William G. Thomas III, The Border South

If the sectional crisis helped define the Border South and the Civil War tested its loyalties, the region's role in the struggles over civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s cast it again as definitively southern and at the same time set apart from the Lower South. The litigation of cases to the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education included four cases from the Border region out of the five total cases. The NAACP's strategy targeted the Border South and the cases emerged from the District of Columbia, Virginia, Kansas, Delaware, and South Carolina.

Reactions to the Brown v. Board of Education decision showed the Border region's complex and contingent place as a deeply Southern area divided by competing loyalties and interests. White political leaders in Virginia, in particular, attempted to lead the South in "massive resistance" to school desegregation. They called for Virginia to take the kind of leadership that it had demonstrated for the South in the Civil War and conjured up images of the state standing like a "stone wall" in resisting desegregation. Virginia closed schools rather than integrate them, Delaware's Sussex County entrenched in its effort to resist Brown, and Maryland's black and white residents in the Eastern Shore town of Cambridge fought a wild, armed battle in the summer of 1963 over civil rights, shooting at one another from windows across streets until the Governor ordered in the National Guard to restore order.

Yet, the Border region in the 1950s and 60s was clearly connected into national networks of economy, media, finance, and government in ways that contributed to the crisis' resolution. Naval bases in Maryland and Virginia represented massive federal power in the region, not to mention federal dollars and jobs. Businessmen were dubious of school closings and other drastic measures, seeing them as disasters for regional economic development.

Recently, Kevin Phillips has argued that the Border region is critical to any understanding of the American Civil War since it comprised over half the states and two-thirds the population of the country. The historical geographer D. W. Menig also considers the region worthy of greater analysis since it so clearly defies the Mason-Dixon Line's neat division between North and South and instead shows how fragmented the eventual tear between the sections was. No simple map depicts the Border South's divided loyalties and cross-sectional ties.