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.
“Real Good and Sincere Catholics”: White Catholicism and Massive Resistance to Desegregation in Chicago, 1965–1968