The Southern Manifesto

This 1956 tome on segregation reminds me of Strom Thurmond,  portrayed in the book Step by Step as a supporter of a cause that he knew was a failure. The die-hard segregationists knew they were fighting a losing battle, but they stuck by it with typical rebel tenacity. They knew Jim Crow was doomed, but still they wouldn’t budge, even as their platform was collapsing. This book raises the question, not of the racism, but how much of it had to do with southern politicians trying to preserve their sovereignty.

Nobody’s sure who wrote the Southern Manifesto, but that’s not the point. This book gives background information on the document and the people that abided by it as the Civil Rights movement was changing the county. Jim Crow was a doctrine, not a law, so whatever racists laws existed in the South were based on norms and mores. After World War II, segregation began to ebb, as Black troops returned from the war and wouldn’t put up with it. In the industrial cities of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit, Black workers were joining the unions in record numbers, not so much out of equality, but to keep them from becoming strike breakers. Then came increased enrollment of Black army veterans under the GI Bill, and when segregation kept them out, they fought back. Almost all of the changes occurred through peaceful protests, not laws. Brown versus the Topeka BOE was a ruling, it couldn’t change the law. Changing the laws were the result of protests.

Senators Oliver Eastland (Mississippi) and Strom Thurmon (South Carolina) both saw the Brown decision as an intrusion on states’ rights. Even if they had no founded objection to Black and White children attending the same schools, their typical southern sense of honor drove them to fight it right down to the last filibuster.  At the same time, they were wary of the bad publicity from the Emmet Till murder.

The issue of whether the anti-integration effort was a result of racism or southern stubbornness will no doubt occupy scholars time for years to come.