In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
that segregation was inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional.
And it was about schools, but everyone knew that what it really was about was
that the whole system of segregation that included voting, included public accommodations,
it included every aspect of life. That whole system of segregation
that the South had established was now considered unlawful, unconstitutional.
And that was a day which essentially meant that Plessy versus Ferguson, handed down
almost 60 years earlier than than Brown, at 60 years of Jim Crow, of blatant
segregation, was declared unconstitutional.
Now there was going to be no longer separate and unequal.
But the real problem was how to make the South live by that decision.
All the southern states began to figure out how they could resist the order,
how could they overturn the order.
In Georgia, it was an immediate response.
By 1956, the Georgia Legislature passed several laws, including one which changed
the Georgia flag and put the old confederate flag into the state flag.
Now some have claimed that that was simply an act of celebrating the history.
In truth, anyone can clearly see that it was enmeshed in the whole business of
massive resistance against Brown versus the Board.
The legislature in that session,
when they passed the change in the flag, also passed laws getting ready
to dismantle public education.
They passed a law that would allow public
schools' retirement funds to be transferred to private schools.
They passed legislation to allow public schools to lease to private schools,
which did not have to follow Brown, their equipment and their buildings.
1956 legislature primarily did nothing but get ready to establish the mechanisms by
which to resist Brown versus the Board of Education.
By 1959, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund had challenged the resistance to segregation in the in the
courts and had gotten a federal court order from Judge Frank Hooper that
the Atlanta schools would have to be desegregated.
Immediately the governor, Governor Vandiver, he set up a commission which
was to study what to do, how to resist, and how to handle this fact of a federal
court order ordering a specific integration of the first schools in Georgia.
Governor Vandiver appointed a lawyer and a businessman by the name of
John Sibley as chair of this commission that was to study the question.
The Sibley Commission prepared a report and that essentially said that we should not
close the public schools of Georgia to avoid integration.
And it listed a dozen ways in which to frustrate integration.
So as a result, the Sibley Commission's recommendations were used to assure
that desegregation would occur very slowly across Georgia.
It gave Georgia state officials a lot of suggestions about how
to frustrate the desegregation process, how to slow it down, how to assure that
if it occurred at all it would occur very slowly with many delays.
And one of those techniques was the notion of simply saying that we will admit a token
number of African-American students and arguing that that was desegregation
because it ended segregation.
There were other techniques as well, but the Sibley Commission's report
essentially was the blueprint that assured the desegregation
of our schools in Georgia would occur one at a time, very slowly over a period of several years.