Profile in black and white

by Howard H. Quint

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]