Many white Southern families protested the Brown decision, pulled their children from public schools, and enrolled them in exclusive white “segregation academies.” They employed violence and intimidation to keep African-Americans from fighting for their rights. In 1956, over 100 Southern congressmen supported and signed a “Southern Manifesto” stating that they would do everything they could to protect segregation.
However, such movements faced challenges, particularly when a new campaign was introduced in 1955. This was the year that Rosa Parks, a Montgomery activist, was taken into custody for denying her seat on a bus to a white person. Her arrest resulted in a 13-month protest of the city’s buses which only stopped when the companies ended discrimination against African-American passengers. Efforts of “nonviolent resistance” like the protest helped influenced the civil rights movement of the next ten years.
