Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction

by Clive Webb (Editor)

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 a campaign 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 decision intensified. It tracks the ingenious, legal, and often extralegal, means by which white southerners rebelled against the 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 struggle for 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 been assumed.

Genres: History

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Clive Webb is Professor of Modern American History at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. He specialises in the history of race and ethnic relations in the United States and also, in recent years, the United Kingdom. Outside of the classroom, he spends as much time as possible roaming the Sussex countryside.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very intresting collection of ten essays on the Civil Rights movement in the post-Brown v. Board days with the perspective that many in the South undertook various strategies of massive resistance to try to combat desegregation. Not all the resistance involved the police dogs and firehoses of Bull Connor fame or bombings, murders or other violence of the movement; this book traces approaches centering on religious responses, female leadership and political minimal compliance. In particular, the chapters on Little Rock and other political and social organization reactions are quite eye-opening.