THE EMERGENCE OF PATTERNS
So strongly drawn is the line between the two races ... and so strengthened by the form of habit and education, that ... no power on earth can overcome the difficulty.—John C. Calhoun.
The May 17, 1954, decision of the Supreme Court in the school segregation cases issued in a new era in race relations in the South. From this point onward the race issue centered on public school integration. Reaction to the ruling tended to vary in proportion to the percentage of Negroes in the local population. Some border areas began preparations for compliance; the deep South was defiant. South Carolina, with a high percentage of Negro population (between 35 and 40 percent) and with a strong master-servant tradition governing its race relations, was among the most intransigent of the deep South states. Few white South Carolinians were willing even to consider compliance with the decision as being among the possible solutions to the segregation problem.
The Clarendon verdict momentarily stunned the white citizenry of South Carolina. Though politicians and their allies in the “power structure” of the state quickly warmed to their traditional thespian role of championing white supremacy and competed in lambasting the Court and the decision, the general public was slow in grasping its full implications. It was this seeming state of indecision that misled those moderates who were willing to go ahead and at least try school integration. The majesty of a Supreme Court decision lent conviction that little needed to be done and in any event there was no sense in antagonizing one’s neighbors. As a consequence the moderates rested on their oars and did virtually nothing to help prepare the way for the implementation of the Court’s ruling. This was a tragic error. But in retrospect and admittedly with the benefit of historical hindsight, it was no more an error than the Court’s allowing the Clarendon County officials an unspecified length of time to achieve integration. Had the Court ordered immediate integration, compliance might well have been forthcoming since at the time there was no alternative course of action. As was, the Court allowed the Clarendon officials time to develop stalling tactics and the state to adopt a public policy which together have been successful in preventing even one Negro child from entering a white public school in South Carolina.
Official reaction to the decision was universally condemnatory. Governor James F. Byrnes was “shocked” to learn that the Court had overthrown the Plessy doctrine. The late Senator Burnet R. Maybank labeled the ruling “a shameful political edict rather than a judicial decision.” The Court made the ruling, he asserted, only “under the duress” of Chief Justice Earl Warren and Attorney General Herbert Brownell. Had the Democrats been in power, the decision would never have been made. Senator Olin D. Johnston, too, saw the fine Venetian hands of Warren and Brownell in the decision which he described as “a flagrant, direct appeal for the political favor of minority groups.” He deplored the Court’s “radical departure from the well-reasoned” separate-but-equal doctrine as being written largely by “subversive groups.”[74]
Senator J. Strom Thurmond was, if anything, even more critical. Blaming the decision on “pressure and power politics,” he termed it “one of the worst ever handed down by any court ... in this country.” Most of the authorities cited by the Court, he said, “were either members of Communist-front organizations” or their loyalty was “in serious question.” Broadening his attack, Thurmond declared that integration was “impractical, illogical, and unconstitutional” and undesired by white people or “good Negro people” of the South. The trouble came from “outside agitators” who were stirring up Negroes with discrimination charges.[75]
Similarly, Attorney General T. C. Callison saw “no constitutional authority, no statutory authority, no judicial precedent, no reason and no justice in that decision.” Callison, a small town lawyer, described Gunnar Myrdal, “the principal authority” used by the Court, as “a foreign Socialist, with no first hand knowledge of conditions in the South.” Many of Myrdal’s “collaborators” in the writing of An American Dilemma were allegedly “members of Communist front organizations.”[76]
In sharp contrast to the comments of the state’s leading political figures was the reaction of James M. Hinton, state NAACP president. Hinton believed that there was “no place in a democracy, and certainly not in the Christian church, for segregation.” Both whites and Negroes of South Carolina, he thought, would accept “any decision from the U. S. Supreme Court.”[77]
The press was no less critical than the politicians. The Charleston News and Courier was especially outspoken. This paper attacked the decision on several grounds. It gave new meaning to the Constitution; “drove another nail into the coffin of states rights;” consisted of a “sociological finding, as contrasted with an affirmation of the law;” constituted an abridgement of “the freedom of white people;” repealed and outlawed laws and customs that were “older than the Republic;” and was the result of packing the Supreme Court “to represent the New-Fair Deal viewpoint” to the exclusion of the “States Rights viewpoint.” Noting the embarrassingly favorable reaction to the decision throughout the non-Southern part of the country and the world, the News and Courier asserted that the only ones “unhappy” with the ruling were “white Southerners ... and the rank and file of self-respecting Negroes,” who were “not interested in being compelled to associate with one another.” While Editor Thomas R. Waring’s paper urged “wisdom and tolerance,” it opposed “cowardice” on the part of Southerners.[78]
The Columbia Record was more realistic. Southerners should not have been surprised by the Supreme Court’s “bouleversement on segregation,” said Editor Buchanan, because such a decision was the logical result of previous cases affecting graduate and professional levels of education. It was based “not upon law but upon sociology and psychology, so-called social sciences which true scientists agree today are not scientific.” The opinion was “a sociological interpretation of the Constitution” and segregation was “sociologically, not legally ... unconstitutional, null and void.” The Court was guilty of getting “too far ahead too fast of public opinion in the South.” The Justices might have held that segregation per se was inequality, suggested the Record, but then concluded that because of “the cultural, health, and other differences between children of the two races and in the preponderance of Negroes in its school population” the Clarendon district had problems which would make integration “harmful, psychologically and sociologically.” The capital city paper, a strong supporter of President Eisenhower, took issue with those who blamed or credited the decision on the Republican administration. Buchanan insisted that the decision was a Democratic ruling eight to one, since Eisenhower had appointed only one justice to the Court. In seeking to absolve Chief Justice Warren of responsibility, the Record declared with a good deal of truth that there were “some indications” that the case had been decided before Warren’s appointment.[79] The editor of the Record refused to concede that what was involved was an “American” decision rather than either a Republican or a Democratic one.
The Anderson Independent likewise stressed the non-legal nature of the Court’s action. Taking exactly the opposite direction from the Record, the upcountry paper said that the decision, which combined “a bit of law along with large doses of psychology and sociology,” was not unexpected in view of the pro-integration policies of the Republican administration. It conveniently ignored the attitude of the national Democratic Party toward the segregation issue. Decision or no decision, said the Independent, the races would “not be mixed in South Carolina schools today, tomorrow, next year or in the years to come.”[80]
Only the Florence Morning News admitted the end of school segregation in South Carolina a probability. On the day following the decision, Editor Jack H. O’Dowd announced, prematurely to be sure, that “segregation is ended in Southern schools.” He then added, “It can be assumed that South Carolina, in the immediate future, is to have integrated schools, or no public schools.... The question is no longer whether or not segregation is proper, the present question is what the state is to do in the face of the Court’s decision.” Within a year, however, the Florence editor saw the South Carolina light, or felt the intolerably hot breath of the white population on his neck, and became more critical of the decision. In April, 1955, he chastised the Court for having “swapped law and legal tradition for ... warped ideas of sociology” which only endangered the “medium through which the Negro has made his greatest gains—public education.”[81]
White South Carolinians generally were no less antagonistic toward the decision than their political leaders and newspapers. W. D. Workman, Jr., the News and Courier correspondent in Columbia, thought the Court was more concerned with the Southern Negro than his white neighbor. And this in spite of the fact that the latter had always relied upon the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution “rather than upon the changing social and political standards of a polyglot nation.” Southerners, boasted this young apostle of the old order, “have been and still are, closer by blood, by belief, and by behavior to the framers of those two documents than are persons of any other section of the country.”[82] L. B. McCord, the Clarendon County school superintendent and former Presbyterian minister, thought the decision “one of the worst things that has happened in this century,” endangering as it did “the splendid relation” which had previously existed between the races “in this good old Southland.”[83]
Stanley F. Morse, president of the Charleston Grass Roots League, a white supremacy organization, viewed the decision as “just another successful step in the Red Revolution against the United States,” marking “the attainment of one of the objectives of the Communist drive among U. S. Negroes started in 1920.” The fact that the decision was unanimous was “indicative of powerful pressure on the Court by ‘liberal’ politicians and Marxian Socialist conspirators.” In a similar manner another Charleston man, Huger Sinkler, attorney and former state legislator, considered the decision to be “but another aftermath to Appomattox.” He believed that
... the authors of this latest outrage are as deeply imbued with hatred for our Southern customs as was Thaddeus Stevens. And, unfortunately, in both periods, we find as President a man whose decisions are obviously made for him by others.
In the case of Grant, it was the man with the mulatto mistress, Thaddeus Stevens, and the small corps of abolitionists. In the instance of Eisenhower, it would appear to be Dewey, Brownell and Dulles, men whose political ambitions lead them to pose as friends of the underprivileged, and, in the case of Dewey, a man with an open hatred for the South....
Reconstruction days were harsh, but, notwithstanding the scalawags, the carpetbaggers and the federal bayonet, the basic principles for which the South fought were not destroyed.
Today, we face a similar challenge. Perhaps, if we have the strength of character, exhibited by the generation preceding, the dawn of a new 1876 will arrive.[84]
The reaction of the white people of Clarendon County to the decision, according to Record reporter Carlton Truax, a former missionary, ranged from “resignation to bitterness and violent rebellion.” A minority “fringe group” openly expressed the opinion that blood would flow if Negroes sought admission in white Clarendon schools. Truax found “much bitterness, some deep frustration and often a sense of helplessness.” At a meeting held in June, 1955, approximately 350 white residents of the Summerton school district agreed that the schools should be kept open only until the courts ordered the admission of a Negro pupil to the white school.[85] The white Clarendon community had decided that segregation was more important than education.
Reaction to the implementing decision of May 31, 1955, was less critical than that of the earlier ruling. The Columbia Record considered the Court’s plan to remand the cases to lower courts a partial Southern victory even though the justices failed to change their original decision. Similarly the Florence Morning News saw “some small comfort” for the South in the Court’s failure to establish a deadline for compliance. In a more critical mood, the Anderson Independent declared that “the poison prescribed when the Supreme Court wrote new law into the Constitution last year is no less deadly offered in the small doses as now directed.” The Charleston News and Courier believed that the Court’s “as soon as practicable” meant “never at all.”[86]
Attorney General T. C. Callison, speaking for the state leaders, termed the implementing decision “quite unsatisfactory.” He asserted once again that integration in South Carolina would “bring about every condition which will create a breeding bed for communism.”[87]
An outgrowth of the Supreme Court’s invalidation of segregation in the public schools was increased criticism of the Court itself. Extremists expressed scorn for the Court as an instrument of government; others urged the Court’s powers be curbed by Congress. Senator Thurmond maintained that the members of the Court were “not worthy to wear the robes of their high office.” James H. Hammond, former state senator and direct lineal descendant of the ante-bellum United States senator of “Cotton is King” fame, called the justices “a bunch of skunks.” At a rally at Laurens, E. L. Edwards, the Grand Dragon of the national Ku Klux Klan, referred to the “nine buzzards on the Supreme Court.” State Representative George Harrell of Florence County introduced into the state legislature a resolution which urged Congress to investigate the Court for “attempting to enact and enforce as law the sociological concepts of its members.”[88]
According to the News and Courier the Court had become “an instrument to uphold the right of Big Government to slap down state and individual rights.” It was more concerned with “the rights of leftist labor officials and Communist editors” than “the rights of white Southerners.” And it had degenerated into a mere political arm of the Eisenhower administration. Indirectly accusing the President of court-packing in the appointment of John Marshall Harlan, the News and Courier peevishly declared that “a suitable man could have been found whose grandfather had not been the only dissenter to the basic (Plessy-Ferguson) decision in the 1896 issue.”[89] The need of the country, said the Record, was “a Supreme Court in the pre-New Deal tradition, one of integrity, stability, learning and judicial outlook.” Unfortunately neither national party offered hope in this area. Warren was “a political appointment” and on the Court he had been a “political Chief Justice.”[90] No less critical of the Court, the Independent suggested that the justices would be less subject to “political pressures” and “radical departures” if they were appointed not for life but for specified terms.[91] The Columbia State, not to be undone, opined that the popularity of the Supreme Court among “sound thinking people seems to resemble that of measles.” It asserted on another occasion that the Court had rather “meander through Myrdalism than precedents.”[92]
Congressman Robert J. Ashmore, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, criticized the Court for a long line of “foolish, unconstitutional and un-American” decisions. Sooner or later, he asserted, Congress would realize that the real aim of the justices was “to set up their socialistic ideas as supreme.” In like manner Representative William Jennings Bryan Dorn accused the Court of degenerating into a mere “rubber stamp” for the Eisenhower administration.[93]
Former Justice James F. Byrnes spoke for states righters who would curb the powers of the Court as a means of halting “creeping centralism.” Holding the desegregation decision an amendment to rather than an interpretation of the Constitution, Byrnes criticized the Court for impairing “progress and ... freedom,” undoing the South’s “steadily advancing racial amity,” and undermining the Constitution. He blamed the decision on political factors and attempted to discredit the sources cited in the Court’s opinion. The one-time New Dealer quoted Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi as authority for the statement that the files of the House Un-American Activities Committee were “replete with citations and information” concerning Theodore Brameld and E. Franklin Frazier, whose studies were considered by the Court. Allegedly, the files contained “18 citations of Frazier’s connections with Communist causes in the United States.” Byrnes was especially critical of the use of Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. He branded as obviously false Myrdal’s statement that “in the South the Negro’s person and property are practically subject to the whim of any white person who wishes to take advantage of him or to punish him for any real or fancied wrongdoing or insult.” Removed from the bench and no longer the wearer of the judicial ermine, Byrnes stated flatly that the only solution to such a situation was to limit the authority of the Court. The trend toward centralization of government powers in Washington, said the ex-War Mobilizer, was bringing “joy to the Communists and their fellow travelers, for they could more easily influence one government” than forty-eight.[94]
Illustrative of the widespread opposition to the Court and its anti-segregation decisions was a resolution signed by 52 prominent white South Carolinians and circulated throughout the state for signature by other Carolinians. All the original signers of this resolution could be included in the State’s “power structure.” The more outstanding included E. H. Agnew, Eugene S. Blease, Robert R. Coker, Rev. Edward B. Guerry, R. Beverly Herbert, Col. Wyndham M. Manning, Thomas H. Pope, Herbert Ravenel Sass, Ellison D. Smith, Jr., Farley Smith, the Rt. Rev. Albert S. Thomas, Ransome J. Williams and William D. Workman, Jr. These people, said the News and Courier, “are not crackpots, extremists, Klansmen, rightists or leftists. They are largely middle-of-the-roaders. They are intelligent white men. They are leaders in law, clergy, business, farming, education, and politics of our state. In other words, they are a cross section of the better-class moderate, white people of South Carolina.”[95]
The “Committee of 52” resolved that the Supreme Court relied “not upon the body of established American law, but upon the dubious conclusions of sociologists and psychologists whose number includes persons tainted with Communism;” that pressure from the NAACP and other “self-serving organizations” had “lowered the will of politicians and the public generally to resist encroachments upon the sovereign rights of states;” and that such pressure was endangering both “the public school system of South Carolina and the harmonious relationship between the white and Negro races.” Therefore, the resolution urged the state legislature to take such steps as “may be necessary or desirable to interpose the sovereignty of the State of South Carolina between Federal courts and local school officials.”[96] The petitioners had some initial success and within a week 7,000 persons had reportedly signed the resolution. However, this movement soon lost its drive and produced no tangible results.
As already observed, one of the tactics most widely used by the segregationists was ridicule and disparagement of the Court’s use of sociological and psychological authority. W. D. Workman, Jr., some fifty years behind the times, spoke of the “new school of sociological jurisprudence.” If Negro children required the company of white children “to fully develop personality and education,” he wrote, then South Carolina needed help because in some areas there weren’t “enough white folks to go around.” In a heavy handed attempt at facetiousness, he suggested that the Supreme Court set up the number of white and colored children necessary to form an acceptable classroom situation. In like vein, the Record complained that “nobody knows what the law is today or what it will be tomorrow with a Supreme Court making its decisions on whim, fancy or pseudo sociology.”[97]
The News and Courier, which shudders at all innovations, was critical of the Court’s emphasis on “psychiatry.” The injection of psychiatry into the controversy brought a letter to the editor from Dr. Norton Williams, a Charleston psychiatrist, who felt that the Supreme Court had “used unwise judgment” and accepted “bad advice” from the psychiatrists who testified in the Clarendon case. “False interpretations” of psychiatry “in the hands of some psychiatrists with misguided motivations” would lead to “unhappy situations” such as the anti-segregation riots in Delaware and Tennessee. Many psychiatrists, according to Williams, “using good, profound psychiatric principles,” realized the need for maintaining segregation. The Negro, a member of a culturally inferior race, was not yet ready for integration. Until he had developed his own culture he would remain unready. To force integration suddenly would make the Negro feel “inferior, hostile, or defiantly competitive.”[98]
Only on the rarest of occasions did a white South Carolinian speak out in favor of the decision of the Supreme Court. On one such occasion H. B. Clark of Charleston, in a letter to the News and Courier, criticized the white man’s “conception of the Negro as something slightly subhuman, a sort of beast of burden for the exploitation of the white man.” He declared that
All the restrictions upon economic and educational opportunity, all the degrading Jim Crow laws which we impose upon the Negro say, in effect, “We no longer own you as slaves, but we are determined to keep you in a subordinate position in our society, and to impress upon you in a thousand small ways every day that you are an inferior race.” Now the justices of the Supreme Court are not black-hearted villains who have sold their souls to the devil of political expediency; on the contrary, they are simply nine Americans honest enough to face inescapable conflict between these undemocratic values of the South and the principles of equality and freedom on which the Constitution is based, and courageous enough to proclaim the necessity of eliminating this paradoxical state of affairs no matter what the cost in terms of readjustment of traditional thinking.[99]
II
White South Carolinians, regarding integration with outright disdain and horror, advance many arguments in defense of segregation. These range from temporary expediency to the fear of “mongrelization” and ultimate extinction of the white race. Running parallel is the constant reiteration that segregation, which allegedly provides separate-but-equal facilities, is of greater advantage to the Negro than to the white. Such a view, to be sure, runs completely counter to the assertion of President Truman’s committee on civil rights which said in 1948 that segregation had become “the cornerstone of an elaborate structure of discrimination.” Separate-but-equal arguments, declared the committee, were the basis for “one of the outstanding myths of American history;” while facilities were indeed separate they were far from equal.[100] In defending segregation white South Carolinians are far less concerned with the equal than with the separate.
Arguments against racial integration indicate a frank belief in the inherent superiority of the white race. In a widely read article in Harper’s magazine, Thomas R. Waring argued against integration on the following grounds: (1) The incidence of venereal diseases was higher among Negroes. (2) The cultural home environment of Negroes was inferior. (3) Marital habits among many Southern Negroes were “to state it mildly, casual.” (4) Crime was more prevalent among Negroes. (5) The intellectual development of Negro school children was generally below that of their white counterparts.[101] The late Herbert Ravenel Sass, a well known Charleston author, got down to Freudian bedrock in stating that fear of intermarriage was the most important factor in Southern opposition to racial integration. In an article in the Atlantic Monthly, he asserted that “it is the deep conviction of nearly all white Southerners in the states which have large Negro populations, that the mingling or integration of white and Negro children in the South’s primary schools would open the gates to miscegenation and wide-spread racial amalgamation.” He claimed that there was “almost no hatred of the Negro” nor was there anything that could “accurately be called race prejudice” in South Carolina. In a skillful display of semantic gymnastics, he held the desire for segregation to be based on “race preference.”[102]
In rebuttal to Sass, Harvard historian Oscar Handlin declared that statistics indicated that the growth of equality between the races did not increase the rate of intermarriage. Historically racial “miscegenation” had been the “direct product of the inferiority of Negro women.” The extent of “miscegenation” varied directly in proportion to the degree of that inferiority. The idea that Negroes were eager to marry whites, he said, was “a delusion born of the white’s own vanity and of his ignorance of the real sentiments of his fellow Americans of another color.”[103]
Answering criticisms such as those of Handlin the News and Courier replied: “The separation of races in public schools, in the circumstances that exist in South Carolina, is necessary. It is not evil or immoral. It does not deprive Negroes of their rights. It does protect the rights of white people. Arguments to the contrary usually stem from ignorance. Firm decent resistance in the end will win.” The paper branded integrationists as “Meddlesome Matties” who were interfering with a custom “older than the Republic.” Only in the last few years had “native born Americans ... learned from the NAACP and the eggheads that a traditionally American practice was un-American.”[104]
The Record considered segregation a modus vivendi which enabled the two races to live together until a more suitable solution could be evolved. Such would result only from a long and slow process of education in which racial prejudice would be wiped out.[105]
The attitude of Morning News Editor O’Dowd was highly ambivalent. Four days before the Court’s original decision he had declared that segregation traditionally had been “a social, economic and political expedient” which had no “moral justification.” Yet he believed the institution continued to be necessary. Three months later he described segregation as “a benevolent and paternal social order,” which “has not been a matter of expediency.” Under O’Dowd’s successor, James A. Rogers, the Morning News moved nearer the position of the Record and the News and Courier. In his first editorial comment on the problem, Rogers stated his “sincere belief” that segregation was practiced in the best interest of both races. Under such circumstances segregation was “not an evil scheme to keep the Negro in subjection but a high road” along which the Negro could “achieve maximum development in an atmosphere without tension or ill will.” A suitable solution to the problem of integration, Rogers thought, would come only after “education, education, education for a period of generations, and patience, the practice of tolerance and the willingness to wait until the alchemy of good will has done its work.”[106] Such a proposal meant postponing integration indefinitely.
Amongst individual white South Carolinians much the same attitudes prevailed. Governor George Bell Timmerman, Jr., indignantly contended that “any statement that our law is inherently unequal is inherently untrue.” Lieutenant Governor Ernest F. Hollings, young, handsome and ambitious, told the Lions Club of Florence that he did not know anyone who believed in “any prejudice on account of race.” Segregation was based on “history, culture and economic background” rather than race prejudice. Former Governor Byrnes told the Sumter Kiwanis Club that segregation arose not from “petty prejudice” but from “an instinctive desire for the preservation of our race.”[107]
Other South Carolinians expressed these sentiments in greater or lesser degree. Charles D. Haigh of Florence pleaded with “white American fathers” to guard their “defenseless children” against all attempts at integration. Criticizing any moderate approach, he recognized only two alternatives—“segregation or integration and eventual mongrelization of the races.” Should the latter alternative come to pass there would be “no ‘Star Spangled Banner’ as a national anthem, but more than likely some such song as, ‘Rest your li’l kinky head upon my breast, w’suns is all alike.’”[108] Similarly, Gilbert Wilkes of the Charleston suburb of Mt. Pleasant had not taught his children “any prejudices against other races” except insofar as “racial purity” was concerned. In keeping his children free from prejudice he imparted to them “the knowledge that God chose members of the white race as his chosen people and then colored the others.”[109]
III
The course of race relations in the state during the period following the court decision was indicative of the moves and counter moves by the proponents and opponents of integration. Segregationists were unanimous in asserting that race relations had been harmonious in the state in the days before the “agitation” began. Historically, said the News and Courier, “whites and Negroes have got along with a minimum of friction in the South.” Likewise, “the South was making rapid progress toward elimination of racial prejudice,” claimed the Record. “There was sympathy and understanding among whites for Negroes in the South.” This era of good will allegedly had been overturned by those who would force integration on an unwilling South. For the “cold war” between the races, full responsibility rested with the “titular Negro leadership.”[110]
During the year between the original ruling and the implementation decree there was little outward evidence that relations between the races had changed appreciably. Each side appeared to be awaiting final action by the Court before digging in and taking its stand. Abruptly in the summer of 1955 the situation changed. The implementing ruling came on the last day of May. Almost at once there followed such “overt actions as the filing of NAACP-sponsored integration petitions.” In response, the whites organized the Citizens Councils which employed or threatened to employ the economic boycott as a means of ending the attempts by Negroes to secure school integration. The most notable example of the economic boycott in action came in the city of Orangeburg in 1955-56. Orangeburg Negroes retaliated in kind and relations between the races deteriorated generally, remaining at their lowest between the summers of 1955 and 1956. The New York Times, in surveying race relations in early 1956, noted this retrogradation. So did the News and Courier’s W. D. Workman, Jr., who reported “a massive deterioration of the racial amity which had been developing and increasing between whites and Negroes.” “Distrust, suspicion and growing bitterness” had supplanted good will. By the following December, when the full implications of the boycott were felt and realized by both whites and Negroes, Workman noted that relations between the races seemed “considerably more tranquil” than a year earlier. He observed that while neither side had compromised “its adamant position,” each was attempting to soft-pedal the issue.[111]
A few whites, by indirection, conceded that the “mutual respect and affection” which allegedly had traditionally characterized the relations between the races in South Carolina resulted from the Negro’s submission, in the face of overpowering odds, to a modus vivendi dictated by the white man. Dr. E. E. Colvin, pastor of the Immanuel Baptist Church of Orangeburg, thought segregation had been a success even if the South “used to have an occasional lynching. Almost invariably the Negro who was lynched had committed some terrible crime.” By contrast, “up North where they don’t have segregation they have a race riot every once in a while.” Similarly, Dr. J. G. McMaster of Kingstree wrote that “whites have sometimes taken advantage of colored but that can be expected and on the other hand, Negroes are less honest with each other than are whites with them.”[112]
IV
Public spokesmen offer many answers to the school integration question. The press of the state constantly urges “patience and forbearance;” “calm, careful consideration, hard thinking and studied action;” “calm, reasonable, and foresighted” actions; “cool calculation, searching forethought;” “restraint and common sense;” “planning, ... determination, perhaps ... cunning;” and “calm and wise decisions.”
Of the many proposals for circumventing the Court’s decision, voluntary segregation is the most popular. Morning News Editor Rogers thought it represented the “ultimate answer to the problem.” The News and Courier believed that “of all the approaches ... now uppermost in the minds of South Carolinians, the voluntary selection of schools by patrons according to their own race keeps recurring as the most reasonable.” Former Governor Byrnes stated that “the hope” of the South was voluntary segregation.[113] Proposals for voluntary segregation, of course, contain no provision for Negro parents who desire integrated schools for their children.
The News and Courier has been a consistent advocate of voluntary segregation. In defending this approach, the Charleston paper said:
Happiness cannot be measured in worldly goods, nor social position, nor many of the things that some of us hold too dear. Contentment is necessary for true happiness....
Too many people of all races and stations in life seem dissatisfied with things as they are. While ambition and the go-getter spirit are praiseworthy, whining for “equal treatment”—which often means excuse for shortcomings—should not be a part of a person’s equipment. Merit has a way of being recognized.
Too many people—both white and Negro—are trying to bite off more of life than they can chew. Not everyone is qualified to take a place in the front rank. Instead of being angry, they would do themselves a favor by adopting a philosophical attitude. Instead some persons dissatisfied with their own accomplishments demand a change in government, in economic laws, in the rules of society.[114]
Another solution is the migration of the Negroes to non-Southern parts of the United States, thus relieving “the pressure of numbers” on the black belt areas of the South. This proposal represents a revival of the pre-Civil War suggestion that the free Negro should be returned to Africa. But in 1955 even the News and Courier conceded that “migration to Africa seems no longer feasible.” In a letter to the editor of the paper W. W. Bragg of Columbia offered concrete proposals to encourage migration. He urged that the state provide each Negro desiring to migrate with a small sum of money—$100 to $200—and pay his transportation expenses. The Negro would be required to “go to a State in the North,” and agree not to return to South Carolina for five years. In the long run this would be cheaper for the state, argued Bragg, because the Negro paid much less money in taxes than the value he received in state services.[115]
The South Carolina Farm Bureau Federation and its president, E. H. Agnew of Starr, also advanced proposals for the continuation of segregation. Agnew, who strongly opposed “this dastardly thing of forced integration,” summarized what he considered to be the views of farmers in the state: “The farm people of South Carolina, both white and colored, are bitterly opposed to such a program as the Supreme Court outlines. They earnestly desire both separate schools and a continued relationship of peace and harmony but they are determined that this vile thing shall be circumvented. They want neither abolition of public schools nor do they want a shotgun solution to the problem but if worst must come they are ready for either or both.”[116]
In a booklet entitled “Education and Race Relations” distributed to its 20,000 members, the Farm Bureau proposed the development of a “co-racial program” of separate but equal schools. By co-racial the Bureau meant “equal status, equal opportunity and self-determination.” If facilities were truly equal, contended the Bureau, there would be “more gracious acceptance” of segregation by both races and “no white or Negro child” would be “forced to attend a school of mixed races, unwillingly.” Since segregation would, under these circumstances, be maintained voluntarily both the spirit and the letter of the court decision would be observed. The success of this program would depend on voluntary acceptance by both races. Again significantly, no provision was made to accommodate those pupils seeking integrated schools.[117]
The Record’s proposals merit special attention since in reality they cracked the door to school integration. It recommended a system (consequently adopted in part in North Carolina) which would allow Negroes in “a few rare instances” to attend white schools. Such a system, which would have assigned pupils to schools on factors other than race, would comply with the Court’s decision and at the same time maintain segregation almost 100 percent intact. Under the system “an occasional white pupil” would have to be assigned to a Negro school. The Record also recommended repeal of all of South Carolina’s segregation laws as a means of removing the basis for further court rulings against the state.[118]
The Independent, though less concerned with the segregation issue, had its own homespun suggestions as to how to circumvent the Court. Comparing resistance to integration with opposition to the Eighteenth Amendment, it suggested that the time might come “when segregated education will be ‘bootlegged’ and when federal agents, slinking behind hedges, will try to follow little Johnny to the ‘speakeasy’ school.” However, there would be plenty of old timers who could give Johnny “some valuable tips on how to confound the revenooers.”[119]
Not a few urged defiance to the point of violence in resistance to integration. Others, less extreme in their utterances, helped create a climate of disrespect for the segregation decision which made defiance easier. “Because the Supreme Court has spoken we should not submit without resistance,” said Senator Thurmond. South Carolinians, he added, “must resist integration by every legal means harder than the integrationists fought to end segregation.” The News and Courier asserted that “the will to resist goes deep into the fabric of the Southern people. They do not intend to yield their principles so long as they draw breath.” Commenting on the integration violence in Clinton, Tennessee, it declared that “organized rebellion at the local level” was “a wasteful and disturbing means of dealing with government.” But Southern states should not “give an inch in standing up to the federal government.”[120]
Despite the intransigent opposition that had developed to integration in the state and the South generally by the summer of 1955, W. D. Workman, Jr., despaired of the “blight of submissiveness” which the Court decision had spread over the land. The “cry of surrender” by those who would accept the decision as law did not “fit well into the traditional pattern of American resistance to dictation,” he declared.[121] A number of letters to the editor of the News and Courier were of the same opinion.
Occasional outbreaks of violence have come in South Carolina as a result of the integration “agitation.” These have been rare, however; the threat of violence was usually sufficient. The most prominent case of violence involved the Reverend J. A. DeLaine, an African Methodist Episcopal Church minister[122] and leader of one of the organizations sponsoring the school case from Clarendon County, where he had a pastorate. Later he was transferred to Lake City. DeLaine’s church in Lake City was destroyed by a fire of undetermined origin; his home was pelted with rocks, fruits and other objects from passing automobiles. On one occasion DeLaine, claiming that the occupants of a passing automobile had fired gunshots into his home, shot back. Two of the men were slightly injured by metal fragments from the car. The men in the car maintained that they had not fired and were in fact unarmed. As a result of this incident DeLaine fled to New York City, seeking refuge with an AME bishop. In South Carolina he was indicted for assault with intent to kill. Federal authorities took no action to return DeLaine to South Carolina. Governor Timmerman, stating that he did not want to give the NAACP another martyr who could be used for fund raising, decided not to press for extradition. South Carolina was well rid of “this professional agitator,” commented Timmerman.
Some two years later DeLaine, interviewed at New Rochelle, N. Y., where he was serving as pastor of the Mount Carmel Church, asserted that his experiences in South Carolina had permanently scarred both him and the members of his family. However, he added: “It’s worth some suffering—it’s even worth a man’s life, if he can start something that will lead to a little more justice for people.... We helped start some things that are bringing a revolution in education for Negroes in South Carolina, in modern schools and bus transportation.” Nor did the minister harbor any ill feelings toward the people of South Carolina. “There are too many good people there, white and colored. But they need to stand up against the hate-mongers,” he declared.[123]
A second notable incident of violence, which took place in December, 1956, involved the flogging of a Camden High School band leader, Guy Hutchins, by six hooded men. According to Hutchins, he was attacked while changing an automobile tire on a lonely road. His assailants accused him of making remarks in favor of racial integration, a charge which Hutchins flatly denied.
Although the Kershaw County grand jury on two different occasions refused to indict six men arrested in connection with the case, many white South Carolinians publicly criticized the incident. The Rev. Stiles B. Lines, pastor of the Camden Episcopal Church of which Hutchins was a member, declared that “fear covers South Carolina like the frost.” Referring to the flogging, he told his parishioners: “Men are afraid to speak. Freedom of speech is almost extinct in South Carolina, except for those who wish to speak in favor of and in accord with the policies of the pressure groups who self-righteously assume that they, and only they, have the answers.”[124]
Criticism of the Hutchins affair was sufficiently widespread to cause the steering committee of the Kershaw County Citizens Council to meet in special session and issue a statement declaring that “unlawful acts of violence, force or intimidation serve only to bring discredit on this community and state, and, insofar as concerns the struggle against integration, the loss of States’ Rights and loss of individual liberties, to cause diversion, dissension and dismay among those who are attempting to maintain our traditional social order and way of life.”
The comments made by South Carolina Circuit Judge G. Duncan Bellinger of Columbia on the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision were an interesting sidelight on the Hutchins incident. They were voiced in his charge to the grand jury considering the indictment of the six men accused of the flogging. Members of the Court, said the judge, had “substituted for legal principles their own personal, social, economic and political ideas, taking away the rights of states, the powers of the departments of the federal government and the rights of individual citizens.” But in urging an indictment of the accused, Bellinger declared that violence would aid only the “scalawags and carpetbaggers” who were seeking to bring about another Reconstruction.[125] By inference the judge considered fighting the “scalawags and carpetbaggers” as important as the rights of individual citizen Guy Hutchins.
Under circumstances and conditions such as those outlined above South Carolina developed its resistance to attempts of the Negro to win integration. The unanimity of opinion among those elements which spoke out on the subject encouraged silence among more moderate persons. Such a situation is further illustrated by a more detailed consideration of the various phases of resistance.