Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era

Chapter 1. A Blueprint for Rebellion: Bryant Bowles and the Milford School Crisis

15 Only four months after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education,the desegregation process faced its first serious challenge.That challenge was to end in defeat for the forces of racial reform. In September 1954, a stranger appeared in a small town. Although the community had no historical record of racial conflict, the intruder adroitly manipulated popular unease at the admission of African American students to a white school.The town hit international headlines as angry whites organized picket lines outside the schools and through acts of harassment and intimidation induced officials to withdraw the black children. The stranger was Bryant W. Bowles, Jr., and the community in which he launched his counteroffensive against school desegregation was Milford, Delaware. The drama enacted on the streets of Milford was of considerable historical consequence. It constituted—along with simultaneous demonstrations in Greenbrier County,West Virginia— the first mobilization of mass opposition to the Brown decision. The outcome was a victory for the forces of white resistance. Segregationists were not the only ones who gained political capital from the forced removal of the black students.The protests, for instance, exposed the damage that domestic racial problems inflicted on the international reputation of the United States. White resistance in Milford armed the Soviet Union 1. A Blueprint for Rebellion Bryant Bowles and the Milford School Crisis 16 Chapter One with ammunition in the propaganda battle with its cold war adversary; Radio Moscow used the incident to demonstrate how race relations exposed the hypocrisy of American claims to represent freedom and democracy. The Milford crisis forces us to reconsider conventional interpretations of massive resistance as having been orchestrated by a neo-bourbon elite in the Deep South. On the contrary, it was a spontaneous grassroots insurgency whose supporters defined themselves as opposing a local civic and business establishment they accused of weakness and betrayal on the race issue.The efforts of local leaders to enforce desegregation led to accusations that they had disenfranchised ordinary whites. By contrast, Bowles used populist appeals to cultivate this alienated white working-class constituency and claim a mandate in opposition to reform. That he succeeded in doing so in a town like Milford is significant. Political observers had anticipated that white resistance to desegregation would be most entrenched in the Deep South. Yet Bowles stirred violent dissent on the streets of a community in the Peripheral South with no history of racial unrest. In the process, he demonstrated that segregationist resistance was deeper and more pervasive than many commentators had anticipated. The success of the protests on the margins of the Jim Crow South inspired segregationists in more central parts of the region. If whites in such an outpost could resist racial reform, they reasoned, then segregation ’s real strongholds would surely withstand assault. Delaware was the source of one of the five cases consolidated by the Supreme Court under the title Brown v. Board of Education. African Americans had gained admission both to the University of Delaware and to Catholic schools in Wilmington as early as 1950.The following year,the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) filed two suits in the Delaware Court of Chancery seeking the desegregation of schools in Claymont and Hockessin. On April 1, 1952, the court upheld the claims of the plaintiffs and ordered the local education authorities to admit black students to white institutions until they equalized facilities throughout their school districts.State authorities appealed the decision but consented to the enrollment of black students at the schools involved in the naacp lawsuits. Although the state supreme court turned down their appeal, Delaware authorities were undaunted.They appealed to the U.S.Supreme Court,which heard the case as one of those combined in Brown. In spite of the initial resistance of state authorities, once the Supreme Court issued its ruling there appeared to be a strong prospect of a swift and A Blueprint for Rebellion 17 orderly process of desegregation throughout the Delaware public school system. Governor J. Caleb Boggs promptly asked the state board of education to devise a strategy for the admission of African American students to formerly all-white schools. The board issued a statement on June 11, 1954, that established its broad commitment “to carry out the mandates of the United States Supreme Court decision...