Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

control of political parties.
    That decision was followed by
Brown v. Board of Education
in 1954, in which the Supreme Court ruled that state-mandated segregation of schools and other public sites was unconstitutional. In 1962 the Court knocked away another pillar of the political dominance of white elites: legislative malapportionment. When a legislature is malapportioned—as were the “rotten boroughs” in England before the First Reform Act—some areas or regions receive much greater representation than they should based on their share of the relevant population. Malapportionment in the South meant that the rural areas, the heartland of the southern planter elite, were heavily overrepresented relative to urban areas. The Supreme Court put an end to this in 1962 with its decision in the
Baker v. Carr
case, which introduced the “one-person, one-vote” standard.
    But all the rulings from the Supreme Court would have amounted to little if they hadn’t been implemented. In the 1890s, in fact, federal legislation enfranchising southern blacks was not implemented, because local law enforcement was under the control of the southern elite and the Democratic Party, and the federal government was happy to go along with this state of affairs. But as blacks started rising up against the southern elite, this bastion of support for Jim Crow crumbled, and the Democratic Party, led by its non-southern elements, turned against racial segregation. The renegade southern Democrats regrouped under the banner of the States’ Rights Democratic Party and competed in the 1948 presidential election. Their candidate, Strom Thurmond, carried four states and gained thirty-nine votes in the Electoral College. But this was a far cry from the power of the unified Democratic Party in national politics and the capture of that party by the southern elites. Strom Thurmond’s campaign was centered on his challenge to the ability of the federal government to intervene in the institutions of the South. He stated his position forcefully: “I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”
    He would be proved wrong. The rulings of the Supreme Court meant that southern educational facilities had to be desegregated,including the University of Mississippi in Oxford. In 1962, after a long legal battle, federal courts ruled that James Meredith, a young black air force veteran, had to be admitted to “Ole Miss.” Opposition to the implementation of this ruling was orchestrated by the so-called Citizens’ Councils, the first of which had been formed in Indianola, Mississippi, in 1954 to fight desegregation of the South. State governor Ross Barnett publicly rejected the court-ordered desegregation on television on September 13, announcing that state universities would close before they agreed to be desegregated. Finally, after much negotiation between Barnett and President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy in Washington, the federal government intervened forcibly to implement this ruling. A day was set when U.S. marshals would bring Meredith to Oxford. In anticipation, white supremacists began to organize. On September 30, the day before Meredith was due to appear, U.S. marshals entered the university campus and surrounded the main administration building. A crowd of about 2,500 came to protest, and soon a riot broke out. The marshals used tear gas to disperse the rioters, but soon came under fire. By 10:00 p.m. that night, federal troops were moved into the city to restore order. Soon there were 20,000 troops and 11,000 National Guardsmen in Oxford. In total, 300 people would be arrested. Meredith decided to stay on campus, where, protected from death threats by U.S. marshals and 300 soldiers, he eventually graduated.
    Federal legislation was pivotal in the process of institutional reform in the South. During the passage of the first Civil Rights Act in 1957, Strom Thurmond, then a senator, spoke nonstop for twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes to prevent, or at least delay, passage of the act. During his speech he read everything from the Declaration of Independence to various phone books. But to no avail. The 1957 act culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing a whole gamut of segregationist state legislation and