Southern opponents of racial integration organized white citizens councils to obstruct the implementation of the 1954 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to end school desegregation, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Originating in Mississippi, the councils advocated white supremacy and resorted to various forms of economic pressure against local advocates of desegregation. They attempted to win support for their views by describing the horrors that integrated education would supposedly bring. By the 1960s, as the pace of desegregation in southern schools accelerated, the councils grew steadily weaker. By the 1970s they were only of marginal importance.

Bibliography

Patterson, James T. Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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