The Southern Case for School Segregation

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
James Jackson Kilpatrick
The Crowell-Collier Press
First Crowell-Collier Press Edition 1962
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-17492 Copyright © 1962 by The Crowell-Collier Publishing Company All Rights Reserved Hecho en los E.E.U.U. Printed in the United States of America
May it please the court :
When this book was conceived, it was intended to be titled “U.S. v. the South: A Brief for the Defense,” but it seemed a cumbersome title and the finished work is not, of course, a brief for the South in any lawyer’s sense of the word. It is no more than an extended personal essay, presented in this form because the relationship that exists between the rest of the country and the South, in the area of race relations, often has the aspect of an adversary proceeding. We of the South see ourselves on the defensive, and we frequently find ourselves, as lawyers do, responding in terms of the law and the evidence.
It is an unpleasant position for the South, which regards itself as very much a part of the American Republic, and it is an uncomfortable position also: We find ourselves defending certain actions and attitudes that to much of the country, and to much of the world, appear indefensible; some times we are unsure just what it is we are defending, or why we are defending it. We would like to think more upon these questions, but in this conflict there seldom seems to be time for thought or for understanding on either side. When one side is crying “bigot!” and the other is yelling “hypocrite!,” an invitation to sit down and reason together is not likely to draw the most cordial response.
This brief for the South, as any brief must be, necessarily is a partisan pleading. My thought is to present the South’s case (with a few digressions, irrelevancies, reminiscences, obscurities, and mean digs thrown in), but I hope to present it fairly, and without those overtones of shrill partisanship that drown out the voice of reason altogether. And it seems to me, if the suggestion may be advanced with due modesty, that a Virginia Conservative is perhaps in an unusually advantageous position to write such a brief. By tradition, inheritance, geography, and every intangible of the spirit, Virginia is part of the South. The Old Dominion, indeed, is much closer to the “Old South” than, say, North Carolina or Florida. Richmond was for four years the capital of a de facto nation, the Confederate States of America; to this day, our children play soldier in the trenches and romp happily on the breastworks left from the bloody conflict in which the CSA were vanquished. The Confederacy, the War, the legacy of Lee—these play a role in Virginia’s life that continues to mystify, to entrance, sometimes to repel the visitor to the State. Virginia’s “Southernness” reaches to the bone and marrow of this metaphysical concept; and if Virginia perhaps has exhibited more of the better and gentler aspects of the South, and fewer of the meaner and more violent aspects, we nevertheless have shared the best and the worst with our sister States. On questions of race relations, of school segregation, of a modus vivendi tolerable to black and white alike, Virginia’s views have been predominantly the South’s views.