STATE PARKS AND JIM CROW IN THE DECADE BEFORE BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION

In discussing southern race relations in the decade between World War II and 1954, the historian Numan Bartley cited a Mississippi journalist who "recalled the decade as a 'halcyon period for the exponents of gradualism; an era when political demagoguery declined and a 'new climate' of racial tolerance gained acceptance" (1995, 38). What existed of this gradualist period ended after 17 May 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that public school segregation violated the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)). The landmark ruling sparked a vitriolic reaction among most southern whites over what they saw as a federal intrusion so profound that some would call it "the Second Reconstruction" (Woodward [1955] 2002). As a direct result, any gains in white racial tolerance achieved after the war's end would disappear after 1954, and the decade that followed would witness the rise of citizen's councils, a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, and widely known acts of white resistance against integration in both public and private spheres, from schools to lunch counters and beyond. This apparent postwar pattern, of seemingly hopeful and gradual racial gains for southern blacks that transitioned to white resistance and recalcitrance after 1954, is visible also in the history of state parks systems around the region. African Americans in the South had virtually no access to state parks before the war. There was, however, a significant effort among park agencies around the region to expand the number of separate so-called state parks for Negroes between 1945 and 1954. Such issues of state park exclusion and access have seen little discussion in the parks literature to this point in time, although Jason Byrne and Jennifer Wolch identify the importance of these themes to geographical discussions of parks (Byrne and Wolch 2009). During this postwar period, sincerity regarding expansion plans reflected the gradualist trend, evident, for instance, at the 1950 meeting of the Association of Southeastern State Park Directors, which included a strategy session called "State Park Facilities for Our Negro Citizens" (ASSPD 1950). Acknowledging the trend toward improved access, a 1952 article in Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), noted that, although serious recreational inequities remained, "On the state level, the need for providing for the recreational needs of all citizens is recognized increasingly" (Burkhart 1952, 623). These efforts at providing segregated park spaces largely came to an end after Brown as state governments and their park agencies--with the significant exception of the border states--joined the white resistance to integration. The segregation history of southern state parks was, in fact, directly influenced by the integration demands of the Brown decision, which set precedent for cases involving state parks and provides an opportunity to weigh in on contemporary discussions about the implications of that landmark Supreme Court ruling. Specifically, my assertions lend support to those that James Cobb expressed in 2005. In a chapter entitled "Down on Brown: Revisionist Critics and the History that Might Have Been," Cobb, a historian of the South, expressed astonishment at a chorus of recent scholarly voices (particularly liberal ones) that cast doubt on the wisdom of the integration demands of its litigants and the impact of the Brown decision itself. At Brown's fiftieth anniversary, when school integration gains appeared to be moving in reverse (see Minow 2010), some critics argued that Brown's significance was overstated and wondered whether more significant gains might have been made if the pre-Brown, gradualist racial progress had been allowed to continue. In his response, Cobb pointed in particular to the legal historian Michael Klarman (2004), who conveyed both assertions. …