The new school building program represents the state’s one real constructive reaction to Negro integration efforts. The purpose may have been less an altruistic desire to improve Negro education than to furnish the state with another arguing point in the preservation of segregation. Whatever the motive, an immediate result has been to provide Negroes with greatly improved, though still segregated, educational facilities.
Early in 1956 Dr. E. Ryan Crow, the able director of the “equalization” program, announced that despite “a fatal indifference to equalizing facilities for Negroes” in some areas, the program had been approximately 85 percent completed. The program’s magnitude demonstrates that South Carolina whites, when pushed far enough, will make efforts to equalize the Negro schools—at least from a physical standpoint. Expenditures in Clarendon County are indicative: between 1951 and 1956 the state spent $770,576 on white school construction as against $2,166,895 on Negro school construction. In the Summerton school district which was directly involved in the case, $102,596 was spent on white school construction as compared to $892,114 for Negro school construction.[302]
In the gubernatorial election of 1954, George Bell Timmerman, Jr., who had been lieutenant governor for eight years, was chosen to succeed Governor Byrnes. Taking office in January, 1955, Governor Timmerman, son of the Federal District Judge who had ruled against the Negro plaintiffs in the Clarendon County case, became the key figure in the state’s official opposition to any and all desegregation. For this reason his public statements are of special significance. The new Governor, a forty-five year old lawyer from Lexington County, is a humorless and fanatical segregationist. On one occasion he told a national television audience that segregation in the state would not end “in a thousand years.”[303] Considering the problem in its more immediate implications, he said on another occasion: “If you let one [Negro] child come in ... you’ve opened the door. There can’t be any compromise—you can’t compromise right with wrong.” In still another instance he declared: “With the knowledge that right, justice and truth are our allies, we shall not fail. There shall be no compulsory racial mixing in our state.”[304]
Timmerman insisted that segregation did not involve discrimination. Equality went “hand in hand” with separation. In developing this theme the Governor added:
The two terms [discrimination and segregation] are not interchangeable. I am opposed to discrimination on any grounds, racial or otherwise, but it does not necessarily follow that racial discrimination results from racial separation. If anything separation makes for less discrimination, for it does not provide a basis for the inevitable discrimination which will follow if white and Negro children are mingled in the same schools and the same classrooms.
... The “separate-but-equal” policy provides a fair and practicable basis for race relations in South Carolina. If the administration of the law in years past has been faulty, the need is for improved administration such as we are now giving, not abandonment of the principle itself.[305]
Timmerman asserted that the positive “benefits” of segregation were realized by the state’s Negro population. He claimed that “many Negro parents living in Washington and other cities to the North of us are leaving their children with relatives in our State so that their children can enjoy the benefit of a Southern climate in segregated public schools.”[306] The Governor did not say whether he was referring to climate in its physical aspects or in the realm of opinion and mores.
In his inaugural address, Timmerman criticized even the suggestion of a moderate consideration of the segregation issue. “The cowardly approach of gradualism,” he described as “the essence of discrimination,” “a creeping evil” that had no place in “the government of a free people.”[307] Constantly reiterating that “white parents” and “most Negro parents” opposed integration, he applauded “the calm attitude” in which white South Carolinians had approached the issue. Since the latter were determined to resist integration, “the sensible choice of the Negro” was to accept and support separate but equal schools. “Our common task is one of patience, understanding and unyielding determination,” said the Governor. “In this way we can minimize some of the tragedy which the Supreme Court would impose upon us all. There will be no compulsory racial mixing in our state.”[308]
Also indicative was Timmerman’s criticism of President Eisenhower’s appeal that every American be “judged and measured by what he is, rather than by his color, race or religion.” He complained that “never before has a national administration proclaimed as unimportant a person’s race and religion.” How better, he asked, could a person be “judged and measured” as to what he is? “A man’s most priceless possession is his heritage. A man’s most priceless achievement is his religious faith.”[309]
Whatever one may think of it, Timmerman’s attitude is in no sense hypocritical; it is in complete consonance with his political credo. He is a conservative in the peculiarly Southern sense of the word, a racist, a states righter, an advocate of decentralized government. In referring to federal aid to education, he declared: “As far as I am concerned, if I must be taxed and controlled, I would rather be taxed by laws enacted sensibly by local representatives of my own state in whose election I have some choice, than to be taxed ill-advisedly by representatives of the other states, in whose selection I have no choice.”[310] The full measure of his political conservatism is reflected in a speech delivered before the Southern regional conference of the Association of State Governments at Charleston in the spring of 1956. George Washington, he said, gave “to posterity prophetic advice of strikingly current significance” when he cautioned against a “spirit of innovation” upon the principles embodied in the Constitution. Such a “spirit,” warned the Governor, was “prevalent and growing.”[311]