White South Carolinians undoubtedly consider public education to be the key issue in the Negroes’ drive for racial equality. Consequently other aspects of the question have received less consideration in discussions relating to the pros and cons of integration. Important developments, however, have been occurring in other areas where attempts at integration are being made, e.g. the armed forces, city buses, and state operated recreation parks.
South Carolina officials can do little more than decry integration in the nation’s armed forces. By the time the Supreme Court gave its initial school desegregation ruling, integration in the armed services had progressed to a point where it had become an accepted fact to all except the most extreme die-hards. Nevertheless Governor Timmerman lodged a futile protest with the National Security Council in late 1955. Referring to statements by military leaders expressing concern over low reenlistment rates among military personnel, the Governor wrote: “So long as our basic training installations are used as sociological camps for compulsory racial mixing, it is reasonable to expect a continued lack of voluntary enlistments, and a continued lessening of morale and esprit de corps in our armed forces. The officials of no other country in the world are so naive as to employ racial integration among military personnel.” Commenting on the Governor’s letter the News and Courier asked editorially: “Is it simply a coincidence that, at about the same time the government mixed the races in the armed forces, enlistments started to sag?” Without answering its question, the Charleston paper continued: “If integration has hurt enlistments and morale, then it follows that integration has harmed national defense.... Gov. Timmerman has courageously brought the matter out into the open.”[392]
In 1956 the general assembly in its onslaught on all phases of integration passed a resolution urging President Eisenhower to “restore segregation of the races in the armed forces of this country which would result in a return of the high morale, efficiency and esprit de corps which our armed forces have always heretofore enjoyed.”[393] The resolution evoked no response in Washington.
Once the assault on armed forces integration had begun, others joined in. From The Citadel, the military college of South Carolina, came a booming verbal salvo from President Mark Clark, former United Nations Commander in the Far East. “I did not feel that we should integrate then [in 1950 when the Army order was placed in effect] and I do not think so now,” said the transplanted general from the North. “I looked at integration strictly as a military problem, not from the sociological standpoint.... I wanted the best fighting unit possible ... politics or no politics.”[394]
South Carolina Negroes, following the lead set in Montgomery, Alabama, have endeavored to bring about invalidation of both state and local Jim Crow laws in the field of bus segregation. In this connection Sarah Mae Flemming of Columbia instituted suit against the South Carolina Electric and Gas Company, operators of the city bus system of Columbia, asking $25,000 for alleged violations of her civil rights. She charged that a bus driver had forcibly required her to go to the rear of a city bus in conformity with the South Carolina law. In the federal district court Judge Timmerman dismissed Miss Flemming’s suit on the ground that the 1896 decision upholding separate but equal facilities in transportation was still in effect and had not been overruled by the school cases of 1954. (There was a curious lack of logic in Judge Timmerman’s position since for years Southerners had defended segregation in the public school on the basis of the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling which upheld the separate but equal doctrine in transportation.) This decision was appealed and reversed by the federal circuit court presided over by Judge John J. Parker. In an action which the Record considered “brusque arrogance,” the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of the South Carolina Electric and Gas Company thus in effect upholding the circuit court decision.[395]
The practical effect of this decision on South Carolina bus segregation has been nil. Nowhere have traditional patterns of segregation ended. Attorney General T. C. Callison considered the Supreme Court’s action in this case “another unwarranted invasion of state and municipal rights.” In early 1956 the state legislature resolved that it was “unalterably opposed to the mixing of the races on common carriers” and would “tolerate no violation of the laws of this State relating to the separation of the races on common carriers.” The News and Courier, strangely enough, foresaw no drastic results if bus segregation were ended. However, it believed that “as a practical matter, they [Negroes] suffer no hardship by observing regulations that reflect prevailing customs of the community. Even if the laws were removed from the books, good manners call for respect of fellow passengers’ preferences.”[396] Editor Waring’s paper made no comment on the obligation of whites to respect the preference of their Negro fellow passengers.
In its own enveloping attack on the segregation front South Carolina’s Negro leadership has struck at the state operated recreation parks. In 1955 the State of South Carolina maintained twenty-one recreation parks, one of which was operated exclusively for Negroes. Of the other twenty, four had separate areas reserved for Negroes. In view of such obvious discrimination, Negroes brought suit to have Edisto Beach State Park opened for all South Carolinians without regard to race or color. In answering this suit the state attorney general’s office presented a brief before the federal district court which declared that “due to the natural inclination of each race at this time to associate and engage in recreation and social activities with members of its own race, and to the present natural, historical, cultural and deep-rooted mental attitudes and feelings of each race against the social and sexual mixing of the races, there exists potential and definite dangers of unpleasantries, social friction, breaches of the peace and other events leading to riot and bloodshed, which will surely result from an enforced mixing of the races at such a park.”[397]
In the light of recent federal court decisions, state officials realized that such arguments would carry little weight in federal courts. Therefore in 1956, precluding a federal court order on the case, the state legislature passed a resolution closing Edisto Beach State Park to both white and colored. The park remains closed, “a monument,” said the Columbia State, to the “vindictiveness” of race agitators.[398]
With actions such as these the sovereign state of South Carolina has combatted the “alien ideas” of racial equality and equal rights for all men.