Massive Resistance Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction

by Webb, Clive

• ISBN13: 9780195177862
• ISBN10: 019517786X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-07-21
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

On May 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. When the court failed to specify a clear deadline for implementation of the ruling, southern segregationists seized the opportunity to launch acampaign of massive resistance against the federal government. What were the tactics, the ideology, the strategies, of segregationists? This collection of original essays reveals how the political center in the South collapsed during the 1950s as opposition to the Supreme Court decisionintensified. It tracks the ingenious, legal, and often extralegal, means by which white southerners rebelled against the ruling: how white men fell back on masculine pride by ostensibly protecting their wives and daughters from the black menace, how ideals of motherhood were enlisted in the strugglefor white purity, and how the words of the Bible were invoked to legitimize white supremacy. Together these essays demonstrate that segregationist ideology, far from a simple assertion of supremacist doctrine, was advanced in ways far more imaginative and nuanced than has previously beenassumed.

Table of Contents

Contributors	ix
Chronology	xi
Introduction	3	(18)
Part I The Origins and Impact of Southern Resistance
1 Why Massive Resistance?	21	(18)
Michael J. Klarman
2 Brown and Backlash	39	(17)
Tony Badger
3 A Political Coup d'État? How the Enemies of Earl Long Overwhelmed Racial Moderation in Louisiana	56	(20)
Adam Fairclough
4 "Massive Resistance and Minimum Compliance": The Origins of the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis and the Failure of School Desegregation in the South	76	(23)
John A. Kirk
5 The Fight for "Freedom of Association": Segregationist Rights and Resistance in Atlanta	99	(18)
Kevin M. Kruse
Part II Segregationist Ideology
6 White South, Red Nation: Massive Resistance and the Cold War	117	(19)
George Lewis
7 Disunity and Religious Institutions in the White South	136	(15)
David L. Chappell
8 The Theology of Massive Resistance: Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown	151	(30)
Jane Dailey
9 White Womanhood, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Massive Resistance	181	(22)
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
10 Massive Resistance, Violence, and Southern Social Relations: The Little Rock, Arkansas, School Integration Crisis, 1954-1960	203	(18)
Karen S. Anderson
Bibliographic Essay	221	(10)
Index	231