School Desegregation in Mississippi
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SCHOOL DESEGREGATION IN MISSISSIPPI James W. Loewen Tougaloo College August, 1973 Contents: I. Introduction 1 II. Race relations and school segregation before 1954 3 A. Education for whites 3 B. Education for blacks 6 C. Education for other groups 12 D. Schools and social structure on the eve of the 1954 decision 17 III. The 1954 decision and its aftermath 20 A. Immediate reaction: “Equalization” 20 B. Resistance 24 C. Longer-term reaction, 1954-63 27 D. Meredith and Ole Miss. 28 IV. Token desegregation, 1964-69 32 A. Freedom Summer and the 1964 Civil Rights Bill 32 B. The burden of token desegregation 34 C. “Freedom of Choice” 38 V. Higher education 46 VI. Massive desegregation 55 A. The Stennis Delay 55 B. Initial reaction 57 C. Cooperation 58 D. Black reaction to discrimination 63 E. Evasion 68 F. White withdrawal 69 G. Sex and race 79 VII. Conflict and accommodation 80 Endnotes 85 1 I. INTRODUCTION In January 1970, a principal spoke to student assembly, newly desegregated, in the southern part of the state of Mississippi. “You people are in a history-making situation,” said B.J. Oswalt to the now unitary high school in Columbia. “It can happen only once and you are part of it. Now, what are you going to do?” It was a question the nation was asking, as Mississippi schools went through the most massive social change ever requested of any educational system in the United States. The response in Marion County was surprisingly constructive: the white student body president said, “If everybody can just treat everybody else as a human being, it might just turn out all right – be a big surprise to everybody.” And the black student body president flashed the peace symbol, a unifying gesture to both races, and predicted, “We can become a lighthouse in Marion County.” Three years later, it is apparent that Mississippi has not yet become that lighthouse and that it still contains potential for vicious racism. But the nation still needs a beacon in the area of race relations, and the state still has a possibility to become that leader. Substantially more desegregated than most other states, Mississippi had not suffered any major blowup, unlike Denver, New York City, and some other Northern cities. Yet it still suffered from day-to-day tyrannies and inhumanities that many other areas would regard as outlandish. How it was that Mississippi had traversed this far, and what the situation has now become, will be the subjects of this paper. Beginning in 1954, when signaled by the United States Supreme Court that their efforts might not be foolhardy, black Mississippians began to press for desegregated public education. These efforts were not motivated by a belief that blacks couldn’t learn in the absence of whites nor by a desire for social or educational mingling as such. Rather, two major factors caused their efforts. First, black Mississippians recognized that the state’s monolithic pattern of segregation constituted a deliberate attempt by whites, through law and custom, to define the position of blacks and to limit their activities, opportunities, and civil rights. Second, black Mississippians were aware that “separate but equal” schools did not exist and that white Mississippi had no intention of providing them, since unequal education was part of the very system that kept blacks from voting and denied them full opportunity. Segregation is defined in this paper to mean a social and cultural system which expresses the feelings of whites that blacks are inferior; it consists of an elaborate racial etiquette, which requires that the races be kept separate whenever they are involved in similar tasks or tasks that might imply social equality, and which allows close physical and social contact whenever the relationship between whites and blacks is clearly “superior” to “inferior.” Since learning things in school is obviously a similar activity regardless of the race of the participants, the races were kept rigidly apart in educational activities. By contrast, the relationship between white housewife and black maid was allowed to be physically close because it did not imply any kind of equality between the roles involved. Desegregation is defined as the ending of segregation, in this case in education. It means the ending of dual schools, of racially identifiable institutions, and of separation in the public institutions. It is not identical with integration, which will be used to mean the functioning and working together of both races in a constructive manner as parts of an organic whole or viable institution. In the context of segregated Mississippi (and of segregated America), and in the context of the basic stasis that had prevailed in Mississippi from 1875 to and beyond 1954, desegregation represents a major black victory. Many recent analysts, black as well as white, have lost sight of that fact and of the fact that the plaintiffs in major segregation decisions, from Brown to Alexander and beyond, have been black children and their parents. Because desegregation has not yet led to full integration, because desegregation in itself has not humanized institutions that manifested a shocking degree of inhumanity, desegregation has been called a failure. Some observers, lacking a sense of history or an understanding of the situation before desegregation occurred, have even termed it a white plot to take away black institutions. But as we shall see, white Mississippi bitterly opposed desegregation every step of the way. Only the courage of many black Mississippians, some of whom paid for their actions with their lives or their health, bolstered by federal allies, particularly in the judiciary, broke down the confining system of segregated education in the state. The social change wrought by this desegregation has not yet ended. In itself, this change will not bring about any racial millennium. But it represents the first step in the upheaval of the old order that was necessary so that black – and white – Mississippians could begin to achieve freedom and opportunity in their lives. 2 II. RACE RELATIONS AND SCHOOL SEGREGATION BEFORE 1954 The present situation and future prospects for education and for race relations in Mississippi are influenced by a history that more than that of any other state, resembles a nightmare. Several themes stand out. Since the beginning of white settlement under the French, whites have used black labor and have restricted black opportunities through restricting, among other things, black education. Second, the state has had a large black population, in most years a larger proportion than that of any other state in the nation. In 1970, for example, 56 of the state’s 150 school districts had black majorities in their enrollments, more on an absolute basis than anywhere else; the state’s population was about 40% black, higher than any other’s; and the school age population was almost half black. Thus any change in education or race relations would of necessity be major. Finally, due in part to the hierarchical relations in society that grew out of plantation slavery, education for whites in Mississippi has been at times severely restricted, as has opportunity for poor and working-class white citizens. A. Education for whites Although black education has almost always been given even lower funds and priority than white education in Mississippi, white schools in most time periods have been abysmal enough. To understand white Mississippi’s response to school desegregation, it is necessary to begin with a survey of the place of education in the lives, minds, and social structure of white Mississippi. Before 1868 public education for whites was scattered and sparse. Even by 1860 Mississippi was still an overwhelmingly rural state, barely out of frontier conditions. The Chickasaws had begun their “Trail of Tears” westward in 1837, the Choctaws theirs seven years earlier; thus only for one generation had the northern two-thirds of the state been open to white and black settlers in any number. Frontier violence, sparse settlement patterns, and such pressing problems as the need for the construction of houses and towns retarded the development of schools. But there were also certain ideological retardants. Plantation slavery developed a very different understanding of the operation of society and the place of the individual in society from the ideology that grew in New England or the Midwest. In a plantation society people were not viewed as basic equals, progressing through their own endeavors. The newly rich planter class that came to dominate Mississippi during the 1840s and 1850s did not explain its own good fortune in such terms. Instead, society was seen as hierarchically ordered. Blacks were considered categorically inferior, not to be educated; increasingly planters and lawyers came to view poor whites as also inferior, poor due to innate characteristics, and likewise not really worth educating. The notion of society as dependent upon an underlying educated citizenry 3 atrophied; rather an educated elite, firmly dominant economically and politically, was relied upon. The “best people” ruled. The matter is not quite so simple, of course. Mississippi was also something of a bastion of Jacksonian Democracy. In North and East Mississippi (except for the Black Prairie, where the plantation structure also developed), unlike the Delta and the River Lowlands around Natchez, a strong sense of independence and opposition to the planter elite developed. Yet while Jacksonian Democracy captured most of the votes of this class except in the Northeast counties, the party did not really represent the interests of the common man. Jefferson Davis, for example, was something of a Jacksonian Democratic leader, while at the same time being a rich slaveowning planter. And during the 1850s, Jacksonian Democrats, not Whigs, led the movement in defense of slavery that eventually led to war.