Sibley Commission

Griffin Bell, the chief of staff for Georgia Governor Ernest Vandiver, proposed the idea of forming a committee to analyze the issue of desegregation and make recommendations to the state government on the matter.

[13][14] On June 5, 1959, presiding Federal Judge Frank Arthur Hooper ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and, later that month, he ordered the board to submit a desegregation plan by the following year.

[19] Because of this, Hooper postponed the plan's implementation until January 1960, when the Georgia General Assembly was scheduled to begin its legislative session, in order to give the state government time to change their laws barring any publicly funded integrated schools.

[22] Additionally, the idea was supported by the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce President Ivan Allen Jr.[19] In choosing a leader for this committee, Vandiver chose John A. Sibley for the role.

[1][26] Busbee was selected because he was from a small town and unaffiliated with leadership in the General Assembly, which Vandiver and his advisors believed would lend the commission an air of independence from the establishment.

[42] Additionally, the committee hired two personal secretaries, Patricia Pruitt and Ann Gaultney,[43] and employed the services of Freeman Leverett, an attorney of constitutional law,[44] as the group's counsel.

[48][45] During this meeting, Sibley denounced the Brown decision as "devoid of legal reasoning", but accepted it as the rule of law and stressed the commission's goal in determining how Atlanta's schools would be desegregated.

[47][44] On February 18, the committee's legal subcommittee, consisting of Boykin, Brooks, Hollis, Kenimer, and Sibley, met with Bell and Leverett to create the framework for the hearings, with the group deciding on two possible options to present to the people of Georgia: either continue with massive resistance at the expense of the state's public education system or allow for some limited integration while largely maintaining a segregated society.

[67] Also, prior to the start of the hearings, Sibley sent several lawyers, including committee members Caldwell and Hall, to other Southern states in order to further investigate their approaches to desegregation.

[76][77] This set the tone for much of the rest of this hearing, as indicated by the testimony from a Columbus-based radio station that had found in a poll of 1,200 people that 1,192 were in favor of complete segregation, even if it meant public school closures.

[80][81][note 12] The NAACP later issued a statement that these witnesses had been under pressure from white school board members in the district to take these pro-segregation stances, which were widely promoted by segregationists in South Georgia such as former governor Griffin.

[102][103] Duncan read the opening statement, as Sibley arrived late due to snow, and the meeting commenced with testimony from the leader of the city's board of education.

[102] With feedback from the previous meetings, Sibley reworked his approach to explaining the local option plan and stressed the successes that similar programs had seen in Alabama and North Carolina.

[113] However, it was in Douglas that organized groups that strongly opposed school integration, such as several local Citizens' Councils and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), decided to take a stand and have their opinion recorded, resulting in the commission hearing 148 witnesses in five hours.

[53] Bibb County witnesses were largely supportive of the local option and included PTA members, the League of Women Voters, and faculty and students of Mercer University and Wesleyan College, both located in Macon.

[123] This hearing was originally planned to be held in Savannah, the state's second largest city,[124] but it was moved to the more centrally located Sylvania at the request of committee member Parker.

[131][128] Additionally, many African American witnesses in the district voiced their opinion in favor of continued segregation, in part due to many newly built black school facilities in the area.

[142] Following Latimer, representatives for DeKalb County's public schools similarly questioned the ability of a private system to adequately address the needs of the district's 42,000 pupils.

[62] Groups supporting the possible closure of schools included a local union of the United Auto Workers, the state affiliate of the Constitution Party, several KKK organizations, and the Metropolitan Association for Continuing Segregated Education.

[142][149] The afternoon session ended with testimony from several witnesses from Atlanta's black elite,[147] including William Holmes Borders, John Wesley Dobbs, and Whitney Young,[150] who all spoke in favor of the local option.

[156] On the day of the hearing, the only sizable support for the massive resistance option came from representatives from the counties of Barrow and Jackson, which contained some of the largest African American populations in the district and were largely rural and agricultural regions.

[162] At the second Atlanta hearing, which was held at the same venues as the first,[155][164] Sibley, rather than allowing for speeches from the witnesses, simply asked them to state their preferences, with 71 people supporting the local option and 49 opposed.

[189] In the end, the committee members were fairly divided between recommending a change in state law to allow for a local option and continuing support for massive resistance and possible school closures.

[193][194] Additionally, Hill submitted another statement of his own writing to the General Assembly arguing that, due to the close polling between the two choices, the state government should consider other, unspecified options to address integration.

[198][199] In addition, several smaller pieces of legislation designed to accommodate the local option plan, such as ensuring retirement benefits for teachers at public integrated schools, were also recommended.

[1][205] In late May, Sibley and Governor Vandiver, the latter of whom still refusing to take a definitive stance on the committee's recommendations, appeared on a national broadcast called Who Speaks for the South?, which was hosted by Edward R. Murrow, to discuss the majority report.

[209] On January 6, 1961,[211] 3 days before the beginning of the General Assembly's session,[9] Federal Judge William Augustus Bootle of Macon ordered the University of Georgia to integrate by admitting African American applicants Hamilton E. Holmes and Charlayne Hunter.

[214] On January 12, Judge Bootle ruled the state's mandatory school defunding laws unconstitutional and again ordered Holmes and Hunter, who Vandiver had suspended from the university following the riot, to be reinstated.

[215][216] According to Vandiver, the university desegregation crisis revealed to him that massive resistance was no longer a viable political strategy, and the following week, after meeting with several dozen politicians at the Georgia Governor's Mansion to discuss the situation, he called for a joint session of the General Assembly on January 18.

[227] In 1965, facing further legal action by the NAACP, the Atlanta public school system voted to abandon their incremental desegregation plan and enacted immediate integration at all grade levels.