Abstract
“Massive Resistance” to equal access to good quality public education is resurging across the nation. First employed by segregationists in Virginia, Massive Resistance spread across the South to oppose school desegregation. This extreme push to suppress equitable education occurred most notably post-Brown. Although 2024 marked Brown’s seventieth anniversary, Massive Resistance is again surging. In fact, the last few years have witnessed increasing resistance to publicly funded education. Some areas where anti-public education resistance strategies have manifested include political rhetoric around Critical Race Theory, library censorship, and renewed parental rights debates.
To devise the most effective response to this “anti-public education” movement, it is crucial to recognize that these strategies are not new. This Article illuminates how both limiting access and denying a right to publicly funded education have long been tools of racial and socio-economic caste subjugation. Today, strategists of resistance to public education in the United States, many of whom are policymakers, use an anti-public education agenda to distract members of the general public from the necessity for, as well as opportunities to, advanced education equity. Progress in achieving education equity can lead to constructive social change. In other words, some less enlightened members of public policy-making elites are massively resisting a shifting status quo. Often, modern resisters to good quality public education for all draw their strategies from segregationist tactics. Some of those tactics trace their origins to Virginia.
To situate what is happening with today’s broader anti-public education movement, this Article provides an original historical account and discusses what is at stake and how to “counter-resist.” Further, this Article provides perspective regarding how Virginia has periodically been a national leader in the broader anti-public education movement in the United States. It offers Virginia as a case study to contextualize the various resistance strategies of this larger anti-public education movement and identify historical protocols that have resurfaced anew today.
Only by knowing where we have been can we see clearly where we are in this historical moment and understand where we must go.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
Recommended Citation
Danielle Wingfield, The Resurgence of Massive Resistance, 82 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 259 (2025).
Included in
Education Law Commons, Law and Race Commons, Law and Society Commons