The D.C. School Hearings of 1956 and the National Vision of Massive Resistance

Abstract

Abstract In September 1956, southern congressmen launched a hostile investigation of the District of Columbia’s recently desegregated public school system. Organized by segregationists on the House District of Columbia Committee, the school hearings and subsequent report represented a provocative attempt to stymie racial reform in the nation’s capital and beyond. By discrediting school desegregation in Washington, Deep South diehards hoped to legitimize their cause and expose white resistance north of the Mason-Dixon Line. By taking the fight to a metropolitan setting, segregationists pushed against the limits of Deep South racial politics and discovered white allies in the nation’s capital. As civil rights advocates and school officials struggled to debunk the propaganda attack, segregationists invoked Washington as a “showcase” for the folly of integration. Years before the nation’s attention drifted from southern civil rights struggles to northern racial turmoil, segregationists had anticipated and encouraged this shift by stressing common cause with the embattled whites of the metropolitan North. While their vision of a national segregationist movement never materialized, the controversy over segregation in the nation’s capital complicated notions of race and region in the civil rights era.