The Race to Erase Brown v. Board of Education:The Virginia Way and the Rhetoric of Massive Resistance

Abstract

The Brown vs. Board of Education ruling stands as one of the more important cases for the American civil rights movement. The Brown decision overturned separate but equal and set off a firestorm of resistance efforts throughout the South. Virginia set the precedent for this countermovement known as Massive Resistance through the development of arguments and policies to thwart integration. These arguments were based in racialized constructions of citizenship. Examining the discourse of segregationists furthers our understanding of how race is reproduced and controlled through public discourse.

Notes

1. ¹I am grateful for the feedback provided by RR reviewers Shirley Wilson Logan and David Holmes. Special thanks also goes to Lois Agnew for her guidance and to my family for their unyielding support.

2. ²The laws included tuition grants for students who chose to attend segregated schools and a pupil placement board to ensure segregation. They also gave the governor full power to cut funds and close any public school that attempted integration. For more on this history see Robbins Gates’s The Making of Massive Resistance: Virginia’s Politics of Public School Desegregation, 1954–1956.

3. ³Patricia Roberts-Miller’s analysis of those who argued for slavery in Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus suggests the value of analyzing the rhetorical practices of rhetors whose arguments we might otherwise dismiss.

4. ⁴Prendergast also critiques Brown for stalling the civil rights movement. While I do not subscribe to that belief, others have argued that Brown had serious shortcomings. Derrick Bell’s Silent Covenants: Brown v Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform analyzes Brown’s deficiencies with regard to enforcement of true equality.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Candace Epps-Robertson

Candace Epps-Robertson is Assistant Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University where she teaches courses in rhetoric and writing. Her research interests include rhetorics of race and institutional responses to racism. Her work has appeared in Literacy in Composition Studies and Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning. She is currently completing a manuscript that examines a one-year school system developed as a response to the cessation of public schools in resistance to Brown vs. Board of Education in Prince Edward County, Virginia.