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Anatomy of Judicial Backlash: Southern Leaders, Massive Resistance, and the Supreme Court, 1954–1958

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Ruth Bloch Rubin  and
Gregory Elinson
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Abstract

Exploiting a range of archival materials, we argue that state-level variation in judicial backlash to Brown was as much the result of strategic choices by southern political elites as it was the ingrained prejudices of the region's white voters. Presenting case studies of massive resistance in Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, and Arkansas, we show that elite agency profoundly shaped the patchwork development of grassroots resistance to integration across the South. These findings challenge the prevailing view that backlash to Brown signaled the unequivocal triumph of racial conservatives. Rather, we argue that the region's response offered individual members of the southern elite significant autonomy to direct massive resistance in their home states. We also argue that southern lawmakers were responsible for the South's embrace of popular constitutionalism post-Brown, and thus that it may not have been “popular” at all. We conclude that studies of judicial backlash would do well to reevaluate the assumption that backlash is necessarily a grassroots phenomenon.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , Summer 2018 , pp. 944 - 980
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2018 

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