SILENT NO MORE
Voicing Secrets - Exposing History
50 years later school integration revealed . . .
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Introduction
Fifty years after the integration of the schools of Coffee County, Georgia, community members have come forward to share their experiences. Stories, long suppressed by fear of reliving a painful past, were recalled and recorded. You will hear these personal accounts on this website. Voices – many of which were silent until now – express diverse points of view. Contrasting accounts of the same incidents reveal a wide range of individual experience. As we listen to these emergingVOICES tell their stories, we gain a new understanding of others and the events comprising the shared history that transformed our lives.
Here we look back to three time periods: Segregation (1865-1965), Optional Integration (1965-1969), and Mandatory Integration (1969-1970), and consider how past events and actions impact our lives today.
In the discussion section of this website we recognize the dynamic changes of these last 50 years and ask that you share your reactions, thoughts, and feelings about where we have been, where we are today, and what you hope for the future. By listening and then speaking, we can continue to construct a vital future together.
emergingVOICES, part of the ongoing project Playback & FastFORWARD, dedicates this work to those who generously and courageously recorded their memories of their period of intense change and inspire us now to speak.
After the Civil War, state and local laws were written mandating the separation of races. In 1892, Mr. Homer Plessy sued Louisiana challenging that state’s segregation laws and lost. He appealed and in 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled segregation laws were constitutional as long as segregated facilities were equal in quality or “separate but equal.” In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education that laws requiring segregated schools were unconstitutional, challenging the precedent set by Plessy v. Ferguson 58 years earlier. However, this decision did not spell out a method for ending segregation in schools. The Brown Decision would have no substantive effect in Georgia until 1965.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation and outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. As a result, the federal government finally had the power to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education ruling and require school desegregation. In December 1964, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare sent a three-page directive to all segregated school systems asking them to submit desegregation plans by March 1965. The Coffee County School System complied, instituting a system of desegregation known as “Freedom of Choice.”
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1968 Green Decision ruled that “Freedom of Choice” desegregation plans did not comply with the mandate for school integration and ordered schools to integrate fully by school year 1969-1970. The Coffee County School Board submitted a plan for total integration but withdrew it when faced with extreme opposition from the newly formed Citizen’s League for Better Government. As the 36th most populous county in the state, Coffee came under federal scrutiny and, while most counties continued “Freedom of Choice,” Federal Judge Alexander Lawrence ordered Coffee County to implement full integration in September 1969.
