Southern Manifesto

Context

Although many white southerners had established independent schools for their children before the Civil War, the first formal public education systems emerged in the South in the late nineteenth century. Each southern state created its own Department of Education, with full power to draft curricula and enforce standards. In every case, however, southern schools segregated black and white students. The U.S. Supreme Court recognized the constitutional legitimacy of state-enforced racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. This infamous decision cemented the “separate but equal” doctrine in American law, holding that racial segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause.

In 1954, as the Supreme Court considered Brown v. Board of Education, the “separate but equal” doctrine still governed race relations in America. Restaurants, restrooms, train cars, and taverns were segregated. In addition, seventeen southern and border states legally barred African Americans from white public schools, four western states allowed local school districts to determine segregation policy, and almost every other state in the nation practiced some form of de facto public school segregation. The Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown challenged the status quo and overturned the Plessy precedent. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “In the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” A year later, in Brown II (1955), Warren announced that public school districts must desegregate with “all deliberate speed.” Yet, of course, it was not that easy.

In the mid-1950s white southern Democrats launched a legal and political campaign against Brown v. Board of Education. On May 17, 1954—the day that the decision appeared—Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia condemned the Supreme Court's school desegregation order. He warned of dangers that would result from racial mixing in the schools. Georgia's Governor Herman Talmadge took a different approach. He said that the Supreme Court had ignored precedent and overstepped the boundaries of its authority.

Powerful southern senator James Eastland of Mississippi took yet another approach. Eastland portrayed racial segregation as a natural, self-evident truth. “Separation promotes racial harmony,” he told the Senate, ten days after the Brown decision. “It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination. … It is the law of nature, it is the law of God, that every race has both the right and the duty to perpetuate itself. All free men have the right to associate exclusively with members of their own race, free from governmental interference, if they so desire” (Commager, p. 70).

Robert Patterson, a plantation manager from Indianola, Mississippi, agreed with Eastland. Patterson and a dozen friends formed the first White Citizens' Council in July 1954. Their organization consisted primarily of white-collar, middle-class southern business leaders and professionals who used economic and legal means to discourage African Americans from pursuing court-ordered desegregation. By October 1954 twenty White Citizens' Councils had appeared across Mississippi. Within two years the organization could boast more than 250,000 supporters throughout the South.

Although southern politicians and members of the White Citizens' Councils often rejected base appeals to racism and violence, other southern whites commonly used these tactics to intimidate African Americans in the South. In 1955, for instance, four African Americans—including a young man named Emmett Till—were brutally murdered in separate cases of racial violence in Mississippi without one white person ever being convicted. Whites used threats of racial violence to keep African Americans from voting booths and courthouses, where they might most successfully challenge white supremacy.

As the South's white political leaders struggled to unite disparate segregationist organizations, they drew on the region's deep-rooted political traditions. No one was more successful in this endeavor than Senator Byrd of Virginia, who in 1956 called for massive resistance to the Brown decision. Byrd's most powerful arguments against the Brown decision were based on the writings of James J. Kilpatrick, the conservative editor of the Richmond News Leader. Kilpatrick argued that the Brown decision represented a federal violation of states' rights and that the southern states should interpose themselves between their citizens and the federal government, if it attempted to enforce the decision.

Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, an outspoken critic of Brown v. Board of Education, showed keen interest in the interposition doctrine. In February 1956 Thurmond approached Byrd with an idea for a Southern Manifesto that might unite the South. He suggested that the document be constitutional and historical in nature and that it emphasize interposition. He wrote three drafts of the document in February 1956. In uncompromising, bombastic tones, Thurmond spoke publicly against the Supreme Court for violating the Constitution and the principles of federalism.

Thurmond's work on the manifesto secured the support of Byrd, a soft-spoken Virginia reactionary who controlled his state's political system through an elaborate network known as the Byrd machine. With Byrd's assistance, Thurmond circulated drafts of the Southern Manifesto on Capitol Hill in the hope of winning support from other southern delegates. While a few die-hard segregationists were willing to sign on to Thurmond's initiative, it proved far too radical for most southern congressmen to approve. Undeterred, Thurmond and Byrd threatened to issue the document with as many signatures as they could get.

At this point, the Senate's southern leadership intervened. Walter F. George, the eighty-year-old senior member of the Georgia delegation, called a meeting of the Southern Caucus. Attendees agreed that Sam Ervin, Jr., of North Carolina would revise the manifesto with assistance from Richard Russell, Jr., of Georgia and John Stennis of Mississippi. Ervin's draft of the manifesto tempered Thurmond's rhetoric, highlighting the historical and judicial precedents that the Supreme Court had supposedly ignored in the Brown decision. Still, Ervin's draft remained hard-hitting.

Leading southern moderates in the Senate, including J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, were discouraged by the Ervin draft. Although they wanted to demonstrate their fidelity to the southern cause of segregation, the moderates remained wary of the Southern Manifesto. As the historian Randall Woods has shown, Senator Fulbright rejected the idea that the states or the people could declare Supreme Court decisions unconstitutional. In March 1956, for instance, Fulbright wrote to a Little Rock constituent, “Under our system of government, the Supreme Court is specifically given the authority to interpret the Constitution, and no matter how wrong we think they are, there is no appeal from their decision unless you rebel as the South tried to do in 1860” (Woods, pp. 208–209).

In an effort to temper the manifesto's most dramatic and troublesome phrases, Fulbright worked with his staff and a coalition of other southern senators, including Lister Hill, John Sparkman, and Price Daniel, to draft an updated, fifth version of the document. As Randall Woods shows, Fulbright's new edition of the manifesto excised previous statements, which declared that the Supreme Court's decision in Brown was “illegal and unconstitutional.” In place of these statements, Fulbright called the decision “unwarranted.” In addition, he encouraged southerners to “scrupulously refrain from disorder and lawlessness” (Woods, p. 209).

Fulbright's draft proved too moderate for Thurmond and other hardliners. They wanted a dramatic denunciation of the Brown decision. Therefore, a committee of five senators including Thurmond, Russell, Stennis, Fulbright, and Daniel compiled a sixth and final draft of the manifesto. The committee completed its work in early March 1956.