A reminder of the past that the Trumpistas want to bring back

The Oxford American last month published an article about Beatrice Alexander, in a story titled, “The Mississippi Ninth Grader Who Integrated the South.“ (1)

While the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision is considered the watershed end to racially segregated schools, Southern states resisted compliance, leveraging the directive to end segregation “with all deliberate speed” to move as slowly as possible. A decade after the Brown ruling, only 2.3 percent of Black students in the South attended predominantly white schools. Stonewalling in some places and token compliance in others slowed the rate of change. The 1969 Alexander case resulted in new language that replaced “all deliberate speed” with “at once,” forcing school districts around the South into immediate compliance. Pre-Alexander, in 1968, sixty-eight percent of Black students in the eleven states of the old Confederacy remained in all-Black schools. Post-Alexander, in 1970, the number dropped to thirty-four percent. By 1972, a higher percentage of Black students in the South attended predominately white schools than in the North. On that early morning in 2019 [when Alexander’s daughter searched her late mother’s name online], [Santrice] Ross learned that her mother had been the lead plaintiff in the US Supreme Court case that truly integrated Southern schools.

PBS’ American Experience produced this description of the case: (2)

This is the historical market on the “Mississippi Freedom Trail” recalling the case. So far as I’m aware, the Trump 2.0 Administration has not yet declared such markers an “antifa” incitement to terrorism.

And, yes, the Trumps and Stephen Millers and Gestapo Barbies of the world really would like to see us go back to a new version of the old American apartheid.

How did the good Christian segregationist white folks in the South respond to court decisions to the original Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954? (2)

Notes:

(1) Fentress, Ellen Ann (2025): Mississippi Ninth Grader Who Integrated the South. Oxford American 10/08/2025. <https://oxfordamerican.org/oa-now/the-mississippi-ninth-grader-who-integrated-the-south> (Accessed: 2025-06-11).

(2) The law that desegregated schools overnight - What the History!?. PBS American Experience YouTube channel 09/11/2023. <https://youtu.be/-FcVBWIuR1U?si=9dWELd91wyqzq2xM> (Accessed: 2025-06-11).

(3) Day, John Kyle (2014): The Southern Manifesto: Massive Resistance and the Fight to Preserve Segregation. Jackson: University of Mississippi.