The signal of “deliberate” resistance shown in the lack of “speed” was clear: Justice cannot be enforced on powerful white men, who were acting as heroes in the South to protect their right to educate their [white] children as they wanted. The public in the rest of the country understood by the absence of real punishment in the case of Civil War leaders, in the case of Senator Bilbo and his fellow Democrat conservative Senator Rankin after 1946 planned insurrection of the election, and of the years after the Brown decision, that white resistance was a real form of power. In the almost one hundred years since their War, white conservatives in the South still didn’t have to “bow” to integration with “the negro.”
