The Best Defense Is a Good Offense: The Stennis Amendment and the Fracturing of Liberal School Desegregation Policy, 1964–1972

In December 1969, Governor John Bell Williams of Mississippi, one of the most notorious southern segregationists, proposed a $1 million program financed by the Mississippi state legislature to file school desegregation suits in northern states. “For fifteen years we have been on the defense,” Williams said. “Now we are going on the offense.” Williams's campaign was just one example of an odd but familiar trend that had emerged by 1970. Some of the most determined southern segregationists became enthusiastic supporters of northern school desegregation. In January 1970, the attorneys general in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida announced plans to intervene as friends of the court in a Pasadena, California, school desegregation case. In February 1970, the governor of Louisiana appealed to citizens of his state to fund a nationwide television campaign calling for equal treatment between northern and southern schools. Most important, that same month, U.S. Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi carried the fight to the floor of the Senate. He introduced an amendment to a federal education bill that called for equal desegregation efforts in both the North and the South, regardless of whether the segregation resulted from state action or residential patterns. Stennis complained that the federal government was pursuing a regional desegregation plan. His ostensible goal was to bring about “one uniform policy” on school desegregation, “applicable nationwide.” But the real motivation, which almost every southern official conceded, was the hope that accelerated desegregation in the North would spark a broader, national backlash against school desegregation.