category is the elimination of racially segregated public schools in the United
States. In 1954 , the Supreme Court decided that separating schoolchildren on the
basis of race violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws.
The decision inBrownvs.Board of Educationought to have produced major shifts
in educational practices, especially in the South, where segregation of African-
American children was so widely used.
This decision proved to be enormously unpopular among those most aVected by
it, producing vocal protests and, in the extreme, calls for the removal of Earl
Warren, the chief justice under whom the decision was issued. Local oYcials in
these areas were generally unsupportive and resisted, quite strenuously, any sug-
gestion that their public schools should be integrated. Especially aVected were the
federal judges in the South—judges who lived and worked in close proximity to
the longstanding practice of segregation—who were charged with overseeing the
process of desegregation; those whose courts were located in the school districts
they supervised were quite lax in bringing about implementation (Giles and Walker
1975 ).
The resistance from these oYcials was emblematic of a more general opposition.
With little support—and no means by which to compel compliance—the Supreme
Court faced widespread and sustained refusal to put its policy into eVect. Segre-
gation simply continued. ‘‘Statistics from the Southern states are truly amazing,’’
writes Gerald Rosenberg. ‘‘For ten years, 1954 – 64 , virtually nothing happened. Ten
years afterBrownonly 1. 2 percent of black schoolchildren in the South attended
school with whites’’ (Rosenberg 1991 , 52 ).
Beginning in 1964 , however, compliance with the Court suddenly began to take
place at a stunning rate. What had to be satisWed was one of the conditions for
judicial eYcacy; Congress, opting for the stick rather than the carrot, enacted the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 , which withdrew federal educational funds from school
districts that discriminated on the basis of race. Faced with the loss of substantial
moneys, public schools in the South quickly fell into line. Thus, the Court required
the coordinated eVorts of both Congress and the president to provide the support
necessary to produce the policy changes that the Court demanded.
In the absence of the sword or the purse—that is, the absence of support
from elsewhere within the political system—change will likely not occur if that
change generates widely shared opposition. Research on reactions to the Supreme
Court’s early rulings outlawing devotional activities and Bible readings in public
schools were widely disobeyed in the American South (Dolbeare and Hammond
1971 ;Way 1968 ). More recent analysis shows that a variety of outlawed religious
practices still remain within Southern schools, often at surprisingly high levels
(McGuire 2005 ).
Just as legislative bodies can oppose judicially-mandated change, so too can
executive oYcials. Law enforcement in the United States has long sought to
circumvent the Supreme Court’s Mirandadecision, which requires police to
the judicial process and public policy 547