BEYOND BROWN: OPPOSITION INTENSIFIES

Activists eventually achieved passage of landmark civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars racial discrimination in workplaces and public accommodations, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which finally created federal oversight to protect African American voting rights. Building on the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Brown, federal courts used these new laws and existing constitutional provisions to strike down racial segregation in public parks, pools, beaches, courtrooms, train stations, and city buses.

In response, segregationist forces comprised of activist politicians, cultural commentators, and grassroots community groups used the same infrastructure and identity developed in the fight against school desegregation to oppose the broader civil rights progress that followed.

The full compilation of civil rights heroes and martyrs — including many names we know and remember — is too long to include here, but another group of actors has remained largely anonymous and unacknowledged. That roster includes white elected officials who proudly targeted civil rights activists with violence and intimidation; white community leaders, clergy, and educators who chose to remain silent while their friends, relatives, and neighbors harassed, beat, bombed, and murdered Black people; white law enforcement officials who protected white supremacy; and Southern lawmakers who weakly condemned the most infamous attacks while obstructing federal civil rights legislation and fanning the flames of segregationist outrage.

The bus boycott here is a painful economic injury to the company. But as a matter of the facts of life, Negro leaders should reckon with two realities: The white man’s economic artillery is far superior, better emplaced, and commanded by more experienced gunners. Second, the white man holds all the offices of government machinery. There will be white rule for as far as the eye can see. Are those not facts of life? Editorial, Montgomery Advertiser, December 13, 1955^{218 Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, “The 2-Edged Sword,” December 13,1955.}

SEGREGATIONIST VIOLENCE UNCHECKED AND ENDORSED

— Black journalist T. Thomas Fortune made these observations in the 1880s during the fight against lynching, but they aptly describe the situation confronting Black civil rights activists generations later.

“For the next 15 years,” a white man named Byron De La Beckwith wrote in a letter to the National Rifle Association in January 1963, “we in Mississippi are going to have to do a lot of shooting to protect our people from bad niggers.”^{220 Rick Bragg, “A Final Try for Truth,” Tampa Bay (Fla.) Times, February 5, 1992.} A fertilizer salesman, veteran, and White Citizens’ Council member, De La Beckwith was a staunch segregationist who once declared, “I believe in segregation like I believe in God.”^{221 Ben Funk, “Beckwith Denies Any Part in Slaying,” Shreveport (La.) Times, February 6, 1964.} When he was arrested and charged with assassinating Mississippi NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers on a June evening in 1963, the state-funded Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission assisted De La Beckwith’s defense. Governor Ross Barnett interrupted his trial during the testimony of Mrs. Myrlie Evers to shake the defendant’s hand, and two different all-white juries declined to convict. Remarking on the outcome of one of De La Beckwith’s two 1964 trials, Governor Barnett quipped, “You can’t be surprised what a jury does or who a woman will marry.”^{222 Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger, “Second Beckwith Trial May Be Held in April,” February 8, 1964.}

Dozens of people died in anti-civil rights violence between 1954 and 1968,^{223 153 Cong. Rec. 16477 (2007) (statement of Rep. Robert Scott); DeNeen L. Brown, “Unsolved and Overlooked Murders: Investigating Cold Cases of the Civil Rights Era,” Washington Post, June 26, 2017.} and countless more were injured and traumatized while fighting for equal rights. A study of violent civil rights-related incidents in the South documented more than 100 attacks between January 1, 1955, and May 1, 1958.^{224 Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 425.} “Although [demonstrators] won several victories,” one scholar observed, “the U.S., particularly the South, became a war zone.”^{225 David C. King, Oman (New York: Marshall Cavendish Benchmark,1997), 211.}

Between 1955 and 1963, Black civil rights activists were the targets of no fewer than 21 bombings in Birmingham, Alabama (earning it the moniker “Bombingham”).

Suppressing Black voters ensured the 1942 election of James O. Eastland as United States senator from Mississippi. Eastland would build a six-term career leading a national movement opposed to civil rights.

Multiple attacks targeted movement leader Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and an explosion at 16th Street Baptist Church killed four young Black girls in the church basement and two young Black boys in the violent aftermath.^{226 Elmira (N.Y.) Star-Gazette, “6 Dead in Birmingham Blast,” September 16, 1963; Jon Reed. “Virgil Ware and Johnny Robinson: Families Want History to Remember Teen Boys, Too,” AL.com, September 14, 2003, http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2013/09/virgil_ware_ and_johnny_robinso.html.}

Law enforcement and white elected officials tolerated and sometimes encouraged racial violence and terrorist acts. Many law enforcement officials were members of White Citizens’ Councils or the Ku Klux Klan. ^{227 Brian Dooley, Black and Green: The Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland & Black America (Chicago: Pluto Press, 1998), 100. FBI investigations into the murders of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, concluded that local Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price were involved in the crim and were active members of the Ku Klux Klan. Montgomery, Alabama, police commissioner Clyde Sellers openly joined the local White Citizens’ Council during the bus boycott.} All-white juries consistently acquitted those charged with violence against Black people, effectively immunizing perpetrators of racist violence from punishment

Myrlie Evers, the widow of Medgar Evers, comforts their son Darrell at his father’s funeral. Medgar Evers was murdered on June 12, 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi. (John Loengard/Life Magazine/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) In August 1955, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were acquitted of abducting and brutally killing Emmett Till, a Black 14-year-old visiting from Chicago, despite the testimony of multiple witnesses proving that the men targeted Emmett for allegedly insulting Bryant’s wife.^{228 Hugh Stephen Whitaker, “A Case Study in Southern Justice: The Murder and Trial of Emmett Till,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8.2 (2005): 189-224.} Months later, both men confessed to Emmett’s murder in Look Magazine.^{229 William Bradford Huie, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” Look Magazine, January 24, 1956.}

Dozens of people witnessed the shooting of Lamar Smith, a 63-year-old Black farmer and voting rights activist killed on the lawn of the Lincoln County Courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi, in August 1955. The sheriff allowed one of the men involved in the murder to leave the scene covered in blood, and three men arrested for the killing were released without charges when the grand jury refused to indict.^{230 Brookhaven (Miss.) Daily Leader, “Authorities Seek Comment on 1955 Murder Cold Case,” May 12, 2009.}

In December 1955, 18 months after Brown, activists in Montgomery, Alabama, launched a year-long boycott to protest mistreatment on the city’s segregated buses following the arrest of a Black rider named Rosa Parks.^{231 Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 371.} In 1956 and 1957, four Black churches and the homes of boycott leaders Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Reverend Robert Graetz, and E.D. Nixon were bombed.^{232 Ibid., 425; Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, “Blast Rocks Residence of Bus Boycott Leader,” January 31, 1956; Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, “Negro Woman Withdraws Action on Segregation,” February 3, 1956; Springfield (Mo.) Leader and Press, “Dixie Solons, Violence Stoke Race Pot Fire,” February 2, 1956; Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, “Graetz Denies Bomb Hoax,” August 26, 1956; Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, “Negro Churches, Residences Suffer $50,000 Bomb Damage,” January 11, 1957.} Two white men affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan were indicted after confessing to the blasts, but in May 1957, an all-white jury acquitted them of all charges as spectators cheered.^{233 New York Times, “2 in Montgomery Freed in Bombing; Acquitted by White Jury of Attack on Negro Church – Spectators Cheer Verdict,” May 31, 1957.}

Jo Ann Robinson, a Black woman and English professor at Alabama State College, was the “key organizer” and “backbone” of the Montgomery bus boycott. She also faced threats and violent reprisals, including vandalism to her home and car.^{251 Lynne Olsen, Freedom’s Daughters (New York: Scribner, 2001), 122, 124-25.} She was arrested for organizing the boycott in 1955. (Alabama State University) The movement to challenge segregated lunch counters started when Black students staged a sit-in at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960. The sit-ins spread and attracted violent responses.^{242 Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 373-74} In 1960, protestors from Tougaloo College staging a sit-in at a Woolworth’s in Jackson, Mississippi, were attacked by white men who kicked one student in the face until he lost consciousness and clubbed a teacher to the floor.^{243 Jackson (Miss.) Free Press, “Real Violence: 50 Years Ago at Woolworth,” May 23, 2013.} That same year, white Americans armed with sticks, clubs, pipes, and whips attacked African Americans staging a “wade-in” to protest racial segregation of a public beach in Biloxi, Mississippi.^{244 Matthew Pitt, “A Civil Rights Watershed in Biloxi, Mississippi,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 19, 2010.}

When students at Alabama State College, a traditionally Black college in Montgomery, Alabama, staged a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in the county courthouse in 1960, Governor John Patterson threatened to terminate the college’s funding unless it expelled the student organizers and warned that “someone [was] likely to be killed” if the protests continued.^{245 Childress (Tex.) Index, “Negro Students March on State Capitol, Sing and Return to Classes,” March 1, 1960.} The college expelled nine students.^{246 ASU Today Magazine, “Historic Graduation: Righting a Wrong,” Summer 2010; Dixon v. Alabama State Bd. of Educ., 186 F. Supp. 945, 952 (M.D. Ala. 1960), reversed by 294 F.2d 150 (5th Cir. 1961) (holding that due process requires notice and some opportunity for hearing before a student at a tax-supported college can be expelled for misconduct).} In August 1960, Florida activists organized several days of sit-in protests at the segregated Woolworth’s in Jacksonville. On August 27, several thousand white men armed with ax handles and baseball bats and waving Confederate flags attacked African Americans as they walked through a park to join the demonstration. Charlie Davis, a 27-year-old Black man, was killed in the violence that erupted that day; more than 70 people were severely injured and 150 were arrested. ^{247 Chicago Defender, “Study Race Violence at Rally,” September 5, 1960.} Mayor W. Haydon Burns told the press: “We regret there were irresponsible elements of the citizenry who would take the law into their own hands, and this includes members of both races.”^{248 Tampa (Fla.) Tribune, “Jax Mayor Clamps Lid On City,” August 29, 1960.} When activists renewed the sit-ins in October, the Klan kidnapped a Black 16-year-old, drove him outside town, stripped him naked, and beat him with a belt and a pistol.^{249 Chicago Defender, “3 Klansmen Pistol-Whip Florida Boy, 16: First Sit-In Staged After Race Violence,” October 10, 1960.}

In 1961, SNCC field secretary Bob Moses was taking two Black residents to the Amite County, Mississippi, courthouse to register to vote when he was attacked and severely beaten by a white man. Mr. Moses pressed charges and after he testified at trial against his attacker — Bill Caston, a cousin of the local sheriff — he was advised to leave the county to avoid further violence. Caston was acquitted by an all-white jury.^{250 “The Struggle for Voting Rights in Mississippi — the Early Years,” Civil Rights Movement Veterans, http://www.crmvet.org/info/voter_ ms.pdf; “A Chronology of Violence and Intimidation in Mississippi Since 1961,” Civil Rights Movement Veterans (April 4, 1963), http:// www.crmvet.org/docs/sncc_ms_violence.pdf; Bryce Wilson Stucki, “Moses of Mississippi,” American Prospect, August 30, 2013; Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 27; John Emmerich and Charles B. Gordon, “Court Acquits White Man on Negro Beating Charge,” McComb (Miss.) Enterprise Journal, September 1, 1961.}

CRIMINALIZING THE STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL EQUALITY

Criminal law has been used to maintain racial control since the end of the Civil War.^{252 Edward Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 187. A Mississippi official remarked in 1865, “Emancipation . . . will require a system of prisons.”} In the 1960s, nearly a century after Emancipation, elected officials denounced peaceful civil rights protestors as “criminals” and “law breakers” and used the legal system to harass, beat, arrest, and imprison activists.^{253 Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 412.} The law protected white supremacy rather than racial equality, and persecuted those who opposed the racial status quo. “The Community Relations Service (CRS) of the Justice Department, established under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, reported police brutality and other violence against Black people that went unpunished throughout the 1970s,” wrote historian Mary Frances Berry, “while the FBI and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division spent their time in surveillance of Black individuals and groups.”^{254 Mary Frances Berry, Black Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America (New York: Penguin, 1995), 73-74.}

A week after 17-year-old Deborah Bracy and several other Black students integrated the high school in Wetumpka, Alabama, she was arrested, charged with assault, and jailed overnight for poking a white classmate with a pencil.^{255 Montgomery (Ala.) Southern Courier, “Girl Accused of Assault,” September 25, 1965.}

Clyde Kennard, a Black veteran, was targeted by the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission after he applied to all-white Mississippi Southern College in Hattiesburg in 1955. When surveillance and investigations failed to discredit him, officials charged him with minor allegations of theft and alcohol possession. An all-white jury convicted Mr. Kennard of stealing $25 worth of chicken feed and he was sentenced to seven years in prison, where he died from undiagnosed colon cancer in 1963. He was 36 years old.^{256 Timothy J. Minchin and John A. Salmond, “Clyde Kennard: A Little-Known Civil Rights Pioneer,” Mississippi History Now (2010), http://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/articles/349/clyde-kennarda-little-known-civil-rights-pioneer.}

In response to the Montgomery bus boycott, police arrested scores of Black activists and carpool drivers on phony traffic charges and tried to disbar the Black lawyer who filed the lawsuit challenging bus segregation.^{257 Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 412.}

Amelia Boynton is beaten unconscious by state troopers in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965. (© Spider Martin) Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and boycott organizer Jo Ann Robinson were among 89 leaders arrested and charged with organizing an illegal boycott.^{258 Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, “Rosa Parks’ Arrest on This Day in 1955 Sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Changed the World,” December 1, 2017.} The grand jury wrote: “In this state we are committed to segregation by custom and law. We intend to maintain it.”^{259 Cheryl Fisher Phibbs, The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A History and Reference Guide (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 52.}

As a movement leader, Dr. King was routinely targeted by Southern law enforcement. Between the start of the Montgomery bus boycott and his 1968 assassination, Dr. King was arrested, jailed, and fined more than 25 times, in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956 and 1958; Atlanta in 1960; Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and 1962; Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 and 1967; St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964; and Selma, Alabama, in 1965. ^{260 The King Center, “FAQs,” http://www.thekingcenter.org/faqs.} He was not alone.

After two Florida A&M students were arrested for sitting in the “white section” of a bus in Tallahassee, the Black community launched a boycott modeled after the Montgomery effort. Boycott organizers and participants faced similar harassment. In October 1956, 21 carpool drivers and nine boycott leaders were arrested for allegedly not having proper car tags. After a three-day trial, they were convicted; some were sentenced to pay fines and some were sent to jail.^{261 Atlanta Daily World, “Leaders Of Bus Protest Group Fined In Fla.,” October 21, 1956; Baltimore (Md.) Afro-American, “‘Ride Buses Or Go To Jail,’ Fla.Warns: Arrest 22, Grab Books of Drivers,” October 13, 1956; Chicago Defender, “Boycotters Fined $500,” October 27, 1956; Norfolk (Va.) Journal and Guide, “Florida Bus Boycotters Appeal $11,000 Fines,” October. 27, 1956}

“For more than a decade — from the mid-1950s until the late 1960s,” wrote Michelle Alexander, officials who opposed civil rights systematically and strategically framed their rhetoric as “calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime.”^{294 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2010), 40-41.} Some segregationists even claimed that integration caused crime, and found their rhetoric bolstered by suspect but highly publicized FBI reports of dramatic increases in the national crime rate.^{295 Ibid., 41.}

By criminalizing civil rights activists, opponents of civil rights shifted the public debate from segregation to crime.^{296 Ibid., 42; see also Lewis, Massive Resistance, 143-44.}

Officials who opposed civil rights systematically and strategically framed their rhetoric as “calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime.”

In the 1968 presidential election, both Richard Nixon and former Alabama Governor George Wallace made “law and order” a central theme of their campaigns; combined, they won 57 percent of the vote.^{297 Alexander, New Jim Crow, 46.} Nixon ran one ad that “explicitly called on voters to reject the lawlessness of civil rights activists and embrace ‘order’ in the United States.” ^{298 Ibid., 46.}

It was a popular message. By 1968, 81 percent of Americans agreed that “law and order has broken down in this country” and the majority blamed “Negroes who start riots” and “Communists.”^{299 Ibid., 45.}

In 1927, white lynch mobs in Burke County, North Carolina, searched for a Black man named Broadus Miller. In an era when allegations against Black people were rarely questioned and Black men accused of serious crimes against white women were more likely to be lynched than tried in court, few expected that Mr. Miller, who was accused of killing a white girl, would live to see the inside of a courtroom. A young attorney named Samuel J. Ervin told the county sheriff to invoke a state law that authorized any citizen to kill a suspect, and then Ervin delivered firearms to the lynch mob. Within days, Mr. Miller was shot dead and delivered to the county jail, where his corpse was “placed on the steps so the milling thousands could pass by and look at the object of their hatred.” ^{304 Statesville (N.C.) Record & Landmark, “Broadus Miller is Killed in Gun Duel,” July 4, 1927; Danville (Va.) Bee, “Searchers of Negro Given A Clean Bill,” July 6, 1927.}

After Black students sought service at a segregated Montgomery cafeteria in 1960, angry white residents attacked Black shoppers. A white man with a baseball bat swings at a Black shopper, while another attacks a Black woman with a closed fist. (Charles Moore/Getty Images) Weeks after Brown was announced in 1954, Samuel J. Ervin by then a justice on the North Carolina Supreme Court — was appointed to a vacant seat in the Senate.^{305 Kannapolis (N.C.) Daily Independent, “Umstead Appoints Sam Ervin to Senate Post,” June 6, 1954.} In response to Brown, he told a local reporter, “I don’t see why our Constitution meant one thing for 86 years and why it now means another” and called the ruling a “tragedy.”^{306 Burlington (N.C.) Daily Times-News, “Ervin Raps Ruling on Segregation,” June 10, 1954.} He was sworn in days later. Senator Ervin signed the Southern Manifesto and spent most of his 20 years in Congress opposing desegregation, obstructing civil rights legislation, and backing racial violence and injustice just as he did in Burke County decades earlier.

The war against racial equality was waged in America’s streets, courts, and schools, and elected officials were the generals who directed the campaign on every front. From mayors to governors, state legislators to members of Congress, Southern officials fought tirelessly to defend racial hierarchy and white supremacy, wipe out civil rights activism, and kill federal civil rights legislation.

Former Georgia governor Richard Russell joined the Senate in 1933 and spent more than three decades in office spearheading opposition efforts and filibustering every anti-lynching and civil rights bill that reached the Senate. ^{307 Robert D. Loevy, To End All Segregation: The Politics of the Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Maryland: University Press of America, 2008), 157, 160.} “As one who was born and reared in the atmosphere of the Old South with six generations of my forebears now resting beneath Southern soil,” he wrote in 1935, “I am willing to go as far and make as great a sacrifice to preserve and insure white supremacy in the social, economic, and political life of our state as any man who lives within her borders.”^{308 Bruce Bartlett, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2008), 73.}

When Texans sent Lyndon Johnson to the Senate in 1937, Senator Russell took the future president under his wing and helped him become the youngest-ever majority leader. ^{309 Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Random House, 2012), 7.} Alongside his mentor, Johnson obstructed every civil rights and anti-lynching bill that came before the Senate. Johnson collaborated with Russell to give civil rights activists a symbolic legislative victory while maintaining the segregationist status quo by passing toothless civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960.^{310 Gilbert C. Fite, Richard B. Russell, Jr., Senator from Georgia (Chapel Hill UNC Press, 2002), 342-43, 347.}

Southern lawmakers’ strict control over voter registration secured their seats and allowed them to gain seniority that translated to great power in Congress. In six terms as senator from Georgia, Russell chaired several committees, including the all-powerful appropriations committee, and served two terms as president pro tempore.^{311 Ibid., 463, 465.} Robert Byrd of West Virginia joined the Senate in 1959, spent his first decades in office as a staunch segregationist, and amassed unparalleled influence during his 51-year career.^{312 Eric Pianin, “A Senator’s Shame,” Washington Post, June 19, 2005.}

The South’s outsized political power in Congress depended on preventing Black people from voting.^{313 Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 48.} Because Southern districts included large numbers of Black residents, the disenfranchisement of Southern Black people translated into the super-enfranchisement of Southern white people: in a 50 percent Black Southern district where no Black people voted, each white vote carried twice the influence of a Northern vote cast in a fully enfranchised district. In this way, the disenfranchisement of Southern Black people empowered Southern white voters at the expense of almost everyone else.

To cultivate the support of white constituents, Southern politicians seized every opportunity to denounce racial progress and incite white people’s outrage.

Senator James Eastland from Mississippi, known as “The Voice of the White South,”^{323 ”Senator James Eastland,” The Mike Wallace Interview, July 28, 1957.} unashamedly fanned the flames of racial violence in Belzoni, Mississippi, where Reverend George Lee, local NAACP co-founder and the first Black voter to register in the county since Reconstruction, was shot to death on May 7, 1955. Soon after, activist Gus Courts was ambushed and shot, forcing his family to “flee in the night” as “American refugees from the terror in the South, all because we wanted to vote.” ^{324 Richmond (Ind.) Palladium-Item, “Negro Says He Had to Leave Home After He Tried to Vote,” March 1, 1957.} After these shootings, Eastland told a White Citizens’ Council meeting in Belzoni: “My friends, we are engaged in one of the greatest conflicts in the history of our country.” He encouraged his constituents to identify as soldiers defending their whiteness under siege. “The fight to protect our racial identity,” Eastland declared, “is basic to our whole civilization.”^{325 Senator James O. Eastland, speech at White Citizens’ Council meeting, Belzoni, Mississippi, September 25, 1957.}

By 1963, John F. Kennedy had been elected president, Lyndon Johnson was his vice president, and white segregationists feared the White House was too cozy with civil rights leaders. In 1961, President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy negotiated safe passage out of Alabama for Freedom Riders, and in 1963 the president used federal power to force Alabama Governor George Wallace to stand down as Black students enrolled at the state’s flagship university. By May 1963, polls reported that 62 percent of white Southerners felt that the Kennedy administration was “pushing racial integration too fast.”^{326 Mildred A. Schwartz, “Trends in White Attitudes Toward Negroes,” Natl. Opinion Research Center (1967): 102.}

Strom Thurmond denounced Kennedy’s proposed civil rights legislation as “a vicious, dangerous, and impractical program” that was “unconstitutional, un-American,” and “lined with bribes and Blackmail.”^{327 Florence (S.C.) Morning News, “Thurmond Fires Three Blasts At Kennedy Rule and Court,” July 5, 1963.}

After Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Lyndon Johnson, now president, again faced pressure from civil rights leaders to pass civil rights legislation. This time, he worked to pass the bill that Kennedy had proposed. The sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964 — which outlawed discrimination in employment, education, and public accommodations^{328 Burlington (N.C.) Daily Times-News, “Interpretation Given of New Civil Rights Act,” July. 16, 1964.} — passed despite Southern lawmakers’ rabid opposition, public condemnation, and racist rhetoric both on and off the Congressional Record.

In the House, the legislation was described as containing “vicious assaults upon the Constitution.” ^{329 Bridgeport (Conn.) Telegram, “Debate Begins in House on Civil Rights Measure,” February 1, 1964.}

In the Senate, Southerners condemned the Civil Rights bill as “unnecessary, unwise, and beyond the realm of reason.”^{330 0 Todd S. Purdum, An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2014), 62.} They told their constituents it was a “complete blueprint for the totalitarian state,” “a threatened crime against the whole philosophy of liberty,”^{331 Ibid.} and that it would “confer the power of dictatorship . . . upon the president.”^{332 Ibid., 81.}

Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana proclaimed that African Americans would never gain acceptance until they obtained “the moral, intellectual, and cultural standards of the white race . . . one need only look to Ethiopia, Liberia, or Haiti to put an end to the charge that the white man has kept the Negro from improving himself.” ^{333 Keith M. Finley, Delaying the Dream (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 264.}

In 1965, President Johnson oversaw passage of the Voting Rights Act, which outlawed most of the policies that disenfranchised Black voters in the South, established clear standards and enforcement provisions for challenging violations of voting rights, and directly threatened the seats of many Southern politicians.^{334 German Lopez, “How the Voting Rights Act Transformed Black Voting Rights in the South, in One Chart,” Vox, August 6, 2015.}

Opposition to civil rights and racial equality cannot be dismissed as the extremism of a few marginalized vigilantes. Like the lynchings prevalent in generations past, school closures, economic reprisals, arrests and harassment, mob violence, bombings, and murder were bold, public acts that implicated the entire community.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of white jurors refused to hold white people accountable for crimes committed against Black activists. Thousands of law enforcement officials and officers failed to protect Black citizens from harassment, attacks, shootings, and bombings, and many police violently abused and even killed Black activists. Public officials who spouted racist rhetoric from their campaign podiums, shut down public schools and parks to prevent integration, and encouraged violence against civil rights activists represented white citizens who applauded their speeches, endorsed their actions, and repeatedly re-elected them to local, state, and national office.^{347 Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 399-403.}

People like James Eastland, Strom Thurmond, and George Wallace portrayed white Southerners as patriots rather than racists; as brave protectors of their culture rather than perpetrators of violent attacks against men, women, and children; and as defenders of state sovereignty against an overreaching federal government intent on destroying their way of life rather than violators of constitutional rights. “We are about to embark on a great crusade,” Eastland told a gathering of pro-segregation activists in 1955. “A crusade to restore Americanism and return the control of our government to the people.”^{348 Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger, “Coordinating Group Formed to Promote South’s Segregation,” December 29, 1955.}

Opponents of racial equality embraced this identity, which empowered them to cast their immoral behavior as moral and to feel pride rather than shame as they used economic intimidation, criminalization, bombings, beatings, and even murder to defend white supremacy. This identity became the civil rights era’s most enduring legacy.

PRESERVING RACIAL INEQUALITY UP NORTH

White opposition to civil rights was largely a Southern movement, but it spread quickly. Between 1941 and the late 1970s, some five million African Americans fled to the North and West, marking the first time in American history that a large proportion of African Americans lived outside the South.^{350 Joe W. Trotter and Kenneth L. Kusmer, African American Urban History: The Dynamics of Race, Class and Gender since World War II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 21.} Southern segregationists saw potential allies in the North and West.

White residents of Chicago's northwest side shout and shake their fists at civil rights marchers protesting racial discrimination in housing, August 7, 1966. (AP Photo/stf) Television cameras recorded Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark’s brutal beating of Reverend C.T. Vivian in Selma, Alabama, during a February 1965 voting rights demonstration. When it was broadcast on television, Clark received fan mail from across the country. “Sorry there are not enough men with your guts and convictions in this country,” read one wire from Porterville, California. “Seventy percent of the messages are favorable,” Clark told a reporter, “and more of it’s favorable from the North than the South.”^{351 Jack Nelson, “Clark Gets ‘Fan Mail’ in Selma Rights Fight,” Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1965.} Later that year, Clark was the invited speaker at a meeting of the Los Angeles White Citizens’ Council, where he condemned the Watts uprising as the fault of “Martin Luther King and company and the Communist conspiracy.”^{352 Fresno (Calif.) Bee, “Sheriff Ignores Pickets During Pasadena Talk,” November 16, 1965.} Meanwhile, Reverend Vivian, an aide to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was charged with contempt of court.^{353 Nelson, "Clark Gets ‘Fan Mail’ in Selma Rights Fight," February 18, 1965.}

As civil rights gains spread, white residents of major cities outside the South blocked efforts to end racial discrimination in housing, education, and public services. Elected officials used legislation and violence to fight racial equality, deny Black people access to public services, and exacerbate the poverty that plagued Black neighborhoods.

Some of the earliest clashes took place in border states like Maryland and Delaware. By 1950, Baltimore had six whites-only swimming pools; the one pool for African Americans was so crowded that children had to swim in shifts.^{354 Laura Wexler, “Swimming in the City,” Baltimore Style (July-Aug.2008).} Threats of violence delayed implementation of a 1956 court order to integrate the pools, and in 1962, a mob of 1000 white people threw stones and bottles at African American children swimming in a traditionally white pool.^{355 Cumberland (Md.) News, “Negro Leader Demands Baltimore Police Probe,” September 19, 1962.}

In 1960, 90 percent of Baltimore restaurants refused to serve African Americans.^{356 Peter Irons, The Courage of Their Convictions (New York: Penguin,1988), 131.} When a group of high school and college students boycotted a segregated lunch counter, Chief Judge of the Maryland Court of Appeals Robert Bell recounted:

When 11 Black students integrated the white high school in the southern Delaware town of Milford in fall 1954, the local school board president predicted it would “blow the town apart.”^{358 Orlando Camp and Ed Kee, “Lost Opportunity: The Failure to Integrate Milford’s Public Schools in 1954,” in Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience, eds. Robert L. Hayman Jr. and Leland Ware (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 137; Orlando Camp and Ed Kee, The Milford Eleven (Wilmington: Cedar Tree Books, 2011), 32.} Plans for a school dance triggered a mass meeting attended by some 1500 white residents, and after 800 people signed a petition opposing an integrated dance,^{359 Nashville (Tenn.) Southern School News, “Delaware,” October 1,1954.} school officials canceled the event. ^{360 Camp & Kee, Lost Opportunity, 142.} The Black students were told to stay home for several days, and when they returned to school, police had to escort them through mobs shouting, “The Bible gives authority for segregation!” and “We just don’t want our children to go to school with Negroes!”^{361 Ibid., 145-46.} Milford expelled the Black students and the NAACP sued, sparking more cross burnings, rallies, and pro-segregation demonstrations. The next year, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled that Milford could delay integration while awaiting guidance from the United States Supreme Court. ^{362 Raymond Waters, The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 200.} Segregation persisted in Milford for 15 years, until the last segregated school closed in 1970.^{363 Camp & Kee, Milford Eleven, 115.}

Employment discrimination was a major barrier to economic advancement for Black people in the North and West. Hiring restrictions that barred Black people in Detroit and Chicago from many positions and promotions during the 1940s war boom persisted long after the war ended.^{364 Mark Speltz, North of Dixie: Civil Rights Photography Beyond the South (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2016), 12.} Many trade unions barred Black workers, and non-union employers often offered Black applicants lower pay and lesser positions, if they were hired at all.^{365 Ibid.}

From 1960 onward, the unemployment rate for Black Americans stayed at double the rate for white Americans.^{366 Algernon Austin, “For African Americans, 50 Years of High Unemployment,” Economic Policy Institute, February 22, 2012.} Even after the Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination in employment, job advertisements in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune sought “white applicants only.”^{367 William A. Darity Jr. and Patrick L. Mason, “Evidence on Discrimination in Employment: Codes of Color, Codes of Gender,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 12, no. 2 (1998): 64.}

Housing segregation shaped urban landscapes in the North, where housing shortages penned Black migrants in overcrowded and overpriced neighborhoods. Housing segregation enabled school segregation, which in many cities remained a vestige of segregated neighborhoods long after segregation laws were struck down.

In Philadelphia, more than 200 African Americans attempting to rent or buy homes at the edges of the city’s segregated residential districts were attacked during the first six months of 1955 alone. Black residents found themselves trapped in the North Philadelphia ghetto for years.^{368 Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017), 122.}

In Los Angeles, more than 100 African Americans were targeted with violence when they tried to move out of segregated Black neighborhoods between 1950 and 1965.^{369 Ibid.} These attacks, including dynamite bombings, cross burnings, and rocks thrown through windows, led to only one arrest and prosecution.^{370 Ibid.}

Police beat a Black man in Harlem, New York, in 1964. (AP Photo) The Chicago Housing Authority invested in segregation by concentrating more than 10,000 public housing units in isolated African American neighborhoods — a policy the Supreme Court found in 1976 violated racial desegregation laws.”^{371 Hills v. Gautreaux, 425 U.S. 284 (1976).}

Slavery and codified racial segregation have come to be thought of as uniquely Southern phenomena, but it is clear that the legacy of white supremacy and racial bigotry was a powerful force in the North and West. Inspired by Southern segregationists, there is a clear and undeniable record of pervasive discrimination based on race that spread across America. The legacy of this history haunts us still.