Why Have African-Americans Abandoned the Republican Party When It Never Abandoned Them: Part II | Eastern North Carolina Now

    The decision did not sit well with Southern Democrats. After 90 years, they still weren't willing to allow blacks to "sit at the same table" with whites.

    In a campaign known as "Massive Resistance," Southern white legislators and school boards enacted laws and policies to evade or defy the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown ruling and its mandate to desegregate schools "with all deliberate speed." [Brown v. Board of Education II (1955), where the Supreme Court specifically addressed the relief that would be appropriate in light of the 1954 Brown decision]. In 1956, nearly every congressman in the Deep South - 101 in all (out of the 128 total in the region) - signed a document entitled the "Southern Manifesto," drafted by Senator Strom Thurmond, to repudiate the decision. 19 Senators and 77 members of the US House from the southern states signed it. Of all the 101 southern legislators who signed the document, all were Southern Democrats - except two congressman from Virginia who were Republicans. The Southern Manifesto said the Brown decision not only represented "a clear abuse of judicial power," but it was an unconstitutional interpretation. It argued that the Constitution does not grant the government the power to legislate in the area of education and it has no power to force states to integrate their schools. Furthermore, the signers urged their state officials to resist implementing the Court's mandates.

    Two years later, in response to the Southern Manifesto and in response to southern opposition in general, the Supreme Court revisited the Brown decision in Cooper v. Aaron (1958), asserting that the states were bound by the ruling and affirming that its interpretation of the Constitution was the "supreme law of the land."     The Southern Manifesto on Integration (of March 12, 1956) read:

    The unwarranted decision of the Supreme Court in the public school cases is now bearing the fruit always produced when men substitute naked power for established law.

    The Founding Fathers gave us a Constitution of checks and balances because they realized the inescapable lesson of history that no man or group of men can be safely entrusted with unlimited power. They framed this Constitution with its provisions for change by amendment in order to secure the fundamentals of government against the dangers of temporary popular passion or the personal predilections of public officeholders.

    We regard the decision of the Supreme Court in the school cases as clear abuse of judicial power. It climaxes a trend in the Federal judiciary undertaking to legislate, in derogation of the authority of Congress, and to encroach upon the reserved rights of the states and the people.

    The original Constitution does not mention education. Neither does the Fourteenth Amendment nor any other amendment. The debates preceding the submission of the Fourteenth Amendment clearly show that there was no intent that it should affect the systems of education maintained by the states.

    The very Congress which proposed the amendment subsequently provided for segregated schools in the District of Columbia.

    When the amendment was adopted in 1868, there were thirty-seven states of the Union. Every one of the twenty-six states that had any substantial racial differences among its people either approved the operation of segregated schools already in existence or subsequently established such schools by action of the same law-making body which considered the Fourteenth Amendment.

    As admitted by the Supreme Court in the public school case (Brown v. Board of Education), the doctrine of separate but equal schools "apparently originated in Roberts v. City of Boston (1849), upholding school segregation against attack as being violative of a state constitutional guarantee of equality." This constitutional doctrine began in the North - not in the South - and it was followed not only in Massachusetts but in Connecticut, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other northern states until they, exercising their rights as states through the constitutional processes of local self-government, changed their school systems.

    In the case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 the Supreme Court expressly declared that under the Fourteenth Amendment no person was denied any of his rights if the states provided separate but equal public facilities. This decision has been followed in many other cases. It is notable that the Supreme Court, speaking through Chief Justice Taft, a former President of the United States, unanimously declared in 1927 in Lum v. Rice that the "separate but equal" principle is "within the discretion of the state in regulating its public schools and does not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment."

    This interpretation, restated time and again, became a part of the life of the people of many of the states and confirmed their habits, customs, traditions and way of life. It is founded on elemental humanity and common sense, for parents should not be deprived by Government of the right to direct the lives and education of their own children.

    Though there has been no constitutional amendment or act of Congress changing this established legal principle almost a century old, the Supreme Court of the United States, with no legal basis for such action, undertook to exercise their naked judicial power and substituted their personal political and social ideas for the established law of the land.

    This unwarranted exercise of power by the court, contrary to the Constitution, is creating chaos and confusion in the states principally affected. It is destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through ninety years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.

    Without regard to the consent of the governed, outside agitators are threatening immediate and revolutionary changes in our public school systems. If done, this is certain to destroy the system of public education in some of the states.

    With the gravest concern for the explosive and dangerous condition created by this decision and inflamed by outside meddlers.

    We reaffirm our reliance on the Constitution as the fundamental law of the land.

    We decry the Supreme Court's encroachments on rights reserved to the states and to the people, contrary to established law and to the Constitution.

    We commend the motives of those states which have declared the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means.

    We appeal to the states and people who are not directly affected by these decisions to consider the constitutional principles involved against the time when they too, on issues vital to them, may be the victims of judicial encroachment.

    Even though we constitute a minority in the present congress, we have full faith that a majority of the American people believe in the dual system of government which has enabled us to achieve our greatness and will in time demand that the reserved rights of the states and of the people be made secure against judicial usurpation.

    We pledge ourselves to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation.

    In this trying period, as we all seek to right this wrong, we appeal to our people not to be provoked by the agitators and troublemakers invading our states and to scrupulously refrain from disorder and lawless acts.

Signed by:

Members of the United States Senate: Alabama: John Sparkman and Lister Hill. Arkansas: J. W. Fulbright and John L. McClellan. Florida: George A. Smathers and Spessard L. Holland. Georgia: Walter F. George and Richard B. Russell. Louisiana: Allen J. Ellender and Russell B. Lono. Mississippi: John Stennis and James O. Eastland. North Carolina: Sam J. Ervin Jr. and W. Kerr Scott. South Carolina: Strom Thurmond and Olin D. Johnston. Texas: Price Daniel. Virginia: Harry F. Bird and A. Willis Robertson.

Members of the United States House of Representatives:

Alabama: Frank J. Boykin, George M. Grant, George M. Andrews, Kenneth R. Roberts, Albert Rains, Armistead I. Selden Jr., Carl Elliott, Robert E. Jones and George Huddleston Jr. Arkansas: E. C. Gathings, Wilbur D. Mills, James W. Trimble, Oren Harris, Brooks Hays, F. W. Norrell. Florida: Charles E. Bennett Robert L. Sikes, A. S. Her Jr., Paul G. Rogers, James A. Haley, D. R. Matthews. Georgia: Prince H. Preston, John L. Pilcher, E. L. Forrester, John James Flint Jr., James C. Davis, Carl Vinson, Henderson Lanham, Iris F. Blitch, Phil M. Landrum, Paul Brown. Louisiana: F. Edward Hebert, Hale Boggs, Edwin E. Willis, Overton Brooks, Otto E. Passman, James H. Morrison, T. Ashton Thompson, George S. Long. Mississippi: Thomas G. Abernethy, Jamie L. Whitten, Frank E. Smith, John Bell Williams, Arthur Winsted, William M. Colmer. North Carolina: Herbert C. Bonner, L. H. Fountain, Graham A. Barden, Carl T. Durham, F. Ertel Carlyle, Hugh Q. Alexander, Woodrow W. Jones, George A. Shuford. South Carolina: L. Mendel Rivers, John J. Riley, W. J. Bryan Dorn, Robert T. Ashmore, James P. Richards, John L. McMillan. Tennessee: James B. Frazier Jr., Tom Murray, Jere Cooper, Clifford Davis. Texas: Wright Patman, John Dowdy, Walter Rogers, O. C. Fisher. Virginia: Edward J. Robeson Jr., Porter Hardy Jr., J. Vaughan Gary, Watkins M. Abbitt, William M. Tuck, Richard H. Poff, Burr P. Harrison, Howard W. Smith, W. Pat Jennings, Joel T. Broyhill.

[From Congressional Record, 84th Congress Second Session. Vol. 102, part 4. Washington, D.C.: Governmental Printing Office, 1956. 4459-4460]

**** Virginia Congressmen Richard Poff and Joel Broyhill were the only Republicans to sign the Manifesto.

    It was not unexpected that Strom Thurmond would draft something like the "Southern Manifesto." In 1948, after serving as Governor of South Carolina, he ran for President. But he didn't run as any ordinary Democrat. He ran as a Dixiecrat, which was an extremist wing of the Democratic Party - also known as the States' Rights Democratic Party. In 1948, the Dixiecrats issued their nine-point platform. Points four through six read as follows:

(4) We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to choose one's associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one's living in any lawful way. We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program. We favor home-rule, local self-government and a minimum interference with individual rights.

(5) We oppose and condemn the action of the Democratic Convention in sponsoring a civil rights program calling for the elimination of segregation, social equality by Federal fiat, regulations of private employment practices, voting and local law enforcement.

(6) We affirm that the effective enforcement of such a program would be utterly destructive to the social, economic and political life of the Southern people, and of other localities in which there may be differences in race, creed or national origin in appreciable numbers.

    As a presidential candidate, Thurmond said: "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the nigger into our homes, our schools, our churches." He lost the election but carried four of the states from the deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Alabama). In 1954, he was elected to the US Senate, as the only successful write-in candidate. And thus began his infamous career in Washington DC.

    Fast-forward to 1963.

    On August 23, 1963, civil rights organizers held a massive march on Washington DC, calling for legislative action to end discrimination. Set on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and broadcast to a television audience, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would deliver a stunningly eloquent speech that helped advance the cause of civil rights and define a standard of civility. He spoke the timeless words "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." This was the Dream.
Dr. Martin Luther King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, who, by the way, was also a Republican: Above.
    He invoked powerful imagery:

    "We have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

    It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check -- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.....

    Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."