2 - The Group Antipathy Theory of Supreme Court Legitimacy

Summary

Brown v. Board of Education and Green v. New Kent County established the lengths to which the Supreme Court would go to safeguard the rights of African Americans. In the years after Brown, when the justices took a dim view of “specific benefits enjoyed by white students [that] were denied to Negro students of the same educational qualifications,” the Court became a strong guardian of civil rights.¹ But even as they fortified Equal Protection guarantees, the justices had very real reason to fear for the health of their institution. Fewer than one in four Southerners approved of the Brown ruling throughout the decade that followed, and a vast majority objected to sending their children to integrated schools (Rosenberg 2008, 127). From Virginia’s massive resistance campaign to the election of pro-segregation, anti-Court governors throughout the South, Brown sparked a firestorm. Statements like that from Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi – who spat that he would “rot in a federal jail before he will let one nigra cross the sacred threshold of our white schools” (Sarratt 1966, 7) – did not just exemplify displeasure with a Court ruling. They showed citizens questioning the basic authority of the institution itself.