1961 US Commission on Civil Rights Report Book 2 - University of ...

5. Legislative Resistance
In the past 2 years there has been a marked shift in some parts of
the South from statewide, massive resistance to local option and freedom
of choice fortified by tuition grants. Some States still cling to
the older strategy.
When this <strong>Commission</strong> reported to the President and Congress in
1959 various massive resistance laws of Virginia and Arkansas had
been held unconstitutional. 1 But at that time the new pattern of legislative
hostility to desegregation, although emerging, was not yet clear.
Massive resistance is characterized by a series of laws and resolutions
adopted for the purpose of thwarting, or at least delaying, all efforts
to implement the ruling in the School Segregation Cases. The key factors
common to all such programs are:
The interposition of State authority in an attempt to nullify the
effect of the Supreme Court ruling and orders of Federal district
courts based thereon.
Statutes authorizing and directing State or local agencies to
assign pupils to public school on the basis of standards requiring
a subjective evaluation of the student as an individual, his scholastic
abilities and achievement, as well as the usual considerations
of curriculum, geography, transportation, and school capacity.
Centralized State control over public schools, traditionally vested
in local school authorities.
In general the new approach returns control to local authorities,
giving them and their respective communities a choice as to the future
of their schools. The change in strategy is a response to a long series
of court decisions on the constitutionality of massive resistance measures—most
of which did not stand the test of litigation.
Thus, one Federal court declared the first Virginia Pupil Placement
law unconstitutional because it required an "efficient operation of the
schools," defined in another law as segregation. 2 Another voided the
Tennessee School Preference Act that authorized boards of education
65