That year the NAACP filed a federal court suit directly challenging segregation on behalf of Black high school students who had staged a strike in rural Prince Edward County. The threat became more explicit in 1951 and white thinking on creating publicly subsidized private schools took more definite form. The rising danger this posed to the dual school system led Virginia’s white leadership to consider resorting to private schooling before accepting desegregation. Represented by lawyers from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the parents’ lawsuits scored victories in the federal courts by the late 1940s. What follows is an effort to do that, to place his actions generally within the period and particularly within the sequence of events in the spring of 1959.Ī demand by Black parents in the late 1930s that Virginia make its grossly unequal segregated schools more equal was the prelude to the massive resistance era.

Placing Buchanan’s actions within the context of massive resistance can help clarify the truth. MacLean’s interpretation of this event has drawn critics who challenge both her facts and her conclusions. A critical moment in the book involved Buchanan’s first involvement in a major policy issue-Virginia’s campaign, known as massive resistance, to thwart racial desegregation of its public schools. In her 2017 book Democracy In Chains, historian Nancy MacLean traced the impact on economics and public life of the ideas of Nobel Prize winning economist James M.

Hard Fall by James Buchanan