Manipulation and Control

Desegregation, A Story of Quiescence and Violence

By Mario Marcel Salas

Violence against integration efforts would not end after the Brown v. Board decision, and patterns of hatred and segregation would be revealed in graphic media images in the North. In 1965, a decade after the desegregation of southern schools, school segregation in the North became national news. As a outcome of extreme segregated neighborhoods in the North, racist savagery erupted in Boston. The NAACP in seeking to end educational segregation supported black parents by confronting the Boston School Committee, and racist leader Louise Day Hicks, who stood fast in her claims that Boston’s black public schools were not inferior. Black parents took the Boston school committee to court, and a federal district court judge ruled that the school committee had intently maintained two divided school systems. The outcome that was imposed was that students were to be bused citywide to eradicate segregation. White racists never accepted it and just moved away causing the schools to stay segregated.

To a certain degree African American political power itself, in many southern states, was a continuation of the orchestration and control of the white elite in which "partial" freedom was granted to them as the result of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and later the Civil Rights movement. There were civil rights victories, but the colonial white elite controlled its extent. These racist white systems of control were not plantation based, but was based upon a state colonial matrix that helped them to recapture control of a newly freed African American population. This colonial system has never been destroyed but has morphed with time. It retailored itself to the legal victories and desegregation efforts by controlling the scope of change, while protecting white elitist positions of power. This is why many political scientists maintain that racism is permanent.

Many public schools across the United States were never truly integrated and San Antonio perhaps best describes the process by which many schools were desegregated. When Brown vs. Board became law, in 1954 and 1955, the white racist power elite, along with their economic and political allies, sought ways to appease desegregation efforts in many areas of the South. The legal, political, and social struggle by anti-integration activists blunted the Brown decision in a number of ways. Racist southern school boards, supported by their allies in state governments, brought suits challenging the Brown judgment, thereby creating escape routes to get around the intent of the decision. In many areas around the country social trickery, intimidation, and violence were used to uphold segregation or blunt the intent of the Brown decision.

Topeka, Kansas became the legal battleground on which school segregation was fought. The 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board declared that racist segregation of public schools was unequal and thereupon unconstitutional. The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. the Board brought much gravity to the racial model and the structure of U.S. society. Though the Brown decision did not begin the historic African American civil rights movement it provided the political fire and legal impetus for social action. While The Brown decision did not end segregation, it provided a legal foundation by which social action could be launched. However, the court decision raised questions as to how much authority it had over entrenched institutional and traditional racism that was embedded into the social fabric of society in a racial matrix that appears to have permanence in U.S. society.

The paternal system of white dominance, as codified in law, was overturned as the constitutional policies established by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that validated the doctrine of "separate but equal" were ruled illegal. Interestingly, the racist "one drop rule" was also codified in the Plessy decision, as Homer Plessy was said to be only "one-eighth black." Jim Crow laws reinforced this pyramidal structure of white racism throughout the South and established separate facilities for Blacks and Whites in every area of social life. Though the South had lost the war segregationist forces were able to "redeem" southern values through segregation and the perpetuation of the myth of "black racial inferiority." The Plessy decision was a achievement for the "Redeemers movement," and those who wanted to "save the South" from Reconstruction and the perceived threat of black rule.

For many years the Robert E. Lee model of separate educational institutions that focused on a curriculum of domestic skills instruction and manual labor was the societal norm of admittance into white society for freed slaves and their ancestors. This is why it took so long to bring black schools and colleges up to par academically. By choosing these pathways, racist paternalistic models of control could assign the boundaries by which the descendents of Africans could interact within a white racist society. Thus, the promises of emancipation and Reconstruction were sidestepped and structured to guarantee white racist rule in the United States. Booker T. Washington’s ideas became the affirmed model for white racist doctrines of paternalism. Consequently, African American movements for social equality fought within the boundaries set by racial models and codified by the Plessy decision. African Americans fought for equal pay for teachers, for equal school facilities, for equal libraries, and for equality on the same footing as whites beyond the racist vocational models prescribed for blacks. The Plessy decision legally defined the boundaries of these struggles, but did not completely control it as African Americans challenged the law and the legal boundaries in many cases.

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Mario Marcel Salas was born in San Antonio, TX in 1949. He joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee soon after high school, and became a civil rights worker for over 30 years. He was the leader of the last SNCC-Black Panther chapter in the United States in 1976. Now a full time professor at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio teaching American and State government, Mr. Salas writes for three African American Newspapers in Texas and speaks across the country at various colleges and universities.