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]