Southern Manifesto Signed by 101 Congressmen Pledging Resistance to School Integration

On March 12, 1956, as the second anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education approaches, Senator Walter F. George rises in the U.S. Senate to announce the latest weapon in the segregationist arsenal—the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” known as the Southern Manifesto. Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia has convinced 101 of the 128 congressmen representing the 11 states of the old Confederacy to sign the document pledging to “use all lawful means” to resist school desegregation.

The Manifesto is signed by 19 of the 22 southern senators and 82 representatives—roughly one-fifth of the membership of Congress and all from states that had composed the Confederacy. Every member of the congressional delegations from Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia signs, along with all but one from Florida and Tennessee, all but three from North Carolina, and half of the Texas delegation. Of seven Republican representatives and three Republican senators from former Confederate states, only four sign: Charles Jonas (NC), William Cramer (FL), Joel Broyhill (VA), and Richard Poff (VA).

The Manifesto attacks Brown as an abuse of judicial power that trespassed upon states’ rights, calling it an “unwarranted exercise of power” and “contrary to the Constitution.” The signers pledge to “use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution” and urge southerners to exhaust all “lawful means” to resist the “chaos and confusion” that would result from school desegregation. The document accuses the Supreme Court of substituting “naked power for established law” and destroying “the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through ninety years of patient effort.”

The full text appears in Congressional Record, 84th Congress Second Session, Vol. 102, part 4 (March 12, 1956), pages 4459-4460. The Manifesto provides official congressional legitimacy to massive resistance efforts already underway at the state level, particularly in Virginia and Mississippi. It signals to southern state legislatures and local officials that they have support from the highest levels of the federal government to defy the Supreme Court.

This congressional defiance establishes a precedent for state-federal confrontation that becomes a core feature of conservative movement strategy: using constitutional arguments about states’ rights and federal overreach to resist federal civil rights enforcement. The Manifesto’s emphasis on “lawful means” provides cover for legislative obstruction, court challenges, and administrative foot-dragging that delays meaningful school integration for over a decade. The same arguments about federal overreach, judicial activism, and states’ rights are later repurposed by the conservative movement to oppose federal regulations on business, environmental protection, labor rights, and social programs.