By Mike Appleton, Guest Blogger
“We pledge ourselves to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation.
-The Southern Manifesto, Cong. Rec., 84th Cong. 2d Session, Vol. 102, part 4 (March 12, 1956)
‘This was an activist court that you saw today. Anytime the Supreme Court renders something constitutional that is clearly unconstitutional, that undermines the credibility of the Supreme Court. I do believe the court’s credibility was undermined severely today.”
-Michele Bachmann (R. Minn.), June 26 2012
Most people are familiar with the opinion in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al., 349 U.S. 483 (1954), in which a unanimous Supreme Court summarily outlawed public school segregation by tersely declaring, “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” 349 U.S. at 495. But many people do not know that Brown involved a consolidation of cases from four states. The “et al.” in the style refers to decisions on similar facts in Delaware, South Carolina and Virginia. And the response of Virginia to the ruling in Brown provides an interesting comparison with the actions leading to the current government shutdown.
In 1951 the population of Prince Edward County, Virginia was approximately 15,000, more than half of whom were African-American. The county maintained two high schools to accommodate 386 black students and 346 white students. Robert R. Moton High School lacked adequate science facilities and offered a more restricted curriculum than the high school reserved for white students. It had no gym, showers or dressing rooms, no cafeteria and no restrooms for teachers. Students at Moton High were even required to ride in older school buses.
Suit was filed in federal district court challenging the Virginia constitutional and statutory provisions mandating segregated public schools. Although the trial court agreed that the school board had failed to provide a substantially equal education for African-American students, it declined to invalidate the Virginia laws, concluding that segregation was not based “upon prejudice, on caprice, nor upon any other measureless foundation,” but reflected “ways of life in Virginia” which “has for generations been a part of the mores of the people.” Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, 103 F. Supp. 337, 339 (E.D. Va. 1952). Instead, the court ordered the school board to proceed with the completion of existing plans to upgrade the curriculum, physical plant and buses at Moton High School. When the plaintiffs took an appeal from the decision, the Democratic machine that had for many years controlled Virginia politics under the firm hand of Sen. Harry Byrd had little reason to believe that “ways of life” that had prevailed since the end of the Reconstruction era would soon be declared illegal.
When the Brown decision was announced, the reaction in Virginia was shock, disbelief and anger. Reflecting the prevailing attitudes, the Richmond News Leader railed against “the encroachment of the Federal government, through judicial legislation, upon the reserved powers of the States.” The Virginia legislature adopted a resolution of “interposition” asserting its right to “interpose” between unconstitutional federal mandates and local authorities under principles of state sovereignty. And Sen. Byrd organized a campaign of opposition that came to be known as “Massive Resistance.”
In August of 1954 a commission was appointed to formulate a plan to preserve segregated schools. Late in 1955, it presented its recommendations, including eliminating mandatory school attendance, empowering local school boards to assign students to schools and creating special tuition grants to enable white students to attend private schools. Enabling legislation was quickly adopted and “segregation academies” began forming around the state. Subsequent legislation went even further by prohibiting state funding of schools that chose to integrate.
In March of 1956, 19 senators and 77 house members from 11 southern states signed what is popularly known as “The Southern Manifesto,” in which they declared, “Even though we constitute a minority in the present Congress, we have full faith that a majority of the American people believe in the dual system of government which has enabled us to achieve our greatness and will in time demand that the reserved rights of the States and of the people be made secure against judicial usurpation.”
Throughout this period the Prince Edward County schools remained segregated, but when various court rulings invalidated Virginia’s various attempts to avoid integration, the school board took its final stand. It refused to authorize funds to operate any schools in the district, and all public schools in the county were simply closed, and remained closed from 1959 to 1964.
There are striking similarities between Sen. Byrd’s failed plan of Massive Resistance and Republican efforts to prevent implementation of the Affordable Care Act. There was widespread confidence among conservatives that the Supreme Court would declare the Act unconstitutional. When that did not occur, legislators such as Michele Bachmann, quoted above, attempted to deny the legitimacy of the Court’s ruling. Brent Bozell went further, denouncing Chief Justice Roberts as “a traitor to his own philosophy,” hearkening back to the days when southern roadsides were replete with billboards demanding the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren.
The House of Representatives has taken over 40 votes to repeal the ACA, quixotic efforts pursued for reasons known only to John Boehner and his colleagues. And in accordance with the Virginia legislative model, the House has attempted to starve the ACA by eliminating it from funding bills. Following the failure of these efforts, Republicans have elected to pursue the path ultimately taken by the school board of Prince Edward County and have shut down the government.
Even the strategy followed by Republicans is largely a southern effort. Approximately 60% of the Tea Party Caucus is from the South. Nineteen of the 32 Republican members of the House who have been instrumental in orchestrating the shutdown are from southern states. It is hardly surprising therefore, that the current impasse is characterized by the time-honored southern belief in nullification theory as a proper antidote to disfavored decisions by a congressional majority.
In reflecting upon the experience of Virginia many years later, former Gov. Linwood Holton noted, “Massive resistance … served mostly to exacerbate emotions arrayed in a lost cause.” Republicans would do well to ponder the wisdom in that observation.
Nick,
The quote you use doesn’t fit in context with your point. And you of all people seem to think your an arbiter of the Truth
RTC:
1. the theory of knowledge, esp. with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.
So what is the problem? The ideas she holds are wrong, how did she come to those erroneous conclusions?
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Oscar Wilde
OS, The best education I received was by Jesuits. They taught us HOW TO THINK not what to think. When you cast aspersions @ me as a teacher, by saying, “Some teachers have no idea of the truth,” I refer you to my opening quote of Wilde. I fear people who think they have “the truth” and want to indoctrinate kids w/ “their truth.”
Nick Spinelli wrote: “I fear people who think they have “the truth” and want to indoctrinate kids w/ “their truth.” ”
This is an excellent paradigm for a public school teacher. I wish you were teaching my children in public school.
This late night history lesson has been edifying. I have problems w/ those who think this country can do no wrong as equally as I do w/ folks who think we are evil incarnate. History is about many things, including evolution. I believe this country has been evolving. We have had moments[decades are mere moments in history] of devolution, but we have progressed. We have a ways to go in many areas. Maybe it just breaks down to our personalities, half full or half empty. I’m a half full guy, and I believe it’s slowly getting filled even more. Coaching and teaching made me even more positive. A kid can’t learn, he can’t go up to bat and hit, w/ negative thoughts and energy. How would you folks assess your own philosophy, absent this topic..just in general.
“Bron is not such a bad guy although he sports some seriously bad ideas, however, asking him for definitions is something done primarily for the humor value.”
You caught me
Blouise: I have no problem with teaching the truth. I wouldn’t teach history of any kind to most children, however, I don’t think they are mature enough to understand what “history” is and how to relate to it, probably until the sixth or seventh grade. (Not that I am a teaching expert). I also would not have them pledge “allegiance” they don’t understand, using words they do not comprehend.
They could certainly understand and parrot lines, I just don’t think they have the rational capacity to understand the difference between right and wrong when it comes to the level of societal justice, the government being wrong, or politicians doing wrong and knowing it as they did it.
Children, necessarily by evolution, lean strongly toward blind trust and acceptance of authority as absolute, and such teaching in K-5 could very well backfire and teach them the prejudices and bigotry and oppression you are trying to prevent.
This is not the time to confuse them with facts! And I mean that literally, I think they will be confused, they are not prepared in K-5 to understand systems of governance (other than “Dictator” because “I say so”) and checks and balances of equals, and “compromise” and formality of systems. Confused students produce wrong answers, and at this stage of mental development, those wrong answers and misunderstandings might change attitudes for the worse.
To me the proper thing to do is avoid both truth and myth, and teach nothing on this topic. Create no heroes or villains, or cowards or victims, until the children (on average) are asking the questions. If they are capable of comprehending the truth, then we answer the questions truthfully.
My father was my first teacher, and drilled into me the validity of “I don’t know” as an acceptable answer; that answers required justifications and without those, any answer (by me or him or a teacher or anybody else) was just bullshit (his words, even when I was five).
And also that some questions required more life experience than I had in order to really understand the answers and the justifications. So even if there is an answer, Tony still can’t be sure, because answers aren’t much good if Tony can’t tell the difference between a good answer and bullshit.
I have no problem teaching the truth to kids that can comprehend the truth. I don’t want to teach them lies, either, and I don’t want to force feed them the truth as parrots without comprehension. At too young an age they accept coercion as a fact of their life; they go, do, and perform as they are told by their masters. They are taught unquestioning obedience; that is how blind religion gets so deeply and perniciously entwined in their psyche. I do not think, in K-5, they have developed the neural machinery in the frontal cortex to understand when coercion is wrong, when the law is wrong, when the authorities are wrong, and why adults would permit and justify beatings, murders, rapes (if they even understand rape), kidnapping and enslavement they know full well is horrifically wrong.
I think K-5 should be spent teaching things that are indisputably true and either fun to do or not open to interpretation. Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, English, vocabulary, computer skills, chemistry, physics, physical exercise and physical games, mental games (like cards or checkers), art, music, acting, and understanding the difference between fiction and reality.
To me, children need a firm grasp on metaphors and analogies to even begin to understand the context of historical events. We have to teach them when and why coercion is wrong. They have to get a sense of how characters can be not all good or all bad, not just selfish or just generous, just mean or just nice, but a mixture of both, at different times. They need to be able to mentally simulate story characters using only the characters context and situation, to separately consider what the character knows and believes from what they know and believe. They need to understand that the Ends do not justify the Means (so later we can apply this to their current comfortable existence versus the genocide, murder and slavery that produced it).
Then we can trust them, when presented with the truth (in graduated doses), to see the founding fathers in the proper light, as imperfect humans with good and bad qualities, the product of their culture, and to see through the myth as bullshit propaganda.
And that even if we cannot make whole those that were wronged, and even though the sins were not ours we remain the beneficiaries, so our best course of action now is to use the ill-gotten gains we inherited as a resource to try and ensure that in the future such oppression and harm are recognized and repelled from their inception, so they forever remain in the past, mistakes that prove the lessons of science: We are not perfect, but if we at least avoid repeating the mistakes of our predecessors we increase our chances of navigating a path toward governance that works, and by that rule, we can asymptotically approach a fair and just society.
Interestingly enough, George Washington’s relatives didn’t come to the New World until 1657 and Thomas Jefferson’s relatives appear to have gotten here in the 1670’s (although there are some who like to think his family was at Jamestown in the early 1600’s, there is absolutely no proof of that and Jefferson himself did not think so)
Why mention it? Because it is true that Blacks were here before either Washington’s or Jefferson’s relatives arrived.
Some of the Blacks who arrived in Jamestown as slaves worked their way to freedom in the same manner as indentured servants. But then things changed … drastically. Eventually land those families had bought was confiscated and slavery was reintroduced to their descendants as permanent.
No myth … truth.
pete,
The first African slaves in America also arrived in Jamestown in the early 1600’s.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/02/AR2006090201097.html
Gene H.
1, October 23, 2013 at 11:56 pm
RTC,
Bron is not such a bad guy although he sports some seriously bad ideas, however, asking him for definitions is something done primarily for the humor value.
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that sounds like sociofacistism
pete,
the child in Jamestown was just not “rugged” enough! 🙂
like the rugged individualists at jamestown
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Starving-Settlers-in-Jamestown-Colony-Resorted-to-Eating-A-Child-205472161.html
history can be an interesting subject if you don’t try to sanitize it.
OS,
A truly educated people ask too many questions and then, even worse, demand answers. A truly educated people know to look for the worth in another irregardless of his/her age, sex, religion, skin color, ethnic culture, or politics. It’s dam hard to enslave a truly educated people.
OS.
If Civics and/or American history is not on the high stakes tests, it won’t be taught. Teachers would be more than happy to teach both subjects, but it will never happen as long as we have the high stakes testing nonsense and we get most of our text books from the Texas school board.
“the truth, not the myth, must be taught and critical thinking must be demanded from students.”
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Part of the problem is that some teachers have no idea of the truth. We have at least a couple of people who mentioned being teachers commenting on this blog, and if they are arbiters of the truth, we are all in trouble.
Civics has been dropped from the curriculum of many (maybe most) schools. Time to bring it back. Seems the one course that really ought to be on those high stakes tests was determined to be disposable. When we look at who developed those tests and are peddling them to schools, why should anyone be surprised they want to bring up a generation who don’t know what Civics is.
Gene,
“To change it those myths of rugged individualism must be exposed.” (Mike S.)
Exactly.
Rugged individualism is a true part of the story but there were other parts just as true … plantation slavery, mines enslavement, forced child labor, native peoples genocide, witch trials, immigrant abuse, political corruption … teach the whole truth and dam the myth to its rightful fairytale position.
The Constitution is a powerful instrument in the hands of the governed. It’s time to take possession of it.
Blouise,
“the truth, not the myth, must be taught and critical thinking must be demanded from students.”
Oh yeah.
Tony/Blouise/gbk/Mike A. (in no particular order),
Ya’ll were on fire today. Good show.
And David? What Tony said.
Tony C.,
I don’t disagree with a word you’ve written. All of these modern day laws were enacted to protect the powerful in exactly the same manner that the Constitution was originally compromised to appease the powerful slave owning/dependent block of revolutionaries.
Education … real education is the vehicle we need to employ. I don’t kid myself that those who wish to maintain the status quo have a real stake in continuing to dumb down public education. Thus it has always been.
Was it you who suggested we start in the K thru 12 or was that another poster? (My apologies to both of you for not remembering the person and for, admittedly, being too lazy to go back up thread and check) That suggestion was right on target. But the truth, not the myth, must be taught and critical thinking must be demanded from students. Only then will we, as a society, come to fully understand the strength that has been given us through the Constitution and use it.
Otherwise we are doomed to repeating the same mistakes … enslaved by our own ignorance.
RTC,
Bron is not such a bad guy although he sports some seriously bad ideas, however, asking him for definitions is something done primarily for the humor value.