Mississippi Governor to Aid School Desegregation Suits in North
Mississippi Governor John Bell Williams on this day announced a plan to help file school desegregation suits in states outside the South.
Williams claimed that $1 million in state funds would be available to assist the plan. Williams argued, with considerable justification, that de facto racial segregation existed in other states. His avowed purpose, he explained, was to create crises over school integration in other states that would cause the federal courts and/or Congress to change their minds about school integration. “Now we’re going on offense,” he declared.
He then taunted the supporters of racial integration, the NAACP and the ACLU, to join Mississippi in its school desegregation plan.
Although white residents in the north and the west refused to face up to the problem, de facto racial segregation outside of the south was a serious problem that continued to worsen in the years to come. On October 22, 1965, 225,000 Chicago public school students boycotted their schools to protest de facto racial segregation. A week later, on October 27, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson caved in to white political pressure and reversed a decision by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) to withhold federal education aid to Chicago because of the racial segregation. After that decision, no future president of the U.S. was willing to use the withholding of federal funds to fight de facto school segregation.
President Johnson’s action on the Chicago schools case stands in sharp contrast to his otherwise strong commitment to civil rights while president.
The racial integration of the nation’s public schools increased from the 1960s to about 1980. From 1980 to the present, however, public school have become more racially segregated.
Read about the racial resegregation of America’s public schools: Gary Orfield and Susan E. Eaton, Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education (1996)
Learn more about the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education: James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy (2001)
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here