| I | |
| The Development of Race Relationships | [1] |
| II | |
| The Case from Clarendon | [12] |
| III | |
| The Emergence of Patterns | [21] |
| IV | |
| The White Folks Fight Back | [38] |
| V | |
| The Brotherhood of Segregated Men | [55] |
| VI | |
| A Place in the Shade | [71] |
| VII | |
| The New Nullification | [92] |
| VIII | |
| Politics and Segregation | [128] |
| IX | |
| Another War of Yankee Aggression | [145] |
| X | |
| Collaborators, Eggheads, Do-Gooders, and Appeasers | [167] |
| XI | |
| The Lost Cause Relost | [181] |
| References | [187] |
| Appendix (Text of Supreme Court decision on desegregation,May 17, 1954) | [206] |
| Index | [210] |
CHAPTER I
THE DEVELOPMENT OF RACE RELATIONSHIPS
Emancipation, itself, would not satisfy these fanatics. That gained, the next step would be to raise the Negroes to a social and political equality with the whites.—John C. Calhoun
The present pattern of race relations for South Carolina was shaped in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1877 at the end of the Reconstruction period the mould of segregation had yet to be rigidly defined. Only in the last decade of the century was absolute segregation established. During the Reconstruction years public schools were not integrated, although Negro students attended the state university. In personal and social relationships segregation was generally practiced but more on the basis of social custom than by force of legislation. Largely if not entirely ignored was the Civil Rights law which had been passed by the Reconstruction legislature. This law, which remained on the statute books until 1889, prohibited racial discrimination by “common carriers or by any person engaged in a business, calling or pursuit” for which a federal, state or municipal license was required.[5]
In the political area the establishing of Jim Crowism was slower though no less effective and complete in its end result. Negroes voted until the 1890’s and were influential in the local government of several counties. South Carolina sent three Negro congressmen to Washington after 1876; one served until 1896. In 1882 nine Negroes sat in the state legislature, the last Negro member of that body being defeated for reelection in 1902. Yet these were the exception and not the rule for the Negro was in truth virtually eliminated as a factor in state politics by the end of the 1880’s. With the restrictions on Negro suffrage contained in the new state constitution of 1895 and the adoption of the Democratic Party primary the following year, the Negro was prevented from voting in the state. Yet, in spite of the Negro’s all but complete disfranchisement, the fear that he might be used for political purposes “prevented the whites from dividing into two parties or from breaking out of the restrictions imposed by the Democratic primary.”[6]
With the disfranchisement of the Negro, the repeal of the state Civil Rights law and the establishment of absolute and legalized segregation, a rigid system of caste based on race materialized as a means of race control.[7] It was reflected in the segregation of schools, churches, and other public and private organizations and institutions. The two races seldom came into contact except in the relationship of employer and laborer. In no sense was the concept of racial equality accepted by the dominant whites.[8]
The maintenance of absolute segregation frequently necessitated resort to either the threat or use of force or violence. The threat was ever present in the personal, economic, and political relationships between the races. Fear of slave insurrections was replaced by fear of a “vague and unknown thing,” social equality. As the nineteenth century ground to an end, application of violence was frequently approved by “respectable” whites, especially if Negroes were suspected or charged with murder or rape. The Charleston News and Courier, for example, argued that the lynching of a suspected murderer was “not mob law.” According to the paper’s editorialist, “the brute placed himself outside the pale of the law and was dealt with accordingly.”[9]
Segregation of the races in the state has been both a manifestation of belief in racial superiority and a basic distrust of democracy. Ben Tillman interpreted his election as governor as a triumph of “white supremacy over mongrelism and anarchy.” In his inaugural address he denied “without regard to color that ‘all men are created equal.’” It was not true then and it was not true when Jefferson wrote it, he thundered.[10] Carlyle McKinley, associate editor of the News and Courier, wrote in the 1880’s that in “works of art, skill, science, invention, literature, in the whole field of human enterprise, endeavor, design and discovery, in every respect that can be named, the Negro is far behind the lowliest families of the white race.”[11] The late W. W. Ball, among other things editor of the News and Courier and Dean of the School of Journalism of the University of South Carolina, declared that “every decent white man and woman” in the state maintained and exercised the “right of treating all Negroes as inferiors.” In one of his characteristic diatribes against democracy, he wrote that “universal and unrestricted suffrage” was unthinkable. Safety demanded that South Carolina “steer away from the infatuation even of universal white democracy.”[12]
In 1944, twenty-five years after Ball made the above statement, the state House of Representatives adopted a resolution which “indignantly and vehemently” denounced all organizations seeking “the amalgamation of the white and Negro races by co-mingling of the races on any basis of equality.” Such were deemed “hostile to the existence and preservation of the American Union of States.” Simultaneously, the legislators reaffirmed their belief in and allegiance to “established white supremacy,” and pledged “our lives and our sacred honor to maintaining it, whatever the cost.”[13]