They called it “massive resistance.”
That, some of you may recall, was what Virginia dubbed its campaign of defiance of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed school segregation. The Virginia crusade was just part of a drive by conservatives all over the South to blunt the effect of that decision.
It’s a noxious bit of history that, paradoxically, may carry a seed of hope for advocates of reproductive rights in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade. It reminds us that, though the court is considered the final arbiter of national disputes, there have been times it was anything but.
Brown v. Board is the most obvious, albeit notorious, example. By means both subtle and overt, conservative voters and lawmakers have spent almost 70 years defying that decision, with the result that, according to a 2020 report from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, “School segregation is now more severe than in the late 1960s.”
In a similar sense, we’ve discovered, in the weeks since the court struck down Roe, that it unsettled more than it settled. Consider last week’s news that a 10-year-old rape victim had to flee across state lines from Ohio to Indiana to have her pregnancy terminated. This, because the law in her home state would not permit the procedure. Many conservative lawmakers, increasingly indistinguishable from 17th-century Puritans and Iranian ayatollahs in their moral precepts, consider it “pro-life” to force a 10-year-old girl to give birth.
