Profile in black and white

by Howard H. Quint

We believe that private schools which offered a poor education soon would go out of business, and that private schools which offered a good education would thrive and multiply. There would be competition among private schools to do a good educational job. At present there is no competition among public schools....[321]

Others expressed like sentiments. Henry E. Davis, a Florence attorney, told the local Citizens Council: “Close your schools if it comes to that.... Closing public schools is not such a calamity and private schools get the best results anyway.” Another Citizens Council speaker, state representative O. L. Warr of Lamar, advised a Beaufort rally that rather than accept integration, public schools should be abandoned “reluctantly but inflexibly without flinch or falter.”[322] The letter of T. H. McFaddin of Gable to the News and Courier is revealing:

Any court that does not consider what is best for the white child, in my opinion is a kangaroo court. No one can read into the Constitution, that any child should be found guilty for being born a white child and be sentenced to over three quarters of every year during its school term to be mixed with children of another race. For there is no commandment that reads, Thou shalt not keep thy race pure....

Books are cheap. Education can be gotten by mail to a great extent ... the only way to beat this school mixture of the races is to advertise all school property for sale.[323]

A few outspoken champions of the public school system have come forward to be heard. Morning News Editor O’Dowd declared that “our educational system is of more importance than mores, political opposition, state-wide resentment or mass disappointment.”[324] Likewise Mrs. C. B. Busbee, head of the education department of the South Carolina Federation of Women’s Clubs, said that “the abandonment of a system of public schools would set back the cause of education for all our people 100 years.”[325]

In view of the role of the schoolhouse in the segregation controversy, the attitude of education groups is significant. The Council of Delegates of the South Carolina Education Association, an organization of white classroom teachers and administrators, in October, 1954, approved a resolution which held segregated schools “the best form of organization for meeting the needs of children of both races,” and urged “an adequate system of free public schools in South Carolina be maintained.”[326] Other education groups have been more hesitant to state their positions. Not until August, 1955, more than a year after the court decision, did the Association of School Administrators and the School Boards Association, an organization of school trustees, take their stand. The School Administrators pledged themselves “to the preservation, continuation, and improvement of the public school system of South Carolina.” The school trustees adopted a resolution which observed that “as long as the State of South Carolina, through its legislative authority, continues its policy of withholding funds for the operation of integrated schools, our schools must continue to be segregated if they are to remain open.” The trustees pledged themselves to keep the public schools open “so that responsibility for closing them must be assumed by other authorities.”[327] A sad commentary is that no one administratively connected with any state supported institution of higher learning publicly has opposed the state’s threat to close those institutions if a Negro were admitted. To summarize, the threatened abolition of the public school system would indicate lack of appreciation by white South Carolinians of the fundamental role of a system of free education in a democratic society.

The question of federal aid to education naturally has intruded itself into the school integration controversy. So intense is the feeling on this subject that it has become another of the articles of faith upon which orthodoxy is demanded of all public spokesmen. Without doubt a large majority of white South Carolinians agreed with the News and Courier when it referred to federal aid to education as “bribery” to be used by integrationists. Governor Timmerman characterized federal aid as “sugar-coated federal taxation.” He told the 1956 General Assembly that propaganda for federal aid to education fostered upon the people “a big political hoax, the claim of an acute shortage of school buildings.” That contention, said the Governor, was “simply untrue.”[328] Some South Carolina school administrators might have been disposed to disagree were it discreet to do so.

Public officials and other leaders in the state have spoken out against federal aid, especially if it suggests any inkling of federal control. That South Carolina’s schools are already receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars of federal money for educational purposes has been conveniently overlooked. Most spokesmen oppose federal aid per se. Occasionally, however, proposals have been made which are designed to give the states federal money with no strings attached. For example, University of South Carolina President Donald Russell who resigned in October, 1957, to run for governor, suggested that the federal government return to the states on a per capita basis ten percent of all federal income taxes collected. This plan, declared Russell, would involve no federal control and thus would test the sincerity of “those who would pervert the matter of federal aid into a coercive weapon to promote some alien or sociological goal.”[329]

The state legislature expressed itself on the subject in March, 1957. The House of Representatives adopted a resolution, introduced by Rep. P. Eugene Brabham of Bamberg, which noted that South Carolinians “are now, always have been and shall always be unequivocally, incontrovertibly and unalterably opposed to any federal invasion, encroachment or infringement of the fundamental right, obligation and duty of the people and their local authority to provide, supervise and control the education of the children of this state or the educational processes concomitant thereon.”[330]

A central theme of the opponents of federal aid to education is the contention that South Carolina does not need any more money for operation of its schools. They point with pride to the large scale school building program which the state has undertaken in response to the demands by Negroes for racial integration. The South Carolina Conference of Education, a group appointed by Governor Byrnes to study education in the state, reported in late 1955 that in regard to federal aid to education “no funds are sought or desired, except in those areas like North Charleston or Aiken where federal installations have caused increases in school population out of all proportion to normal growth and development.”[331]