|
Massive resistance was a strategy declared by U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr. of Virginia along with his brother in law as the leader in the Virginia General Assembly, Democrat Delegate John Thomson of Alexandria, to unite white politicians and leaders in Virginia in a campaign of new state laws and policies to prevent public school desegregation, particularly after the ''Brown v. Board of Education'' Supreme Court decision in 1954. Many schools, and even an entire school system, were shut down in 1958 and 1959 in attempts to block integration, before both the Virginia Supreme Court and a special three-judge panel of Federal District judges from the Eastern District of Virginia, sitting at Norfolk, declared those policies unconstitutional. Although most of the laws created to implement massive resistance were overturned by state and federal courts within a year, some aspects of the campaign against integrated public schools continued in Virginia for many more years. ==Byrd Organization and opposition to racial integration== After Reconstruction ended following the 1876 Presidential election and the Readjuster Party fell in the 1880s, and continuing into the 1960s, Virginia's conservative Democrats actively worked to maintain legal and cultural racial segregation in Virginia through the Jim Crow laws. To complete white supremacy, after the U.S. Supreme court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Virginia adopted a new constitution in 1902 effectively disfranchising African Americans through restrictions on voter registration and also requiring racially segregated schools, among other features. In the early 20th century, Harry Flood Byrd (1887–1966), a Democrat, former Governor of Virginia, and the state's senior U.S. Senator after World War II, led what became known as the Byrd Organization. Continuing a legacy of segregationist Democrats, from the mid-1920s until the late 1960s, the Byrd Organization was a political machine which effectively controlled Virginia politics through a network of courthouse cliques of local constitutional officers in most of the state's counties. The Byrd Organization's greatest strength was in the rural areas of the state. It never gained a significant foothold in the independent cities, nor with the emerging suburban middle-class of Virginians after World War II. One of the Byrd Organization's most vocal, though moderate, long-term opponents proved to be Benjamin Muse, who grew up in North Carolina, served as a Democratic state senator from Petersburg, Virginia, then unsuccessfully ran for Governor as a Republican in 1940, served in the U.S. Army, moved to Manassas, Virginia and became a publisher and Washington Post columnist.〔Lassiter (ed.) Moderate's Dilemma at pp. 168-201〕 Using legal challenges, by the 1940s, black attorneys who included Thurgood Marshall, Oliver W. Hill, William H. Hastie, Spottswood W. Robinson III and Leon A. Ransom were gradually winning civil rights cases based upon federal constitutional challenges. 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 part of the landmark ''Brown v. Board of Education'' Supreme Court decision in 1954.〔 That decision overturned ''Plessy'' and declared that state laws which established separate public schools for black and white students denied black children equal educational opportunities and were 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 Desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement. A little more than a month after the Supreme Court's decision in ''Brown'', on June 26, 1954,〔The decision in Brown v. Board of Education was announced on May 17, 1954.〕 Senator Byrd vowed to stop integration attempts in Virginia's schools. By the end of that summer, Governor Thomas B. Stanley, a member of the Byrd Organization, had appointed a Commission on Public Education, consisting of 32 white Democrats chaired by Virginia Senator Garland "Peck" Gray of rural Sussex County.〔http://articles.dailypress.com/1991-07-14/news/9107140001_1_virginia-senate-gray-era-ends-favor〕 This became known as the Gray Commission. Before it issued its final report on November 11, 1955, the Supreme Court had responded to segregationists' delaying tactics by issuing ''Brown II'' and directing federal district judges to implement desegregation "with all deliberate speed." 〔http://www.lib.odu.edu/specialcollections/schooldesegregation/timeline.htm〕 The Gray Plan recommended that the General Assembly pass legislation and allow for amendment of the state constitution so as to repeal Virginia's compulsory school attendance law, to allow the Governor to close schools rather than allow their integration, to establish pupil assignment structures, and finally to provide vouchers to parents who chose to enroll their children in segregated private schools. Virginia voters approved the Gray Plan Amendment on January 9, 1956.〔http://www.lib.odu.edu/specialcollections/schooldesegregation/resources/gray.htm〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「massive resistance」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|