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Defiance, Protest, and Compromise: The Struggle to Implement Brown in Georgia, 1950–1973
- University of Arkansas Press
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team colors, and school newspapers in favor of those from traditionally all-white institutes.36 In 1971, most South Carolina school districts were finally desegregated , although racial inequalities in the quality of education would linger for years to come. African Americans came to participate more fully in the politics of the state, but as Republicans came to increasingly dominate state politics it could often seem as though the gains of the civil rights movement were elusive. It would be foolish to suggest that little progress has been made for the better, but even some fifty years after Brown, there remain ample opportunities for improvement. Although white South Carolina had been forced by the federal government to integrate , the white political elite did not want to give up control of the schools, even when those schools were primarily populated by African American students. County and city governments, as well as local school boards, changed their method of elections from districts and wards to at-large voting in an effort to dilute the African American vote and maintain practically all-white elected bodies. When the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, the U.S. Bureau of the Census reported that nineteen South Carolina counties elected at least some members of the county governing body from single-member districts that helped ensure predominantly African American areas would be represented by a candidate of their choice. By 1973, the bureau’s survey indicated that eleven counties had switched entirely to an at-large election system, thereby undermining the African American vote.37 The example of Charleston County clearly demonstrates how local jurisdictions used the laws to control integration and the schools. In 1967, Charleston senator Charles Gibson introduced a bill to consolidate the Charleston County School districts. Debate over this bill dominated the South Carolina Legislature, set off a record filibuster, and divided both the Charleston legislative delegation and the people in the County. The discussion of the act included issues of race, busing of children , and transfer of teachers to different districts. The bill was approved June 8, 1967, as Act No. 340. The Gibson School Bill was amended by the same house delegation that amended senate bill S131 to change the method of electing county council to at-large from districts. The motivation behind the amendments to the Gibson School Bill has been carefully researched by the historian R. Scott Baker, who concludes, “The Act of consolidation was a fitting conclusion to a quarter century of shrewd white resistance, testimony to the ability of whites to limit the 88 Vernon Burton and Lewie Reece impact of NAACP litigation. By equalizing expenditures and maintaining constituent district boundaries, consolidation stymied the NAACP’s attempt to achieve meaningful desegregation in Charleston.” Baker shows that “Equalization was always a means to a larger end: the maintenance of racial separation in education. . . . By blocking desegregation across district lines, consolidation embedded schools in racially segregated and economically unequal social environments.”38 The racial motivation for this change is all too obvious when one considers that the trustees were to be an elected board, except in the four districts (20, 23, 9, and 1) where African Americans had the opportunity to elect representatives. Thus, in the Gibson School Consolidation Bill, Act 340, in 1967 this racial distinction was incorporated, denying African Americans the vote where they might have the majority and determining vote for school trustees. In these four predominantly African American districts, trustees would instead be appointed, thereby allowing the racial makeup of the board to be predetermined. It was not until 1974 that these predominantly African American school districts were allowed to elect their trustees in the same manner as did the predominately white districts.39 Since the mid-1970s, little progress has been made toward ensuring the continuation of equal, desegregated schooling in the state. In many districts, attempts at enforcing integration were accompanied by white flight to private schools once the student body was more than one-third African American. State-sanctioned segregation may have ended, but segregated education remained, and remains, the normal experience for most African American students in South Carolina. In 2004, 36.5 percent of Lee County’s residents were white, but only 6.5 percent of the student population in public schools was white; in Hampton County, the figures were 45.5 percent and 1.5 percent. Making matters worse was a growing disparity between the level of funding available to the richest (predominantly white) and poorest (predominantly black...