Southern Manifesto

Impact

The Southern Manifesto had an immediate impact in the South, where it unified legislators and encouraged resistance to desegregation. The most obvious example of the manifesto's success occurred in state legislatures. There, six southern states passed interposition resolutions in April 1956. Four states—Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida—actually declared the Brown decision null and void within their borders. Even moderate states such as North Carolina and Tennessee joined the chorus of protest in 1957.

State legislatures in the South also pursued other, more pragmatic tactics to avoid school desegregation. One such method was the passage of pupil-placement acts, which required African American students to complete applications, tests, and in some cases personal interviews before their request for transfer would be considered by the state. Another legislative tactic pursued in a handful of states empowered the governors to cut funding for public schools should the federal courts order desegregation.

The legal posturing of southern legislatures was put to the test in a series of school-desegregation conflicts that erupted in the mid-1950s. In Mansfield, Texas, Governor Alan Shivers called the Texas Rangers to halt the desegregation of Mansfield High School. In Clinton, Tennessee, John Kasper and Asa Carter stirred up segregationists who attempted to halt the integration of Clinton High School. In Little Rock, Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to uphold segregation. Although his efforts were thwarted by President Eisenhower and the federal court system in 1957, the following year, Faubus and the state legislature closed the high schools in Little Rock for the year to prevent integration. In Virginia, a similar story developed when Governor J. Lindsay Almond closed nine schools in four localities to prevent desegregation in September 1958. The federal courts intervened again, however, and massive resistance in Virginia ended in February 1959.

Although the Southern Manifesto encouraged resistance to the Brown decision, it is difficult to determine the document's long-term significance. It is well known that school desegregation proceeded slowly in the South during the 1960s, but the degree to which this related to the Southern Manifesto is questionable. The document remained of symbolic, rather than legal, significance. It provided southern segregationists with a popular rallying cry by which they continued to resist integration.