Posted on 06/20/2020 3:57:07 AM PDT by Libloather
On this date, Howard Smith of Virginia, chairman of the House Rules Committee, introduced the Southern Manifesto in a speech on the House Floor. Formally titled the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” it was signed by 82 Representatives and 19 Senators—roughly one-fifth of the membership of Congress and all from states that had once composed the Confederacy. It marked a moment of southern defiance against the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka (KS) decision, which determined that separate school facilities for black and white school children were inherently unequal. The Manifesto attacked Brown as an abuse of judicial power that trespassed upon states’ rights. It urged southerners to exhaust all “lawful means” to resist the “chaos and confusion” that would result from school desegregation. Smith had cooperated with several Senators to develop the Manifesto, and Walter F. George of Georgia introduced it in the other chamber. Under Smith, the Rules Committee became a graveyard for numerous civil rights initiatives in the 1950s. In his prefatory remarks, Smith declared that the ship of state had “drifted from her moorings,” and described the high court’s record on civil rights as one of “repeated deviation” from the fundamental separation of powers and constitutionally implied autonomy of the states. A small group of southern Members rose on the House Floor to applaud Smith’s brief speech; no Member rose to speak against it.
(Excerpt) Read more at history.house.gov ...
The Declaration of Constitutional Principles (known informally as the Southern Manifesto) was a document written in February and March 1956, in the 84th United States Congress, in opposition to racial integration of public places.[1] The manifesto was signed by 101 congressmen (99 Southern Democrats and two Republicans) from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.[1] The document was drafted to counter the landmark Supreme Court 1954 ruling Brown v. Board of Education, which determined that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. School segregation laws were some of the most enduring and best-known of the Jim Crow laws that characterized the Southern United States at the time.[2]
Massive resistance to federal rules that ordered school integration was already being practiced across the South, and was not caused by the Manifesto. Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas had worked behind the scenes to tone down the original harsh draft. The final version did not pledge to nullify the 'Brown' decision nor did it support extralegal resistance to desegregation. Instead, it was mostly a states' rights diatribe against the judicial branch for overstepping its role.[3]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Manifesto
/s
LBJ and Al Gore, Sr. did not sign the document, according to the link...
Also, Wright and Rayburn did not sign.
The only one on your list who did was Slick Willy’s mentor.
That’s what I get for posting before I’ve finished my morning cup of coffee. I misread the linked article. Thanks.
I expected all of them to have signed it as well, and was surprised to find out they did not.
Well, there is a lot of “chaos and confusion” in the government schools, with a lot of white kids being beaten and not much learning going on.
And “federal rules that ordered school integration” are largely thwarted these days (in all parts of the country in which there are heavy concentrations of minorities) by enrollments in private schools or shopping for safe government schools by means of moving into the right subdivisions.
Parents still want their kids in safe schools where at least some modicum of learning exists, whether bureaucrats in D.C. approve of it or not.
So to assume they signed the Manifesto wouldn't have been a stretch. (But we all know what Felix Unger said about assume!)
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