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March 30 - April 7, 2020
there was a considerable body of homegrown, middle-class segregationists who insisted that the loss of public education would be a smaller price to pay than the loss of what they saw as their rights as parents, citizens, and taxpayers.
“Some people are saying ‘Save our schools,’ ” Wesley stated in one speech. “We say ‘Save our children first.’ We want the Negroes to have full opportunity for self-advancement, but see no reason why this necessarily entails their forced inclusion into places where they are not suited.”14
Thomas J. Wesley Jr., leader of the Metropolitan Association for Segregated Education (MASE). A prominent spokesman for middle-class segregationists in Atlanta, Wesley challenged the claims of the moderate coalition that their opponents were simply uncultured “rednecks” from the working class. In his opposition to desegregation, Wesley employed a language that avoided crude racism and instead stressed the supposed rights of the white middle class, especially the right to “freedom of association.”
“Some of the best known integrationists in our state,” he said, “already have their children safely tucked away in private schools.”
segregationists in MASE and the state capitol stood by the private school plan, which they hoped would preserve segregation and education alike.
A representative of United Auto Workers Local No. 34, for instance, strode to the microphone to deliver the results of his union’s vote on the matter. “We want segregated schools at any cost,” he stated, “and when I say any cost, I mean any cost—the cost of lives if necessary.” “We are for segregation at any cost,” echoed a minister from the Evangelical Christian Council. “Last night, an overflowing crowd—they authorized me to speak to this Assembly here and to this group and that they were 100% behind segregation and they would stand for segregation at any cost and all cost to the bitter
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“If the right to associate transcends the right not to associate, then nobody’s privacy is safe. We feel that everyone should be permitted to associate with those he chooses—if the desire for association is mutual.”
School officials refused to acknowledge that the two students had been rejected for racial reasons and insisted that the University of Georgia did not follow a policy of segregation. It was simply a coincidence that no blacks had attended the school in its 175-year history.
Lawlessness fell on Little Rock during these years, as segregationists bombed the offices of the mayor and school superintendent, fired gunshots into the home of an NAACP leader, and made countless threats against black students. In the end, the pressure proved too much for the man charged with keeping the peace. Shortly after the schools reopened, Little Rock’s police chief sat down at his kitchen table, fired three bullets into his wife and then turned the gun on himself.27
whites in New Orleans took violence to new levels. The degree of desegregation in the city was barely noticeable, with just four first-grade girls entering two elementary schools. Still, thousands of whites rioted in New Orleans’ streets, throwing rotten eggs and tomatoes at the first transfer student, a six-year-old girl.
“Little new Industry since ‘Little Rock,’ ” another reported grimly. The “2 most profitable businesses now are Moving Van companies.”30
ignorant rabble, inflamed by political demagogues and encouraged by the silence of our most substantial civic leaders.”
“By far the largest number are quizzical, annoyed, or would just say that they don’t want them,” Coles reported. This “quietly disapproving or careless majority,” as he called them, simply stood by while a “small but articulate” group of whites attacked the black students. In interviews with these white students, Coles carefully recorded “chief themes which come up again and again.” Echoing the racism of their parents and neighbors, white teenagers argued “that Negroes will lower standards”; “that they are dirty and diseased”; “that they are like animals”; and “that they are not like white
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in practice, token integration was often just a new form of segregation. Black students sat by themselves in classes and the cafeteria. Students attacked them in the halls, teachers ignored or insulted them in the classrooms, and school officials excluded them from school activities, both on and off campus. For white liberals, the treatment of the transfer students dashed their faith in Atlanta’s progress. “When you hear 9 children say nobody spoke to them at school & nobody sat with them at lunch,” one activist reflected, “it doesn’t make you feel very happy.”
A number of white Atlantans, however, wanted to remove themselves and their children even further from black students. Keeping their distance inside a desegregated school was simply not enough. They wanted out.53
May 1961, they
Sandra Melkild, he argued, had a right not to be “forced” to attend school with blacks against her will.1
“Disallowing the transfer of Sandra Melkild, who is seeking freedom of association, while [permitting] the transfer of 10 Negroes seeking forcible association,” he charged, would “set the most disturbing precedent in this city and state since Reconstruction days.”
feared that giving whites the freedom to change schools would allow blacks to change as well. That precedent would destroy the pupil placement program and
“We can’t choose who we send our Children to School with, and it won’t be long before we will have to ask who we can visit and who can visit us,” complained another man in 1957. “How far are we from a Russian form of Government?”
whites who invoked “freedom of association” did not define the concept positively, in terms of what outside groups they could join, but negatively, in terms of what groups of outsiders they could shun. Blacks were entitled to their rights, these parents reasoned, but not at the expense of whites’ rights to choose their own associates. “I want the negro to enjoy his freedom but I dont want any part of them,” said another. “I dont want any one to tell me Ive got to sit with them have my children go to school with them invite them into my home. … which shall it be? give us liberty or give us
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segregationist whites who lost the struggle over their neighborhoods and neighborhood schools, the only remaining option was another phase of withdrawal, to the last bastion of segregated education inside the city—private schools.
white teachers were allowed to flee as well. The results were dramatic. On the Friday before the black children were to arrive, there were still 470 white boys and girls enrolled at Kirkwood Elementary, plus a full slate of white teachers and staff. When the black students showed up the following Monday, they found only 7 white children in the building, with just the white principal.
The success of these segregation academies, however, rested on their affordability. Many whites wanted segregated education for their children, but few could pay for it on their own. Therefore, supporters of segregation academies tried to tap into state funds to help parents of all classes send their children
Tuition Grant Law, part of the original “private-school plan.” Simply put, the law guaranteed every child in Georgia money for a private education. Although it made no mention of race, the legislation noted that students seeking to escape certain “intolerable conditions” in public schools could avail themselves of the grants and thus maintain their “freedom of association.”
By the fall of 1962 more than one thousand tuition grants had been approved for a total exceeding $186,000. Closer inspection, however, showed that the grants were not a way for all whites to place their children in segregated private schools, but merely a handout to upper-class whites who already had their children there.
Instead of enabling all Georgians to attend segregated schools, the tuition grant program was “simply … making the public school system poorer and the rich richer.” The legislature tightened the administration of the law and, by the time the 1963 school year began, not a single tuition grant had been sought throughout the state.19
The students pressed an aggressive civil rights agenda that alienated not just white moderates but the elder generation of black leaders as well. For decades, the old guard had worked with white leaders at a slow but steady pace, which guaranteed a gradual course of desegregation, as well as positions of prominence for themselves. In contrast, the student activists proved to be much more militant than their elders in every way. Instead of negotiations, they issued ultimatums; instead of compromise, they sought confrontation.
the practical costs of the protests alarmed them even more. The sit-ins distracted their employees, scared away their customers, created bad publicity, and, in general, choked off their profits.
Throughout his store, workmen boarded up the lunch counters and installed vending machines instead. Restaurant workers were let go, with no assurances of being rehired. Even the Magnolia Room closed. Yet again, white Atlantans made it clear that, when faced with the “threat” of desegregation, they would abandon a public space, no matter how prized, rather than see it integrated.19 As
Meanwhile, segregationists pressured whites to stay away from businesses that “surrendered” to student protesters. Petitions made the rounds in Atlanta, with signers promising, “We do not intend to trade with any store which maintains integrated eating facilities or integrated rest rooms.” Within two weeks, the campaign had secured more than eight thousand signatures.
“Shall we keep our schools segregated, our races pure, peace and harmony in our schools and state,” he asked in 1958, “or will we give it all up, throw our children to the wolves (politicians) and let those who are most dear to us come face to face with the diseases, crimes and wickedness that has come to all large integrated cities?” Maddox addressed residential change in the same light. “Mixed neighborhoods,” he charged in 1960, were “destroying white churches, homes, businesses and white communities. Thousands have been trapped and forced to sacrifice their homes and thousands more are
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For Maddox, the sit-ins represented the ultimate threat to both segregation and private property.
he noted, these latest protests targeted private policies, not public ones. Maddox believed, as most white businessmen did, that private property rights gave him the freedom to run his establishment however he saw fit. Regarding racial policies, his own preference
I chose to operate my restaurant on a segregated basis.”
“Rights of property owners are completely ignored by lousy politicians who care more for votes and power than for their souls and their fellow men,” he charged in a typical ad. “Why are ‘Civil Rights’ more important than human rights, human decency and human respect?”29
Maddox represented, in the words of one liberal columnist, the “boy who came up [the] hard way,” someone of absolutely no means who literally built his business from the ground up and ran its daily operations with considerable pride. “As a businessman,” Maddox bragged in one ad, “I started with a capital investment of $4.00 and that investment, as of today, has increased by more than one hundred thousand times.”
the two main candidates were both businessmen, they represented vastly different parts of that world—one the well-connected, corporate executive, the other the small-time, independent operator.35
Integration, Maddox warned in one ad, would damage “religious, residential, educational and business investments” throughout the city. “If you have lost your home, business, church or other investment because of this problem, you know what I mean,” he wrote in another campaign ad. “If you haven’t been involved, can you afford a $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 or greater loss to your investment?”
“LESTER MADDOX BELIEVES that every person who is engaged in private business has a right to choose the customers of his business. The law gives him this right,”
For Maddox and his supporters, however, “moving backward” was not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, Maddox embraced the label, claiming he stood for a return to traditional values of segregation, free enterprise, and law and order. “Will we move BACKWARD TO HONOR, DECENCY, AND GOVERNMENT BY THE PEOPLE in ATLANTA,” he asked in a newspaper ad, “or will we move FORWARD to forced racial integration and amalgamation of the races?”
Among working-class whites, he once again polled extremely well, winning roughly two-thirds of their ballots. While this segment
Maddox’s totals in middle-class regions rose significantly. As historian Numan Bartley’s analysis has demonstrated, Maddox now took in 72 percent of “middle-income white” votes and 63 percent of “semi-affluent white” votes as well. Likewise, to the shock to the moderate coalition, more than a quarter of the white elite—Ivan Allen’s friends and neighbors—went for Maddox instead.42
The white elite who usually dismissed segregationists as “rednecks” complaining about nothing now found that they too worried about the personal costs of civil rights change. While the privileges of class had let them escape the course of residential desegregation and school desegregation, such differences did nothing to shield them from the sit-ins.
What Atlanta and the rest of the nation needed now, he insisted, was “a clear definition from Congress” on how to uproot racial discrimination. “I have heard dozens of businessmen say that if there had been a court order or definition by Congress, it would have been easier to desegregate,” the mayor testified. Congress’s failure to act, he said, “would amount to an endorsement of private business setting up an entirely new status of discrimination throughout the Nation. Cities like Atlanta,” he warned, “might slip backward.”1
To no one’s surprise, the Civil Rights Act outraged segregationists. But in fundamental ways, countless other whites—in the South and elsewhere—found themselves disturbed not by the act’s goals but by the means used to reach them. Whatever these whites may have felt about the significant changes the act enabled in race relations, they were much more troubled by the revolutionary ways in which the new legislation expanded the power of the federal government and constricted the prerogatives of private businessmen.
the Civil Rights Act seemed to be nothing less than communism, because it undermined capitalism, limited individual decision making, accelerated the growth of the centralized state, and further entrenched the federal bureaucracy.
in nearby Alabama. In May 1963 networks and newspapers across the country brought home the brutality of segregation as civil rights protests in Birmingham came to their climax. Images of local lawmen battering black children with high-pressure hoses and attacking them with German shepherds shook the national conscience and raised serious doubts about the wisdom of leaving racial issues in the hands of local forces.
“If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public; if he cannot send his children to the best public school available; if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him; if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want,” the president asked directly, “then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsel of patience and delay?”
think we owe them,” Kennedy said, “and we owe ourselves, a better country.” He then listed the proposals he would put before Congress. The first and most specific recommendation, he said, would be “legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public—hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores and similar establishments.”10
