What was the Brown case? What was "Massive Resistance"
In 1954, the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared segregated schools unconstitutional. The following year, in a case known as Brown II, the Court ruled that segregated schools should be desegregated "with all deliberate speed."
The Brown decision angered white Southern supporters of segregation, who engaged in what they called "Massive Resistance" to desegregation. Southern states and towns wrote new laws designed to maintain separate schools for blacks and whites. Some white Southerners engaged in violence against blacks. In 1955, Emmett Till, a Chicago teenager visiting his uncle in Mississippi, was brutally murdered. The men accused of killing Till were found not guilty, and the case shocked many Americans. White Southern members of the U.S. Congress also wrote the "Southern Manifesto" in 1956, which declared that the Brown decision should be resisted and overturned.