The “Injustices” series, published by the USA TODAY Network in collaboration with the Equal Justice Initiative, seeks to confront the realities of racial injustice, reckon with their enduring effects and preserve these narratives as part of America’s collective history.
Georgia Gov. Herman E. Talmadge liked to portray himself as a champion of education who’d built hundreds of new schools, many of them for Black children. When it came to integration, however, Talmadge said he would sooner end public education in Georgia than allow Black children to attend school with white children.
“There is only one solution in the event segregation is banned by the Supreme Court,” Talmadge declared on Dec. 18, 1952, anticipating how the justices would rule in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. “And that is abolition of the public school system.”
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