Profile in black and white

by Howard H. Quint

But Mrs. Sanders had not counted on possible retaliatory action on the part of white supremacy bedsheet brigadiers who haunt the upper part of the state. On the night of November 19th an explosion rocked the Sanders house tearing a gaping hole near the chimney, breaking six windows, and cracking a wall in the living room. Dr. and Mrs. Sanders and their house guests, Mr. and Mrs. Carl B. McLaughlin of Louisville, Kentucky, were in another part of the house at the time of the explosion and escaped injury.[530]

Police officials investigating the explosion discovered that this was the third attempt to dynamite the Sanders home, two other efforts having failed because of the bungling of the perpetrators. Moreover, within three weeks the State Law Enforcement Division had arrested five men in connection with the bombing. With all due respect to the extremely efficient SLED, it required neither a Sherlock Holmes nor a Dick Tracy to track down the culprits, for the trail led directly to a Ku Klux Klan group operating in the area. The five men arrested were factory workers and mill hands. Their ages ranged from twenty-four to thirty-five.[531]

“Respectable” South Carolinians were appropriately shocked by the Gaffney episode and newspaper editorials uniformly called for the arrest of the culprits and later expressed satisfaction when they were apprehended. Yet few if any of the public officials in the state, who were so vocal on the Little Rock “oppression,” saw fit to comment on the bombing, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the Reverend John B. Morris of Dillon, one of the clergymen who helped prepare the “Concerned South Carolinians” booklet. In a letter to papers throughout the state the Reverend Morris, who opposes immediate integration in the public schools of the deep South, wrote: “When big men in public office have hitherto talked loosely on the race issue, very little men have been incited to plan acts of violence. The big men deplore the violence and realize it only hurts their cause, but until they use their influence before the violence occurs, they bear some responsibility for it. When the emotions of simple folk are stirred by emotional talk from public figures, they come to feel that they must take the law into their own hands. Let segregationist politicians realize they can maintain their position calmly and with reason. Otherwise incendiary talk will prompt incendiary action.”[532]

The arrest of the five men in no sense chastened them or made them realize the enormity of their act. Nor did the Klan seek to cover its tracks in the affair. On the contrary, the local Klansmen held a rally at Blacksburg to collect funds to defray the cost of the legal defense of the accused, two of whom, Luther E. Boyette and Robert P. Martin, openly boasted of their affiliation with the nightshirt brigade. Present at the rally, attended by 20 robed Klansmen and approximately 250 onlookers, was the grand dragon of the South Carolina Independent Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. “We do not wish Mrs. James H. Sanders any harm,” he told the crowd. “If we could, we would send her back [sic] to Africa so she would be with her Negro friends.” The Independent Klan would back the accused “all the way,” he asserted. “They have already proved their innocence so far as I am concerned, and of course the first consideration was in proving it to the Klan.”[533]

James McBride Dabbs, whose wife is president of the state United Church Women, has also been prominent in the activities of interracial groups. He is president of the Southern Regional Council. Immediately after the original decision, Dabbs, a one time college professor, urged South Carolinians to “proceed now to implement this ruling with whatever skill and wisdom we have.” He considered segregation “nonsense” and believed that under desegregation “Negroes would still associate almost entirely with Negroes, white people with white people.” The row over desegregation, he maintained, was a tempest in a teapot. It is time “for the white man to realize that he is just a human being; he’s been playing God so long,” declared this modern Old Testament prophet. “The majority of white South Carolinians today are waging a fight which they will lose as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, and about which, when they have lost it, they will wonder why they fought so hard to stave off so small a change.”[534]

The Rev. G. Jackson Stafford, who was pastor of the First Baptist Church of Batesburg until his resignation was forced, typifies in a very real sense those clergymen who opposed segregation. He believed that the Court decision was “in keeping with the constitutional guarantee of equal freedom to all citizens, and ... in harmony with the Christian principles of equal justice and love for all men.” But he also realized that “the people of the South need time to become adjusted to the changing social and political climate with regard to race relations.” Racial tensions, he believed, would be greatly reduced if the politicians would cease their efforts to make a political football out of the problems involved in improving race relations.[535]

Occasionally other South Carolinians publicly expressed support for integration. John Bolt Culbertson, a Greenville attorney who had “been interested in liberal causes and in the labor movement” since his student days at the University of South Carolina, was a strong supporter of the NAACP. He considered the denial of “the fundamentals of democratic government” to Negroes a “mockery” of democracy. In a similar vein D. M. Harrelson of Gresham protested “as a Southern white man” against the “Nazi-Ku Klux Klan climate” fostered in the South by “demagogic politicians, citizens committees, [and] a Metropolitan press.” This agitation, he felt, appealed “to the ignorant, unthinking, whose minds are filled with native prejudice.” E. M. Martin of Charleston, too, was critical of segregation. “Any institution supported by public funds ought to be for all citizens excluding none,” he thought. Segregated school systems were “contrary to the Constitution of the United States.” Another Charlestonian, W. Ernest Douglas, believed that “most white people have such a terrific mental block concerning segregation that, in this matter at least, they forfeit their right to be called rational animals. They become simple animals moving in whatever direction their herders prod them.”[536]

The influence of the segregation issue on freedom of thought in South Carolina was illustrated by the nationally publicized Travelstead affair.[537] Dr. Chester C. Travelstead, a native of Kentucky, was appointed Dean of the School of Education of the University of South Carolina in 1953. According to Dr. Travelstead, he made known to University President Donald S. Russell his views on segregation before his appointment. With the developing resistance to integration in the period following the Supreme Court’s ruling, Travelstead became “distressed to observe that only one side of this whole issue was being presented to the public.” He believed that segregation deprived the Negro of his “right to first class citizenship.” Even more important, he felt that South Carolina was “fast developing an autocratic police state.” In the late spring of 1955, he decided to speak his piece.

In April Governor George Bell Timmerman Jr. had addressed the South Carolina Education Association and strongly condemned attempts at integration. Shortly thereafter Travelstead wrote a long and, on the face of it, imprudent letter to the Governor:

You said in your speech, Governor, that “the opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States in the school-segregation cases upholds for the first time in judicial history that equality of treatment is discriminatory.” It is my considered opinion, Governor, that it was not the intent of the Court to say that “equality of treament is discriminatory.” Rather did it say in effect that segregation is in and of itself discriminatory....