Opposition To Racial Integration
From the period following Reconstruction in the late 19th century, continuing into the second half of the 20th century, Virginia's conservative Democrats and the Byrd Organization actively worked to maintain legal and cultural racial segregation in Virginia through the Jim Crow laws. To complete white supremacy, they also passed a new constitution in 1902 that effectively disfranchised African Americans through restrictions on voter registration. African Americans were deprived of representation until passage of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s.
Using legal challenges, by the 1940s, black attorneys who included notables such as Thurgood Marshall, Oliver W. Hill, William H. Hastie, Spottswood W. Robinson III and Leon A. Ranson were gradually winning civil rights cases based upon federal constitutional issues. Among these was the case of Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, which was actually initiated by students who stepped forward to protest poor conditions at R.R. Moton High School, Farmville, Virginia. Their case became a portion of those heard as part of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954. The Brown decision declared that state laws which established separate public schools for black and white students denied black children equal educational opportunities and that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, thereby paving the way for integration and encouraging the Civil Rights Movement.
Read more about this topic: Massive Resistance
Famous quotes containing the words opposition to, opposition, racial and/or integration:
“Commitment, by its nature, frees us from ourselves and, while it stands us in opposition to some, it joins us with others similarly committed. Commitment moves us from the mirror trap of the self absorbed with the self to the freedom of a community of shared values.”
—Michael Lewis (late 20th century)
“When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when antiracism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose.”
—Kimberly Crenshaw (b. 1959)
“Please stop using the word “Negro.”... We are the only human beings in the world with fifty-seven variety of complexions who are classed together as a single racial unit. Therefore, we are really truly colored people, and that is the only name in the English language which accurately describes us.”
—Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954)
“Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)