The Southern Manifesto [TEASER]

The landmark Brown v.

Board of Education case.

Hey everyone, this is Andrew Parsons from Prologue Projects.

I'm filling in for Leon while he's away.

And on this premium episode of 5-4, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are talking about the Southern Manifesto.

This was a document signed by nearly a fifth of the U.S.

Congress responding to the ruling in Brown v.

Board of Education.

On May 17, this court ruled unanimously that segregation in public schools was not legal.

While Brown officially ended the policy of separate but equal, it did little to outline how inequality would be remedied.

So, southern states banded together to implement an organized resistance to integration, and its effects are still felt today.

This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.

Welcome to 5 to 4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have undermined our civil rights, like Drew Barrymore undermining organized labor.

Got her.

I'm Peter.

I'm here with Rhiannon.

Hello.

Hi.

And Michael.

Hey, everybody.

Good news down the wire from Hollywood.

Yeah.

As we record this, looks like there is a tentative agreement and that it is favorable to the good guys.

Yeah.

From what I've heard.

So I know we're a little bit late, but you know, blow us Drew Barrymore.

You suck.

And congrats to our homies who sacrificed to strike.

Hopefully it's as good as we've heard and some folks will start getting paid.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And hopefully we get some good shows and movies.

Yeah.

I would like to get back to the business of just shutting my brain off and sucking in content.

Yes.

That's right.

Passively.

Beam it into my eyeballs.

Thank you.

Today we are talking about the Southern Manifesto and the massive resistance to Brown v.

The Board of Education.

This is something that I think like basically isn't really taught in American education.

You know, Brown v.

Board is a success story in American life and American politics.

And the reality of it is that it was quite complicated.

And in the 50s especially, there was an intense struggle between segregationists and the courts and the anti-segregationists, especially folks like the NAACP.

And we wanted to sort of tell that story

and

talk about how it bleeds into our modern life and how this fight sort of shaped the 70 or so following years of politics and law.

We will give the disclaimer up front that we are not historians.

And, you know, we're trying to condense a very complex story that has had.

thousands of books written about it and has more characters than you could possibly count and more little events that are all fascinating in their own ways than you could possibly count.

We will be putting that into like an hour 10.

So if you're a historian, please cut us some slack, okay?

Yeah, please keep that in your mind space before you write a very long email that our producer is going to forward to us and then no one is going to respond to.

Okay, right, right, right.

I think it's important too.

Like, look, we're a podcast about the Supreme Court, right?

And this is part of the history of modern America that can be sort of punctuated by Supreme Court action, right?

Supreme Court cases.

And you can sort of track the development of these politics, particularly the politics on race in the United States, through a Supreme Court lens, kind of, right?

All the way into today, all the way into the last term at the Supreme Court, all the way into the term that's upcoming in like a week at the Supreme Court, right?

Right.

And just to be clear, you know, when you say last term, and we'll talk about this a bit later, but Students for Fair Fair Admissions v.

Harvard, the case that overturned affirmative action last term, was a case that really embraced a philosophy that you can trace to this era in history and the Southern Manifesto.

And Peter, you just said too that like people don't really learn about this in like high school history and stuff like that.

You also don't learn about this in law school, right?

And I think this is something we talk about a lot, which is that like in law school, you are learning Supreme Court cases and jurisprudence completely abstracted from a historical and sociological context in which these cases happened, right?

And an ideological context, right?

I think part of the story that we want to tell here is about how, yes, in some sense, the Southern political institutions were defeated in the 1950s.

They lost a bunch of court cases, but these are conversations, conversations about race, about desegregation, about equal protection that we are in a lot of ways now having on their terms, on the terms that were sort of outlined by Southern political actors, expressly racist political actors in the 1950s and 60s.

That's a history that isn't taught in high school or college or law school consistently at all.

So the Southern Manifesto, the South's quote-unquote massive resistance campaign to desegregation, you're not learning this as part of your education on Brown v.

Board of Education in law school.

Yeah.

And, you know, I think it's worth noting, and we'll sort of tie this together toward the end of the episode, that the way that modern conservatives look at much of our Constitution

is

guided

by

the anti-Brown v.

Board segregationist movement of the 1950s.

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Thanks.