In the arguments before the court, Marshall sought to prove first that the separate school facilities provided Negroes in District 22 were in fact physically unequal and second that segregation per se was discriminatory and therefore a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Inasmuch as school officials readily admitted that the facilities then offered Negroes in Clarendon were unequal, Marshall concentrated on sociological and psychological arguments to support his second contention. He argued that segregation invariably resulted in the development of “psychological roadblocks” which prevented Negro pupils from achieving “full absorption” of the educational process.[54]
To buttress this position, Marshall introduced what the late Walter White, then executive secretary of the NAACP, thought “the most impressive array of authorities ever assembled to testify as experts on the unreasonableness of segregation.” Their arguments, he said, were “irrefutable.”[55] The “experts” were half a dozen social scientists from such universities as Harvard, Columbia, Vassar and Howard. They held that segregation resulted in “discordant” education that caused “moral confusion” for both whites and Negroes. Amongst Negroes it resulted in “a lowering of self-esteem, a strengthening of resentment and hostility” and a personality development that emphasized “a desire to escape or withdraw from social participation.” Amongst white children segregation developed a feeling of guilt caused by their being taught simultaneously both the doctrine of brotherly love and the practice of unbrotherly racial segregation.[56] Segregation was said to be building into the Negro “the very characteristics” which were then used to justify prejudice.
The counter case presented by Clarendon school officials contained three basic points. First, they maintained that segregation per se was not violative of the Fourteenth Amendment as it had been recognized as legal by the courts, Congress and the governments of seventeen states. The only condition that could be legally demanded was that the segregated facilities be substantially equal. Attorney Figg readily admitted that school facilities then being offered Negroes in the county were unequal but asked that the court allow the state a “reasonable” time in which to equalize them. South Carolina, he pointed out, was in the midst of a statewide equalization program. The second argument held that school segregation statutes were “a valid exercise of legislative power,” a matter of state legislative policy rather than of constitutional right. No legal compulsion could oblige a state to accept “scientific opinion” that its school program “must be geared to personality development.” The third contention of appellees was that to disturb drastically the racial status quo in the deep South would produce “dangerous tensions and unrest.” Racially segregated school facilities, Figg insisted, were the “normal” result of a racial conflict heritage in the state of South Carolina.[57]
The court ruled two to one against the appellants. Judges Parker and Timmerman held that segregation per se was not a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. They said, however, that “the educational facilities and opportunities” provided both races “must be equal.” Equality had to be provided “promptly” and “in good faith.” Consequently school officials were directed to report to the court after six months as to what actions were being taken to provide equality. In rejecting Marshall’s line of argumentation the court asserted that judges had “no more right to read their ideas of sociology into the Constitution than their ideas of economics.”
Judge Waring dissented vigorously. The majority opinion, he wrote, was “unreasonable, unscientific, and based on unadulterated prejudice.” He condemned the “sadistic insistence of the ‘white supremacists’ in declaring that their will must be imposed irrespective of rights of other citizens.”[58]
Governor James F. Byrnes hailed the majority ruling upholding school segregation as “unanswerable.” The court’s “well-reasoned opinion,” he maintained, completely vindicated the separate-but-equal doctrine.[59]
II
Only slowly had white South Carolina awakened to the threat to legal school segregation contained in the repeated petitions and suits of Clarendon Negroes. By the time the state legislature convened in January, 1951, the menace was fully realized. A definite fear had developed that the courts might rule in favor of the Negro petitioners. Basis for this fear was a long line of recent United States Supreme Court rulings outlawing segregation in state university graduate and professional schools even when facilities provided Negroes were in fact substantially equal to those for whites. The legislators and other state officials clearly recognized that by no criteria were white and Negro schools even remotely equal, not only in Clarendon but over the entire state. White South Carolina’s only hope, they reasoned, lay in an immediate and far reaching program to provide equal facilities for each race. At the same time certain precautionary measures had to be taken against the possibility that the courts might hold segregation per se illegal.
Leadership in this program fell to Governor James F. Byrnes, who, after a long career in the federal government, including a short period of service on the Supreme Court, had broken with President Truman and the national Democratic Party and had returned to South Carolina to vent his frustration against the national government and the Democratic Party. Elected governor in 1950, he was inaugurated in January, 1951. Almost immediately Byrnes began a long range program which was to provide a basis for the state’s defense of the racial status quo and the doctrine of separate-but-equal schools. The program subsequently was enacted by the 1951 state legislature. The position of Byrnes, as well as that of many of the state’s other leaders, was summarized in a series of the governor’s speeches in early 1951. South Carolina, he announced, would not then “nor for some years to come mix white and colored children” in public schools. To prevent this situation the state would, if necessary, “reluctantly” abandon its public school system. “A lawful way” would be found to educate all children “and at the same time provide separate schools for the races.” While conceding the inferiority of Negro schools, Byrnes insisted that the educational crisis facing the state was caused by “the politicians in Washington and the Negro agitators in South Carolina” seeking to alter the “Southern way of life.” But they would find that “what a Carpetbag government could not do in the Reconstruction period” was likewise impossible in 1951. The governor would protect the “innocent Colored children,” the victims of those elements which sought to end segregation. With a prescience characteristic of white spokesmen for racial separation, he insisted that “the overwhelming majority of colored people in this state” did not want integrated schools. Byrnes denied that new school policies were based on the expediency of necessity rather than on high principle. He righteously observed shortly after the district court ruling that “had there been no suit ... I would have urged this school program to help the white and colored children” of the state.[60]
The most important undertaking in the Byrnes educational approach was the beginning of a tremendous school construction program. The cost was estimated at $75,000,000 though the amount actually spent on the project by 1957 was more than double the original figure. To finance new school construction, Byrnes secured legislative passage of a three percent sales tax.[61] This program, in which more than half the funds were spent for Negro schools, had the result of giving the Negroes better physical school facilities in some localities than those of the whites.