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]