Rather than desegregate
September 1958 - September 1964
Ordered by federal courts to integrate, city and county governments closed the thing instead: schools, swimming pools, parks, and in Atlanta a public street. Closing a public good to everyone was held lawful where sharing it was not.
Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954 and ordered nothing in particular. The Supreme Court's second Brown opinion, a year later, asked only for desegregation "with all deliberate speed", and across most of the South the answer was neither speed nor deliberation but a decade of official obstruction.
Virginia made it doctrine. Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. called for Massive Resistance in 1956, and the Stanley Plan that followed handed the governor power to close any school placed under a desegregation order. In September 1958 Governor J. Lindsay Almond Jr. used it three times: Warren County High School on the 15th, Lane High School and Venable Elementary in Charlottesville on the 19th, and six schools in Norfolk on the 27th. Nine schools, nearly 13,000 children locked out. In Arkansas, on the same morning that Front Royal's school doors were chained, Governor Orval Faubus closed all four high schools in Little Rock.
The school closures collapsed quickly - Virginia's own Supreme Court of Appeals and a federal district court both struck the statutes down on 19 January 1959, and Little Rock's voters recalled their segregationist school board that May. The tactic migrated rather than died. Prince Edward County stopped appropriating money instead of closing schools outright and kept its entire public system shut for five years. New Orleans left two schools open and let white families empty them while crowds screamed at six-year-olds. Montgomery locked its parks and filled eight swimming pools with dirt. Jackson closed the four pools it owned and gave up the lease on a fifth. Atlanta put barriers across a public street.
What connects these places is a piece of reasoning, and the reasoning won more often than it lost. When Jackson's pools reached the Supreme Court in Palmer v. Thompson in 1971, the Court held, five to four, that a city closing a public facility to everyone denies no one the equal protection of the laws, whatever its reasons. The schools had to reopen, because a state constitution required free schools; the pools never did. Much of what these governments did was not so much defeated as made permanent. A pool that is filled in stays filled in, white enrolment that leaves a school system rarely returns, and some of the private academies founded in 1958 and 1959 are still taking pupils.
On this map (9)
- Closed 8 a.m., 15 September 1958; reopened 12 August 1959Little Rock, AR
Little Rock closes every high school
A year after the Little Rock Nine, the governor shut all four of the city's high schools for the whole of 1958-59 rather than let desegregation continue. 3,665 students, Black and white, lost the year.
- Closed 15 September 1958; reopened February 1959Front Royal, VA
Warren County closes its only high school
Eight days after a federal judge ordered Black students admitted, the governor locked the doors of Warren County High School. It was the first school closed under Massive Resistance, and roughly a thousand students had nowhere to go.
- Closed 19 September 1958; reopened 4 February 1959Charlottesville, VA
Charlottesville shuts Lane High and Venable Elementary
Two days before twelve Black children were due to start, the governor closed both schools. They stayed shut for five months, reopened segregated, and admitted the twelve only in September 1959.
- Closed 27 September 1958; reopened 2 February 1959Norfolk, VA
Norfolk locks out ten thousand children
To keep seventeen Black students out, Virginia closed six Norfolk schools and shut roughly 10,000 white students out with them - the largest of the Massive Resistance closures. It lasted four months.
- Closed 1959; eight pools filled in, the zoo closed 31 December 1959Montgomery, AL
Montgomery fills in its swimming pools
Ordered in 1959 to desegregate its parks, Montgomery closed all of them instead - filling eight swimming pools with dirt, shutting the recreation centres and selling off the zoo's animals.
- Schools closed September 1959, reopened September 1964Farmville, VA
Prince Edward County closes its schools
Rather than integrate after Brown, Prince Edward County shut every public school for five years. White children were given tuition grants for a private academy; about 1,700 Black children had no school at all.
- 14 November 1960 - May 1961New Orleans, LA
New Orleans empties two schools rather than share them
Four Black six-year-olds entered two white elementary schools in the Ninth Ward in November 1960. White families withdrew nearly every other child, and a crowd gathered daily to scream at them.
- Barriers ordered 17 December 1962, removed 1 March 1963Atlanta, GA
Atlanta walls off a street
When a Black doctor bought a house in Peyton Forest, Atlanta barricaded Peyton and Harlan roads to keep other Black buyers out. The national press called it the Atlanta Wall. It stood ten weeks.
- Pools closed 1963; closure upheld by the Supreme Court in 1971Jackson, MS
Jackson closes every public swimming pool
Jackson desegregated its parks and its zoo but would not desegregate its pools, so it closed four and gave up the lease on the fifth. In 1971 the Supreme Court held that closing them broke no law.
Sources for this account
These carry the claims about the episode itself. Each entry above carries its own.
- Massive ResistanceEncyclopedia Virginia, Virginia HumanitiesUniversity / scholarlyencyclopediavirginia.orgBacks the Stanley Plan, the three September 1958 closure dates, the nine schools, the figure of nearly 13,000 students locked out, and the 19 January 1959 rulings.
- Desegregation of Virginia Public SchoolsEncyclopedia Virginia, Virginia HumanitiesUniversity / scholarlyencyclopediavirginia.orgThe decade after Brown in Virginia, including the tuition-grant schemes and pupil placement that followed the closures.
- Lost YearEncyclopedia of Arkansas, Central Arkansas Library SystemUniversity / scholarlyencyclopediaofarkansas.netBacks the closure of all four Little Rock high schools for 1958-59 and the figure of 3,665 students shut out.
- Crisis TimelineLittle Rock Central High School National Historic Site, National Park ServiceGovernment recordnps.govDates the closure order to 8 a.m. on 15 September 1958, the STOP recall to 25 May 1959 and the reopening to 12 August 1959.
- New Orleans School Crisis64 Parishes, Louisiana Endowment for the HumanitiesUniversity / scholarly64parishes.orgThe November 1960 desegregation of McDonogh 19 and William Frantz, and the white withdrawal that followed.
- U.S. Reports: Palmer v. Thompson, 403 U.S. 217 (1971)Library of Congress (1971)Government recordloc.govThe holding that closing Jackson's pools to everyone was not a denial of equal protection, with the dissents of Justices White and Marshall.
- The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in VirginiaUniversity Press of Virginia (1998)BookEssays edited by Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis on how the closures were organised locally and why they failed.