Profile in black and white

by Howard H. Quint

Stanley F. Morse, a chronic letter-to-the-editor writer and prominent in white supremacy circles, told the News and Courier that the progeny of “uncontrolled [interracial] crossings are mongrels which are more apt to be inferior than superior.” “The fall of the Egyptian, Roman and other great civilizations,” he continued, “was largely due to the development of a mongrel race caused by interbreeding with slaves and ‘barbarians.’” Furthermore, “planned mongrelization of a race in 740 B.C. produced the despised Samaritans.” Those who would condone such mongrelization were “breaking the Divine Laws.” Other writers also considered intermarriage a violation of the will of God. Mrs. E. R. Mansfield of Mt. Pleasant, for example, wrote the News and Courier editor that “naturally this process of maintaining racial purity and integrity at the same time that we make possible equality of opportunity, is going to impose a hardship and some personal tragedies, on some individuals. But this will not be the first hard thing that God in His infinite goodness has demanded for us.”[552]

Three principal conclusions result from this study: (1) South Carolina has not yet embraced democracy as the term is generally defined by Americans outside the South. (2) Many white South Carolinians still accept a racism which in its most extreme forms approaches that of Hitler and the Nazis. (3) Not a few of the arguments and defenses advanced by segregationists against the Court decision are so illogical and so riddled with inconsistencies that sometimes one is obliged to question not only the sincerity but also the intelligence of the spokesmen. These conclusions have been illustrated in the body of the study but a short summary is in order.

The denial of equality of access or opportunity in any public area, function or facility by a “superior” group to an “inferior” group constitutes the antithesis of democracy. In this respect South Carolina, like all of the Southern states, is undemocratic, a condition which persons concerned with promoting integration have not failed to note. Clarence Mitchell, the Washington NAACP official, referred to South Carolina as “the frontier of democracy,” a place where “the real meaning of America” had not penetrated.[553]

The attitude of leading segregation spokesmen regarding democracy is more revealing than that of critics of the South. The News and Courier is the state’s most articulate expert on the “phony spiels about democracy.” The American people had gone “hog-wild in worshipping ‘democracy,’” complained this paper. Democracy with its “unrestricted franchise” did not guarantee good government. Indeed there was “ample precedent for requiring that those who vote on public issues be able to understand” what they were doing. Property, too, was a relevant qualification. George Washington himself had warned against the “‘dangerous multitudes without property and without principle.’” “Some persons” would object to the use of property as a qualification for voting but property was “still a gauge of competence.... Paupers are and should be excluded from deciding how other people’s money is to be spent.” Editor Thomas R. Waring’s editorials also argued that majority rule might be the essence of democracy but the United States was not a democracy. It was a republic. A mob might be a majority at certain times. “The condemnation of Jesus Christ had the approval of a majority. Throughout the history of the church there have been martyrs of majorities.”[554]

A democracy, according to the News and Courier, did not guarantee protection of sectional or local interests. But the United States—“a federal republic”—was especially designed for this end. Under the American constitutional system the parts were supposed to be equal to the whole. In this sense then it was not “the democratic way to force the majority of the people of a REGION to live in a manner that is repugnant to them. The democratic way should take into consideration the local as well as the national feelings of citizens.”[555] John C. Calhoun never better expressed these sentiments.

The Record, too, abhorred “absolute democracy.” The United States was never intended to be such. It was “a limited representative democracy.” The Record deplored constitutional flexibility. It maintained that the presumption on which the Supreme Court based its decision outlawing school segregation, namely, that the Constitution was “a growing document,” eliminated, “for all practical purposes,” the Constitution as “a safeguard of the people’s purposes,” as “a safeguard of the people’s rights and as a limitation upon government.” The Record maintained that the integration problem arose from the fact that “so many of the minority groups, who have been urging the abolition of segregation and other such ‘reforms’” were “not inheritors of the British tradition out of which the American Constitution grew.” These groups saw nothing to be feared in constitutional amendments by the Supreme Court. It was all “democracy” to them and by democracy they meant what the United States Constitution did not mean—absolute democracy.[556]

On this subject the State was equally vociferous. Referring to the term human rights as “meaningless,” the Columbia newspaper in 1957 declared: “The only right with which man is endowed at birth is the right to survive if he can. The right to vote, think freely and speak freely” and the right of representative government “are created by government and society.” Social Darwinism in its rawest form is not yet dead in South Carolina.

Not only do the segregationists deny the validity of many of the basic concepts of democracy but they also dispute the authority of the federal government to assure equal treatment under the laws of the United States to all Americans. They uphold what they consider to be the constitutional rights of the states above human rights as applied to the Negro. Democracy is denied to Negroes in the name of democratic government. Harking back to the conservative nature of the Constitution as originally written, the News and Courier thought it “ridiculous that a document which recognized slavery” was now being “brandished as a guarantee of all sorts of supposed rights. Did the framers of the Constitution, who approved of slavery, sit down and write a document guaranteeing to Negroes the right to send their children to mixed schools?” The question of the Charleston paper reveals more of its fetish for constitutionalism than does the answer: “The framers didn’t guarantee Negroes anything—not even protection from the whip!” The Record, at least recognizing that the Court based its decision on the Fourteenth Amendment and not the original Constitution, declared that “every student of the Constitution” knew that the amendment “was never constitutionally submitted to the states or constitutionally ratified” and was therefore “not today constitutionally a part of the Constitution.”[557] The Record’s arguments concerning the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment contain, of course, an element of historical truth, but only a warped approach to the problem of constitutionalism can hold that the Amendment is not part of the fundamental law of the land.

Not only is there a considerable body of anti-democratic opinion in the state but it is also safe to say that most white South Carolinians consider the Negro a member of an inferior race. Dr. E. Ryan Crow, chairman of the South Carolina education finance commission, observed, for example, that “the white man feels he belongs to a superior race.” To support this belief in racial superiority segregationists often resort to science or pseudo-science. The News and Courier thought it “curious” that many Americans had “abandoned the scientific approach to study of the human species.” “Leaders of public opinion,” it complained, had thrown overboard “the scientists’ cold appraisal” and had fallen back on “sentiment, on propaganda, on political catchwords.” Anything that tended to confirm “inherent differences among races,” was “frowned on as ‘racism.’ Yet a large body of scientific evidence indicates that important differences DO exist” between the races.[558]

These comments by the News and Courier brought a letter of agreement from Francis Fielding-Reid, M.D., of Charleston who warned South Carolinians against accepting “a certain type of pseudo-scientific balderdash.” Said the doctor: