three white Boston city councilors refused to vote to approve a resolution honoring the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. the Board of Education because, as one remarked, “I didn’t want to get into a debate regarding forced busing in Boston.” Against the recent national proliferation of celebrations of civil rights milestones and legislation, the controversy surrounding the fortieth anniversary of the court decision that mandated busing to desegregate Boston public schools speaks volumes about the historical memory of Boston’s civil rights movement. Two highly acclaimed contemporary works of children’s literature set during or inspired by Boston’s desegregation busing plan reflect and respond to the ongoing battle over the history and memory of Boston’s civil rights movement and its enduring racial legacy: Busing Brewster, an illustrated children’s book for young readers, written by Richard Michelson and illustrated by R. G. Roth; and Gold Dust, a middle-grade novel for adolescents by Chris Lynch. Both works offer representations of an overtly racist past, produced in a historical moment when prevailing ideologies of color blindness and postracialism suggest not only that racism is passé, but that any attempt to redress past racism that takes race into account is itself racist and unjust. Busing Brewster and Gold Dust offer equivocal reflections on urban decline and racial transformations at the turn of the twenty-first century. Both works have as much to tell us about the historical memory of Boston’s desegregation efforts as they do about contemporary understandings of race and social justice.

Blurring Public and Private: The Pragmatic Desegregation Politics of an Elite Private School in Atlanta

2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-89
Author(s):  
Michelle A. Purdy
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Students ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Private Schools ◽  
Private School ◽  
Historically White ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
White Elite

The school desegregation narrative often references historically white public schools as sites of massive resistance and historically white private schools as segregationist academies. Yet some historically white elite private schools or independent schools, such as The Westminster Schools (plural in name only), established in 1951 in Atlanta, Georgia, chose to desegregate. Such elite institutions, which have served as one catalyst for the creation and maintenance of social and cultural capital, became more accessible after Brown v. Board of Education through a combination of private and public decisions galvanized by larger social, political, and federal forces. Westminster's 1965 decision to consider all applicants regardless of race was emblematic of the pragmatic desegregation politics of Atlanta's city leaders during the civil rights movement and a national independent school agenda focused on recruiting black students. Drawing on institutional, local, regional, and national archival records and publications, this article examines the import of schools like Westminster to civic and business leaders, to the politics of race and desegregation occurring in large cities, and to the range of educational opportunities available in metropolitan areas. This examination yields an analysis of the leadership and politics of a southern historically white elite private school that black students desegregated in 1961.

The Southern Manifesto

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kyle Day
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
The South ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Postwar America ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Federal Judiciary ◽  
Complete Study ◽  
Post War

The Southern Manifesto: Massive Resistance and the Fight to Preserve Segregation is the first complete study of the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, popularly known as the Southern Manifesto. On March 13, 1956, ninety-nine members of the Eighty-Fourth United States Congress promulgated the Southern Manifesto, formally stating opposition to Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the emerging Civil Rights Movement. This book explores a crucial aspect of post-war American history in general and the Civil Rights Movement in particular, most notably that of efforts by southern segregationists to construct a quasi-legal and political defense against the desegregation decisions of the Federal judiciary. This promulgation was also a response to the increasing support by American public opinion to advocates of desegregation, as well as the increasing isolation of the South and its traditional social structures. The Southern Manifesto was seminally important in creating the concerted and ultimately successful effort by white southerners to oppose the implementation of the Brown decision, a movement that came to be known as massive resistance. This study treats the Southern Manifesto as a document in and of itself, analyzing its text, its authors, its supporters and opponents. The Southern Manifesto, therefore, explains where the formation of the segregationist majority came from and how it became the standard for the South during this period, and thus creates a useful window through which to view the racial dynamics of postwar America.

Contending with Change and Challenges

2018 ◽  
pp. 56-81
Author(s):  
Michelle A. Purdy
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Private School ◽  
School Leaders ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Student Body ◽  
Local Schools ◽  
Tax Exempt ◽  
The Face

This chapter captures the development of Westminster in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By the late 1950s, Westminster’s student body had quadrupled, and the school was housed on the current West Paces Ferry Road campus. School leaders prepared for the possible closing of Atlanta Public Schools as black Atlantans called for desegregation in the face of oppositional state policies. As the civil rights movement increased in momentum, Westminster and other local schools, including Lovett and Trinity, received inquiries into their admissions policies from interracial organizations such as the Greater Atlanta Council on Human Relations and leading civil rights activists including the Kings, Abernathys, and Youngs, and black families such as the Rosses. Private school leaders worked to find a balance among multiple contexts and influences, including the enlarged federal presence in education and increased questions about federal tax-exempt status for private schools. Concurrently, a school culture at Westminster developed in ways that continued to reflect the “Old South” and included racist traditions while some white students earnestly debated and discussed the issues of the day.

Transforming the Elite

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle A. Purdy
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Students ◽  
Education Reform ◽  
Social History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Private Schools ◽  
Private School ◽  
Mixed Feelings

When traditionally white public schools in the South became sites of massive resistance in the wake of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, numerous white students exited the public system altogether, with parents choosing homeschooling or private segregationist academies. But some historically white elite private schools or independent schools, the most prestigious of private schools, opted to desegregate. The black students that attended these schools courageously navigated institutional and interpersonal racism but ultimately emerged as upwardly mobile leaders. Transforming the Elite tells this story. Focusing on the experiences of the first black students to desegregate Atlanta's well-known The Westminster Schools and national efforts to diversify private schools, Michelle A. Purdy combines social history with policy analysis in a dynamic narrative that expertly re-creates this overlooked history. Through gripping oral histories and rich archival research, this book showcases educational changes for black southerners during the civil rights movement including the political tensions confronted, struggles faced, and school cultures transformed during private school desegregation. This history foreshadows contemporary complexities at the heart of the black community's mixed feelings about charter schools, school choice, and education reform.

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