Buoyed by success in Montgomery, King in 1956 took the lead in forming the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a coalition of black ministers and civil rights activists, to press for desegregation. But despite the movement’s success in popular mobilization, the fact that Montgomery’s city fathers agreed to the boycott’s demands only after a Supreme Court ruling indicated that without national backing, local action might not be enough to overturn Jim Crow. The white South’s refusal to accept the Brown decision reinforced the conviction that black citizens could not gain their constitutional rights without Washington’s intervention. This was not immediately forthcoming. When the Supreme Court finally issued its implementation ruling in 1955, the justices declared that desegregation should proceed “with all deliberate speed.” This vague formulation unintentionally encouraged a campaign of “massive resistance” that paralyzed civil rights progress in much of the South.
In 1956, 82 of 106 southern congressmen—and every southern senator except Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas and Albert Gore and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee—signed a Southern Manifesto, denouncing the Brown decision as a “clear abuse of judicial power,” and calling for resistance to “forced integration” by “any lawful means.” State after state passed laws to block desegregation. Some made it illegal for the NAACP to operate within their borders. Virginia pioneered the strategy of closing any public schools ordered to desegregate and offering funds to enable white pupils, but not black, to attend private institutions. Prince Edward County, Virginia, shut its schools entirely in 1959; not until 1964 did the Supreme Court order them reopened. Many states adopted “freedom of choice” plans that allowed white students to opt out of integrated schools. As a symbol of defiance, Georgia’s legislature incorporated the Confederate battle flag into its state flag in 1956, and Alabama and South Carolina soon began flying the battle flag over their state capitol buildings.
If the civil rights movement borrowed the language of freedom, Cold War opponents of racial integration seized on the language of anticommunism to discredit the movement This photograph is from a 1959 rally in Little Rock, Arkansas.
The Problem We All Live With. This 1964 painting by Norman Rockwell, which accompanied an article in Look magazine, depicts federal marshals escorting six-year-old Ruby Bridges to kindergarten in New Orleans in 1960 in accordance with a court order to integrate the dtp’s schools. “There was a large crowd of people outside the school,” she later recalled. “Thep were throwing things and shouting.” But Rockwell, intent on focusing on the child, presents the mob only through their graffiti and tomatoes thrown against the wall, and does not show the faces of the marshals. Because of the decision to send her to the formerly white school, Bridges’s father lost his job, and her grandparents, who worked as sharecroppers in Mississippi, were evicted from their land. In 2001, President Bill Clinton presented her with the Presidential Citizens Medal.
QUESTION
1. What does the painting suggest about the relationship of federal power and individual freedom?
2. Do you think that Rockwell’s decision to show the mob only indirectly makes the painting more or less powerful?