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It was originally hoped that state and local governments in the South would comply voluntarily with the Brown decision. In many areas, however, the decision was met with "massive resistance." White political and governmental leaders worked to put off as long as possible the racial integration of their local schools. Segregationist-dominated southern state legislatures soon joined the act, enacting state laws that cut off state educational funding to any school system that had the temerity to racially integrate. In some cases, amendments to state constitutions were adopted that required shutting down public schools rather than allowing them to desegregate.
President Eisenhower often vacationed and played golf in the South. He thus was well aware of the strength of southern attitudes on the race issue, particularly as they applied to school integration. Eisenhower often expressed the fear that, if the U.S. Government pressed too hard on the issue of public school integration, many communities in the South might abandon public education altogether. Whites would then have their own private or church-related schools while blacks, particularly poor blacks, would have no schools at all. Eisenhower frequently used the word "dilemma" to describe this problem of total southern intransigence on the subject of public school integration.
The Brown decision thus had two simultaneous but contradictory effects. On the one hand, it inspired northern liberals and black political activists to press ever more strongly for racial integration in the American South and the Border States. On the other hand, it unified much of the official white South in its all-out opposition to race mixing in any form. Conflict between these two forces became ever more inevitable during the later years of the Eisenhower administration.
By the early 1960s, the lack of progress on school integration in the South became one of the strongest arguments for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As the tenth anniversary of the Brown decision approached in the spring of 1964, civil rights supporters pointed out that a decade had gone by since the Supreme Court's landmark decision but very few southern blacks were attending integrated schools. Such a conspicuous example of lack of state action on desegregating schools dramatized the need for congressional - and thus national government - intervention.
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