Remember the "Massive resistance" program against civil rights?That's what we have against Obamacare
Massive resistance
"Massive resistance was a policy declared by U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr. of Virginia on February 24, 1956, to unite other white politicians and leaders in Virginia in a campaign of new state laws and policies to prevent public school desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954.[1] Although most of the laws created to implement Massive Resistance were negated by state and federal courts by January 1960, some policies and effects of the campaign against integrated public schools continued in Virginia for many more years; many schools, and even an entire school system, were shut down in preference to integration.
Byrd Organization
Harry Flood Byrd (1887–1966), Democrat, a former Governor of Virginia, and the state's senior U.S. Senator, was the leader of the powerful Byrd Organization. Continuing a legacy of state domination by segregationist Democrats which began after the fall of the Readjuster Party in the late 19th century, from the mid-1920s until the late 1960s, the Byrd Organization was a political machine which effectively controlled Virginia politics through a network of courthouse cliques of local constitutional officers in most of the state's counties.
The Byrd Organization's greatest strength was in the rural areas of the state. It never gained a significant foothold in the independent cities, nor with the emerging suburban middle-class of Virginians after World War II.
Opposition to racial integration
From the period following Reconstruction in the late 19th century, continuing into the second half of the 20th century, Virginia's conservative Democrats and the Byrd Organization actively worked to maintain legal and cultural racial segregation in Virginia through the Jim Crow laws. To complete white supremacy, they also passed a new constitution in 1902 that effectively disfranchised African Americans through restrictions on voter registration. African Americans were deprived of representation until passage of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s.
Using legal challenges, by the 1940s, black attorneys who included notables such as Thurgood Marshall, Oliver W. Hill, William H. Hastie, Spottswood W. Robinson III and Leon A. Ranson were gradually winning civil rights cases based upon federal constitutional issues. Among these was the case of Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, which was actually initiated by students who stepped forward to protest poor conditions at R.R. Moton High School, Farmville, Virginia. Their case became a portion of those heard as part of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954.[1] The Brown decision declared that state laws which established separate public schools for black and white students denied black children equal educational opportunities and that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, thereby paving the way for integration and encouraging the Civil Rights Movement.
Circumventing Brown ruling by new state efforts to maintain segregation
Senator Byrd waged vocal and bitter opposition to the high court's ruling and subsequent actions to implement public school integration in Virginia. Leading the state's Conservative Democratic political machine, on February 24, 1956, he declared a campaign which became known as "Massive Resistance" to avoid compliance. Byrd stated: "If we can organize the Southern States for massive resistance to this order I think that in time the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South."[2]
To implement Massive Resistance, in 1956, the Byrd Organization-controlled Virginia General Assembly passed a series of laws known as the Stanley plan, after Governor Thomas Bahnson Stanley. One of these laws forbade any integrated schools from receiving state funds, and authorized the governor to order closed any such school. Another of these laws established a three-member Pupil Placement Board that would determine which school a student would attend. The decision of these Boards was based almost entirely on race. Another facet of these laws was the creation of tuition grants which could be given to students so they could attend a private school of their choice; again, in practice, this meant support of all-white schools that appeared as a response to forced integration (the "segregation academies"
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Later in 1956, the NAACP then filed lawsuits around the state in response to these laws in an attempt to force integration of Virginia schools. By 1958, things had come to a head. Federal courts ordered public schools in Warren County, the cities of Charlottesville and Norfolk and Arlington County to integrate."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_resistance
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