Profile in black and white

by Howard H. Quint

Segregationists seem totally unable to understand the failure of Negro leaders to support the status quo. “The finest thing that could happen to the Negro race,” declared the Morning News, “would be the emergence of leadership that would crusade for voluntary segregation with the same vigor and persistence that the NAACP has crusaded for integration.”[256] That such leadership has not been forthcoming allegedly has been due to the “reign of terror” which the NAACP has instigated against Negro moderates. Lowcountry Negroes, like lowcountry whites, noted the News and Courier, were “largely conservative,” an attitude expressed in their “reluctance to agitate for racial change.” These moderates were loath to speak out because they would be “penalized by the extremists.” Although such moderates had “strong support” among Negroes in the state, they were largely “silent.” Negroes who spoke out in favor of segregation, concluded the News and Courier, were the “truly heroic” element in the segregation controversy. “It would be well,” Senator Gressette said, “for us to encourage the members of the Negro race with these [pro-segregation] views,” so that they in turn could “discourage the few whites and colored, from within and without the state,” who were advocating integration. State Senator Marshall Williams would extend such encouragement to all Negroes. “We should talk with the colored people we employ, and can influence,” he said, “give them the benefit of what we know, explain how they are being duped by the NAACP and other outsiders and convince them that it would be better to live at peace among their white neighbors in a segregated society.” White advice, then, is for the Negro to return to the “sound counsel” of Booker T. Washington.[257]

White leaders are certain that they and not the Negroes themselves best realize the latter’s true needs. “Unless the Negroes come to their senses and cast out the false leaders,” warned the News and Courier, they might find that they had been led “down a primrose path to misery and disaster.” “Respectable Southern white people” are the Negro’s best friends.[258] Running concurrently with this refrain is the frequently stated belief that nowhere on earth have Negroes been so fortunate as in the South. “Segregation has been a success,” especially from the standpoint of the Negro, proclaimed Dr. E. E. Colvin, a white Baptist minister of Orangeburg.[259] The South had “none of the ‘isms’ and tensions of the Northern cities,” asserted Gilbert Wilkes of Mt. Pleasant in a letter to the News and Courier, echoing the century old philosophy of George Fitzhugh and John C. Calhoun. “As far as race relations go,” the Negro lived “a much freer and happier life” in the South. Another letter writer, Alford W. Atkins of Charleston, stated that in the North in contrast to the South, one did not see among Negroes “the smiling or solemn dark faces ... filled with content or at least joy in living and the happiness that comes from it.” Negroes in the North “looked strained and dissatisfied with life.” The News and Courier said that “apparently” integration was not bringing happiness to Northern Negroes. Instead “contentment, freedom from worry and a pleasant disposition” which have been the “prize possessions” of Southern Negroes disappeared with the end of segregation.[260]

As will be shown subsequently in greater detail, the segregation controversy has played a major role in state politics in the period following the May 17, 1954, ruling by the Supreme Court. The constant political concern with the subject explains in part the inability of the two sides to get together and calmly work out a mutually agreeable modus vivendi. Negro leaders see politicians using the issue as a political football for personal benefit. Contributing to this situation has been the failure of the Negroes to register and vote in sufficiently large numbers to cause politicians to fear their influence at the polls. Absence of an effective political pressure action group has not helped the Negroes. The Progressive Democratic Party, the only real Negro political organization in the state, has been practically moribund from 1948 to 1958. Efforts of Negro political spokesmen have been hampered because a large majority of the state’s Negroes are ideologically Democrats in the national sense while Negro leaders receive no consideration from state Democratic leaders.[261]

Negroes have attempted to make the pressure of their votes felt in the state and not without some success in presidential elections. On the state and local levels, however, they are completely frustrated. They can not, for example, find candidates who will campaign on even a “moderate” platform with regard to the race issue. Consequently the Negro has only the choice of the lesser of several evils. The Negro vote, moreover, is most ineffective in areas where it is potentially the strongest, that is in heavily Negro populated low country counties. In such counties the number of Negro voters was less than in those where the Negro population was lower percentagewise.

Leading Negro political spokesmen have been John H. McCray, chairman of the Progressive Democratic Party, and the Reverend James M. Hinton, president of the state NAACP. McCray’s party sent a delegation to the national Democratic convention in 1956 to challenge the regular slate headed by Governor Timmerman. One of its purposes was to secure official recognition by the convention in the event the regular delegation walked out over the civil rights issue.[262] The presence of the Negro group probably had little if any influence on the decision of the regulars to remain in the convention.

The actual influence of the Negro vote in the state is difficult to assess. Until 1958 voter registration has omitted any mention of race and ballots by whites and Negroes have not been cast separately. Also various groups, white and Negro, have made claims and counterclaims for political purposes. McCray maintained his party delivered 85,000 to 95,000 votes to the Democratic Party nominee in 1952 and was thus responsible for the Democratic victory. A similar claim was made for 1956. Anti-Negro politicians, especially among the Independents of 1956, agreed with these claims. They hoped thereby to stigmatize the Democratic Party.[263]

In late 1954 the Palmetto State Voters Association was formed to organize Negro voters for the purpose of electing to public office candidates sympathetic to the Negro. It has had little, if any, success, in part because many of the leaders of other groups, including the NAACP, oppose isolating Negro voters in a separate group. Such action, it is argued, is inconsistent with the professed aim of the Negro for full integration into the state’s political activities. “Racial bloc voting,” said A. J. Clement, Jr., was “out of order, out of style” and did not provide the advantage of a system that was interested in the whole as against a particular part.[264]

The organization primarily responsible for the giant steps taken by Negroes toward the goal of full participation in the responsibilities and benefits of American citizenship is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The South Carolina conference has chapters scattered throughout the state with headquarters in Columbia. The state organization, headed by the Reverend James M. Hinton, claimed 22,000 members in South Carolina in early 1956.[265] Though membership rolls are not made public, it would appear that the major portion of NAACP spokesmen are from middle class and professional groups. A disproportionate number of the organization’s leaders are ministers. The NAACP generally represents the best in the state’s Negro leadership. The state conference, though virtually autonomous, works closely with the national headquarters in seeking to end all racial discriminations based on law. According to the official Civil Rights Handbook published by the national headquarters, the NAACP is “not a legal aid society” for supplying assistance to every needy colored person. Its intervention in legal suits is limited to three categories: (1) Legal defense of innocent colored persons who are victims of injustice solely because of race, (2) Assistance in legal cases involving colored persons where fundamental civil or constitutional rights are involved, and (3) Affirmative legal action to establish principles of law of benefit to colored persons generally.[266]

Working within these boundaries and in conjunction with the national headquarters, the state conference has secured several notable victories, the most spectacular being the Clarendon County school case. The NAACP also assisted in the cases which resulted in pay equalization for white and Negro school teachers and in the destruction of the white primary in South Carolina. In other less publicized cases assistance has also been given. “The litigious NAACP,” the Record complained, “has been behind every one of the suits to mix the races in the public schools, the colleges and universities, in transportation and in state parks and other recreation areas.”[267]

The degree to which South Carolina Negroes agree with the NAACP and its aims and objectives is evidenced by the widespread support given the drive to end segregation by church, professional and other groups. Many organizations have gone on record as supporting an end to segregation without giving a specific endorsement to the NAACP. But the general public directly associates the NAACP with leadership in this fight. Typical of the expressions of support given the NAACP was the resolution adopted by a portion of the student body and faculty of the Negro college at Orangeburg when the state legislators were planning an investigation of NAACP activities at the institution. The NAACP was regarded “as simply one organization” which gave “vitality” to the furtherance of the constitutional rights of the Negro. The students and teachers disavowed “any knowledge of information that that organization represents any more than the maintenance of law and order in the determination of and in the protection of the constitutional rights involved.”[268]