College
Buchtel College of Arts and Sciences
Date of Last Revision
2025-12-11 06:48:05
Major
History
Honors Course
HIST 492
Number of Credits
6
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Date of Expected Graduation
Fall 2025
Abstract
This paper traces the rhetoric of “states’ rights,” “local control,” and “parental rights” as evolving tools for shaping American public education. Using legal, political, and cultural sources, it constructs a historical timeline that shows how this rhetoric transformed from an explicit defense of segregation into a central weapon in contemporary culture wars. I begin with the post–Brown v. Board of Education era and Massive Resistance of the 1950s and 60s, when Southern officials deployed states’ rights language to resist desegregation and recast segregationist goals as “local control” and “freedom of choice.” I then examine how these arguments persisted through the 1970s, in the battles over busing and the infamous textbook wars of the era. Next, I trace how the Reagan administration and the Religious Right of the 1990s nationalized this vocabulary, embedding “parental rights” and educational choice in a broader conservative project. The paper then follows this rhetorical lineage into twenty-first-century conflicts over evolution, LGBTQ+ inclusion, modern book bans, and Critical Race Theory. I conclude by linking this history to current fights over DEI, arguing that today’s “culture wars” surrounding education are the culmination of a decades-long conservative strategy to redefine the purpose and power of public schools.
Research Sponsor
Kevin F. Kern
First Reader
Gregory Wilson
Second Reader
Stephen L. Harp
Honors Faculty Advisor
Michael Levin
Proprietary and/or Confidential Information
No
Recommended Citation
Wright, Halle, "From Segregation to Censorship: The Evolution of "States’ Rights" in Shaping American Educational Policy and Its Role in Contemporary Culture Wars" (2025). Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects. 2062.
https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/honors_research_projects/2062