Reaction varied to O’Dowd’s “retreat,” or more accurately his admission of defeat. A number of letters to the editor expressed sympathy with his moderation policy; others were highly critical. Time magazine, in an article favorable to O’Dowd, brought to national attention the plight of the Morning News and its editor. Praise by a magazine such as Time, of course, merely increased the condemnation of white supremacists. Joe B. Powell of Florence, for example, said he “sure would hate to be on the side of TIME or any other lousy YANKEE magazine or newspaper” while living in the South among his “southern white friends.” Florentines, he said, were “sick and fed up” with O’Dowd’s ideas on segregation. In line with the advice of Dorothy Moore Guess to unhappy Southerners, he suggested that O’Dowd “move to the North” where he would feel at home.[545] The News and Courier considered the whole affair “a grandstand play” to enable O’Dowd to reap “publicity as an integrationist advocate.”[546]
O’Dowd remained as editor of the Morning News until August 3 when he accepted a position on the news and editorial staff of the Chicago Sun-Times. The announcement of his resignation contained no mention of the segregation controversy. In the summer of 1957 he was appointed Dean of Students of the University of Chicago’s university college.
In incidents such as these white South Carolina demonstrated its opposition to those few white dissenters who would accept integration or who would admit that there is an element of right on the side of those who oppose the racial status quo.
CHAPTER XI
THE LOST CAUSE RELOST
The racially pure ... Teuton on the American Continent has arisen to be its master; he will remain master so long as he too does not succumb to blood defilement.—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
In 1954 historian Francis B. Simkins told the Southern Historical Association: “There is a reality about the South which historians with egalitarian standards find hard to understand or appreciate.” The South, said this native South Carolinian, should be judged by its own standards, not those of a liberal, equalitarian, democratic America.[547] Professor Simkins’ advice has not been followed in this study.
In contemplating the arguments advanced by white South Carolinians against integrating the races on any level, one is struck by the prominence given to expressions of fear that integration will inevitably lead to wholesale “amalgamation” and/or “miscegenation” which will result in turn in the destruction of Southern civilization. An excellent example of this reasoning is contained in the late Herbert Ravenel Sass’s article “Mixed Schools and Mixed Blood,” which appeared in the November 1956 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. “It is the deep conviction of nearly all white Southerners,” Sass wrote, “that the mingling or integration of white and Negro children in the South’s primary schools would open the gates to miscegenation and widespread racial amalgamation.” To guard against this “danger,” he declared, Southerners would maintain segregation in public schools at all costs. “The South must do this because, although it is a nearly universal instinct, race preference is not active in the very young. Race preference (which the propagandists miscall race prejudice or hate) is one of those instincts which develop gradually as the mind develops and which, if taken in hand early enough, can be prevented from developing at all.” If the South allowed its small children to attend integrated schools in which white and colored would be “brought together intimately and constantly” there would be many “in whom race preference would not develop.” This would be the ultimate tragedy for the South and for civilization. For “a very few years of thoroughly integrated schools would produce large numbers of indoctrinated young Southerners free from all ‘prejudice’ against mixed matings.” Negro leaders, he concluded, desired racial amalgamation; “they not only want the right to amalgamate through legal intermarriage but they want that right to be exercised widely and frequently.”[548]
The concern of South Carolinians with the “threat” of intermarriage is evidenced by the frequency with which this subject is mentioned in letters to newspapers in the state. Though the logic and factual accuracy of many of these letters leave something to be desired, they none the less are illustrative of a state of mind. For example, W. A. Morris of Charleston, referring to the mulattoes in the NAACP, said: “In the animal kingdom the mongrel is despised and outlawed, the good farmer uses only purebred stock and dog and cat fanciers insist on pedigreed pets. Should we expect less of man, made in the image of God, or attempt to improve on God’s work?”[549] Mr. Morris did not make it exactly clear how both whites and blacks but not mulattoes could be made in God’s image. Nor did he concern himself with how mulattoes got to be what they are.
Sentiments similar to those of Morris were expressed by Mrs. S. L. Blackman of Darlington: “Cross-bred animals lose the higher qualities of the parent stock,” she asserted, “and the low qualities always come to the fore. That’s a law of nature you can’t get away from.... If segregation is broken down everywhere, this world will be peopled by a mongrel race, eventually fit for nothing, not worth the air they would breathe, just scum of the earth.”[550] Mrs. Blackman’s dogmatic assertions are in direct contrast to the findings of the late Professor Franz Boaz, America’s greatest cultural anthropologist. Concerning attitudes such as those expressed by Mrs. Blackman, Boas wrote: “The claim has been made ... that mixed races ... are inferior in physical and mental qualities, that they inherit all the unfavorable traits of the parental races. So far as I can see, this bold proposition is not based on adequate evidence.” Going even further, he declared, “The few cases in which it has been possible to gather strictly scientific data on the physical characteristics of the half-bloods have rather shown that there may be a certain amount of physical improvement in the mixed race.”[551]