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.