Profile in black and white

by Howard H. Quint

Southerners do not talk about Civil War II. That is a bogeyman to scare the faint of heart. There will be no war. There may be “economic sanctions” such as withholding of some form of federal aid....

Whatever may be the form of interposition, the South will not, cannot and should not accept dictatorship while breath remains in Southern breasts....

For many reasons the News and Courier advocated interposition, the most important being that it “could raise the issue above the tumult and the shouting” of race and thus place “state sovereignty on the highest plane.” The doctrine “should be held in reserve for use in cases of maximum gravity.”[350]

Interposition was first considered seriously late in 1955. In January, 1956, Governor Timmerman and several other Southern governors attended a conference in Richmond, Virginia, where the problem was discussed with a view toward united action. The conference approved a statement urging all the Southern states to adopt a “resolution of interposition or protest.” Upon returning from the conference, Governor Timmerman recommended that the state legislature approve such a resolution. He described the interposition doctrine as representing “the studious thought and deliberate work of the men who have provided sound advice and wise leadership in this crisis.”[351]

A resolution interposing the sovereignty of the state of South Carolina between its people and the federal government was introduced into the legislature by Senator Gressette on January 31 and adopted February 14. It condemned “the illegal encroachment by the central government into the reserved powers of the states and the rights of the people.” The resolution protested “against the grave threat to constitutional government, implicit in the recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States.” Eight closely connected reasons were enumerated in justification for interposition. “The right of each of the States to maintain ... racially separate public schools ... is not forbidden or limited” by the Fourteenth Amendment. When the Supreme Court handed down its desegregation decision, it departed from “the sanctity of past decisions” and relied “on the current political and social philosophy of its members.” Such in effect constituted an amendment to the Constitution, since the Court ignored the “principle that the meaning of the Constitution and its Amendments does not change. It is a written instrument.” This usurpation of power by the Court transcended even the “problems of segregation in education.” Under such circumstances the sovereign state of South Carolina could “judge for itself of the infraction of the Constitution.”

For these reasons, then, the legislature resolved that the Court decision was “a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous attempt to change the true intent and meaning of the Constitution;” that the state “condemns and protests” against this illegal encroachment of the federal government upon the rights of the states; and that South Carolina reserved for itself the right to take such “legal measures” as it might deem appropriate “to protect its sovereignty and the rights of its people.”[352]

Scattered opposition developed in the legislature against the resolution. The more extreme elements clamored for a stronger statement! One of the modern “fire eaters,” Representative George Harrell of Florence, previously had introduced an interposition resolution in the House on January 10, 1956, which would have declared “that the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States holding that segregation of races in public schools of this state is unconstitutional, is, in itself, unconstitutional, contrary to law, and therefore null and void and of no effect so far as this state is concerned.”[353] On the House floor, Representative John M. Horlbeck of Charleston echoed the News and Courier: “This is a resolution of protest and not of interposition. There are many who think that this resolution should state a positive position asserting and pledging the authority of the State to prevent the implementation of what this resolution terms an unlawful decree. I am of this opinion.”[354]

The press of the state underscored the protest nature of the Timmerman resolution. The political writer, W. D. Workman, Jr., termed it “a states rights resolution which is well-worded, well-reasoned and eminently logical, but ... NOT an interposition resolution.” It marched “briskly” up to the threshold of interposition and then stopped. Decrying such hesitation, he declared that “somewhere, sometime, somehow, the people and the states must stand and fight, or else watch the American form of government evolve into centralism.”[355] The Independent agreed. The resolution, thought this upcountry paper, amounted to nothing more than a protest. Since no assertion was made of “the state’s claim to the right of outright nullification,” it was meaningless. The Anderson daily questioned the seriousness of state political leadership in the whole interposition affair.[356] The Record, which strongly opposed all implications of nullification, praised the resolution as a “solemn protest” and a “dignified document.” It condemned the trend in the nation toward “an all-powerful central government, constructed in the form of an absolute democracy” in which the minority would have no rights. This situation was caused by the political thinking of the big Northern cities—thinking that was partially to be explained “by the high proportion of European immigrants in their population.” These people could not “even understand” such historical American concepts as states rights.[357] Shades of John C. Calhoun, perhaps, but completely comprehensible to regular readers of the Record’s xenophobic editorials.

Expressing similar views, Senator Gressette said that the resolution would serve notice to all America that the major political parties were “victims of small pressure groups ... in some of the larger cities and states of the North and East.”[358]

The full implications of the doctrine of interposition emerged in stark reality early in September when Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state’s national guard to prevent implementation of a federal court decree ordering the integration of a Little Rock high school. Though Faubus made no reference to interposition and claimed that he had called out the troops solely to maintain order and to prevent bloodshed, many South Carolinians insisted, and with some reason, that the Governor’s defiance of federal authority constituted interposition in effect if not in name. “Use of state troops to prevent Little Rock’s school board from carrying out integration orders of a federal judge is a direct act of interposition,” said a News and Courier editorial. “The doctrine of interposition,” it added, “has been hazy in the minds of many persons, even in the South. Now it has taken shape in the form of state troops on school patrol.” The following morning the State followed the lead of the Charleston paper: “We have in Arkansas a first-class example of interposition—a state putting itself between the federal government and the people.” A few days later the same paper leveled an editorial blast against United States District Judge Ronald N. Davies who issued the integration decree. “In the first place a North Dakota judge, no matter how learned he may be in law or how sternly he can throw around his bantamweight, should never have been put in the position of making the integration ruling in Little Rock,” said Editor Samuel Latimer. “He couldn’t possibly have any deep understanding of the relationship between the whites and Negroes in the South and because of this shallow knowledge he has created a most unpleasant situation.” Mr. Latimer’s analysis was a bit ironic since the State’s editorials had constantly demanded that judicial decisions be premised on law and not the sociological opinions of the judges.[359]