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:
“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Through all opposition the personal benefits of the reform [dress] [bracketed word in original] have compensated; but had it been mainly sacrifice, the thought of working for the amelioration of women and the elevation of humanity would still have been the beacon-star guiding me on amid all discouragements.”
—Susan Pecker Fowler (1823–1911)
“Rarely do American parents deliberately teach their children to hate members of another racial, religious, or nationality group. Many parents, however, communicate the prevailing racial attitudes to their children in subtle and sometimes unconscious ways.”
—Kenneth MacKenzie Clark (20th century)
“The more specific idea of evolution now reached is—a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.”
—Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)