In the movies, said Leroy Hilton, 19, we got to go up to “Buzzards Roost” (the Jim Crow Balcony). When there’s a good picture, we’ll be standing up there even though there’s empty seats downstairs. My feeling is we pay as much, we ought to be able to sit anywhere. Every time I go, I get mad, but I don’t say anything.
I feel insulted every time I got to sit in the back of a Jim Crow bus, said Henrietta. I feel insulted every time I go into the drugstore for ice cream or a soda. All the booths are for whites. We got to have our ice cream out on the hot street. I just wonder what makes them think they’re superior. Sometimes, you walk down the street and white people just look at you scornful. You can feel it.[238]
Statements made by individual Negro leaders and resolutions adopted by various Negro groups reveal a willingness of Negroes generally to follow anti-segregationist leaders. The Progressive Democratic Party, the state’s leading Negro political group, stated that the question was no longer segregation or integration but rather “how best” to accomplish desegregation. The party proposed creation of an inter-racial commission to handle such problems as would arise during the period of integration. The Palmetto Education Association, representing approximately 7,000 Negro public school teachers, adopted a resolution in 1955 hailing the Supreme Court decision of May 17, 1954, as “consistent with the Association’s belief” in democracy. The Association offered to cooperate in “discussing, outlining, and implementing plans for universal public education” in the state “within the framework of the recent ruling of the United States Supreme Court.”[239] The Association’s stand is particularly noteworthy since there is general agreement that many Negro teachers would be eased out of their jobs should integrated schools become an accomplished fact.
The Richland County Chapter of the South Carolina Citizens Committee (Negro), in an unusually strong statement, declared that it stood “solidly for the respect and observance of all laws.” The chapter wished it “clearly understood” that this included the Supreme Court decision of May 17, 1954. “To circumvent or to defy the law is rebellion and to join others in so doing is criminal conspiracy which could lead to anarchy.” The chapter concluded that the Negro’s struggle was “neither temporary nor futile” since its ultimate objective was “the proper evaluation of each individual and the proper regard for human dignity.” The Clarendon County Civic League, which backed the school suit, attacked segregation as “un-Christian, undemocratic, unscientific, and asinine.” Statements to the effect that Negroes favored segregation, according to the League, revealed “a deep-seated racial prejudice that has warped the intellect, the sensibilities and the wills” of white people. According to State NAACP president James M. Hinton, “Negro parents only want their children taught by competent teachers and in integrated schools, where children of both races can learn to study and learn to live as citizens.”[240]
Opposition to school integration has arisen from isolated Negro individuals and groups. More than 100 “patrons” of a Negro school in Mullins signed a petition urging continuation of segregation and “opposing integration of the Caucasian and Negro schools.” A similar petition was signed by Negro parents in North Augusta. This group feared integration “might disrupt progress now being made” in the Negro school program. A Negro school principal in Ehrhardt, in Bamberg County, thought integration would result in Negro teachers and pupils being “thrust into a most peculiar situation” which would be beset “with many perplexing problems and grave consequences.” Educational opportunities of Negro children under integration, he feared, would “suffer for the next 50 years.”[241] A Negro delegate to the Horry County Democratic Convention said that he wanted his children “to go to as good a school as any man’s children,” but “to the same school they go to now.” Dr. Ben J. Armstrong, prominent Mullins Negro, believed it would take “a thousand years” for the races to get ready for desegregation. The Reverend Webster McClary, a “preacher” from Kingstree, praised the Citizens Councils as being composed of “smart steady men” who “mean business” and declared that Negroes did not desire mixed schools any more than whites.
I can say this to any Negro who has it sticking in his craw that he can’t be happy without trying mixed schools [said McClary]. All you have to do to get your heart’s desire is buy a ticket to Philly or other points North where they are already mixed. Nobody has to tell you that colored children don’t learn books as fast as whites. But see for yourself how pitiful your big colored children will look in the same grades with smaller white children. Have you got enough money to dress your brood in clothes they won’t be ashamed of? Go ahead and try it if you must. But don’t be fool enough to slam the door in your white friends’ faces before you go. You might want to come back like I did after I lived up there awhile. How if you came home and find the door locked?—Will the NAACP give you a handout? Laugh, folks, laugh.[242]
The News and Courier considered McClary’s statement to be “moderate in tone and sensible in approach.” The Independent thought it “timely advice” for Negroes. A letter to the editor of the News and Courier nominated McClary for the Pulitzer Prize “for the most enlightening and constructive” comment on the race problem “made to date.” The same writer opined that McClary and eight other men “equally as intelligent” should be appointed to the United States Supreme Court.[243]
Pro-segregation statements by Negro leaders have become less frequently heard as attitudes toward the problem have hardened on both sides. Pressure for conformity has worked within both the Negro and white communities, though probably less effectively so among Negroes.
The attitude of Negro church groups is of especial significance in light of the church’s undeniably great influence within the Negro community. The number of ministers and prominent laymen among Negro improvement and advancement groups is unusually high. Statewide Negro church associations almost without exception have endorsed the Court decision and have called for the ending of racial segregation. The Progressive Democratic Party claimed that as early as 1951 “religious denominations and groups administering to more than 600,000 of the state’s 850,000 colored citizens” made voluntary statements and declarations which urged the removal of racial segregation in public places. The South Carolina conference of the Central (Negro) Jurisdiction of the Methodist Church, in endorsing the struggle of the Negro for equality of treatment, approved all organizations which sought “the full participation of all American citizens in the responsibilities and privileges of this nation.” Bishop Frank Madison Reid expressed the attitude of the state’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in late 1955. In suspending the Reverend James Vanwright for opposing integration and the court decision, Bishop Reid asserted: “No minister in our church can openly declare or write anything that attacks the scriptural belief in the equality of all men.”[244] Dr. G. G. Daniels, president of the Negro Baptist State Convention, in supporting efforts to end all legal racial discriminations, stated that the Negro was seeking only those human rights guaranteed by the Constitution.[245] A manifesto of the Columbia Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, a Negro group, declared that there could be “no first-class citizenship in a segregated society.” Full participation of the Negro in the life of South Carolina would come only after the removal of such barriers as “racial segregation, discrimination, Jim Crowism and economic pressure.” The Alliance recognized the difficulties involved in the process of desegregation. “Things cannot be changed overnight,” the Reverend J. Arthur Holmes, Alliance president, told this organization in 1956.[246]
The attitude of individual Negro ministers conforms to the same general pattern. The Reverend William L. Wilson, pastor of a Spartanburg Baptist Church, told a newspaper reporter that he was sometimes “ashamed” of his white colleagues. “They tell me privately,” he said, “that segregation is wrong, but they will say nothing publicly.” The Reverend Giles G. Brown, a Methodist Minister of Charleston, referring to proposals for church integration, said that there was only “one human family.” The brotherhood of that family was ordained by God. Any movement that furthered this brotherhood would eventually succeed but in some areas this would come only after a “long, long time.”[247]