The Rhetorical Road to Brown v. Board of Education: Elizabeth and Waties Waring’s Campaign

In this story of resistance to white supremacy, Wanda Little Fenimore weaves the Warings’ speeches with local organizing, NAACP legal strategy, and national politics. Elizabeth Avery Waring was a twice-divorced northern socialite. Her husband, federal Judge J. Waties Waring, was an eighth-generation Charlestonian whose family had enslaved people of African descent. The Warings’ goal was to arouse silent white people and pressure the federal government to intervene in the South. Elizabeth and Waties took purposeful steps to ensure that their oratory reached audiences across the United States. With each speech and media interview, they received letters – positive and negative – that they then circulated to more audiences. The responses demonstrate that a cadre of white allies existed in the pre-Brown era. The responses also demonstrate the polite racism that sustained Jim Crow. This rhetorical history of Brown v. Board of Education reveals the terms upon which segregation was defended, the reasons that white people remained silent, and the ways that white Americans reconciled the contradiction between American democracy and white supremacy.