The same inequality evidenced on the public school level existed in higher education. The state maintains five institutions of higher learning for whites and one for Negroes. The Negro institution was originally rather thoroughly named the Colored Normal, Industrial, Agricultural, and Mechanical College. The total state appropriation for the white colleges in 1949 was in excess of $4,500,000 while that for the Negro college was less than $600,000. Dr. Lewis K. McMillan, former professor of history at the Negro institution, described the college as “a glorified high school” treated as a “step child” by the state. Until after World War II the college did not have a nominal graduate or law school. However, in the light of a spate of federal court decisions admitting Negro students to white state universities when equal educational opportunities were lacking in state-supported Negro schools, the 1945 state appropriations act authorized the college to establish “graduate, Law, and Medical departments and such other departments as may be necessary to provide training in all lines of college activities for students attending this college.” No money was appropriated until 1946 and then a completely inadequate $25,000 for the graduate school. In 1947 $60,000 was appropriated for the Law School. “Medical and pharmaceutical training” was authorized to the extent of a paltry appropriation of $15,000 in 1950.[46]
While federal court cases in other states provided a general impetus to this program, the danger that a Negro might be admitted to the University of South Carolina loomed ominously on the horizon in 1946 when a Negro, Cleveland M. McQueen, applied for admission as a graduate student in the School of Education. The state answered his request with the appropriation for a graduate school at the Negro college.[47] In the same year another Negro, John Wrighten, applied for admission to the University Law School and was denied admittance. He then took his case to the courts which ruled that unless the state provided a law school at the Negro college “on a substantial parity with the University Law School” by September, 1947, Wrighten had to be admitted to the latter. By the deadline a law school had been established and Wrighten made no further appeal.[48] Until January, 1958, no Negro made a concerted effort to gain admission to one of the white institutions of higher education. Two Negroes applied for admission to Clemson College in 1956 but did not press their applications after being refused. But in January, 1958, as will be seen in Chapter VII, Negro students were clearing the decks for a law suit to force admission to the University of South Carolina.
CHAPTER II
THE CASE FROM CLARENDON
When the social needs demand one settlement rather than another, there are times when we must bend symmetry, ignore history and sacrifice custom in the pursuit of other and larger ends. From history and philosophy and custom, we pass, therefore, to the force which in our day and generation is becoming the greatest of them all, the power of social justice which finds its outlet and expression in the method of sociology.... The final cause of law is the welfare of society.—Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo.
Culmination of the effort of the Negroes of South Carolina to win legal recognition of their rights to first class citizenship came in 1954 in the Clarendon County school case. This was the key case in the NAACP’s nationwide campaign to break down racial segregation in public schools. Negro leaders purposely singled out Clarendon County because it presented racially segregated schools in the worst possible light. Located in the state’s black belt, the county in 1951 had approximately 23,000 Negroes and 8,000 whites. Enrolled in its public schools were 6,531 Negro students as compared to 2,375 whites. Yet school expenditures totaled $395,329 for whites as against $282,950 for Negroes.[49] In School District No. 22 (Summerton), the district directly involved in the suit, there were 298 white pupils and 2,259 Negro pupils.[50] In facilities such as libraries, lighting fixtures, desks, play grounds, classroom space, lavatories, lunchrooms, auditoriums and teacher ratio to pupil, the Negro schools were decidedly inferior to those provided for whites. For example, the NAACP pointed out in the hearing of the case before the federal court that one of the Negro schools with 600 pupils had only two toilets, both outdoors. Another school lacked drinking faucets and water had to be brought in a bucket from the home of a neighboring minister.[51]
Clarendon is a typical South Carolina low country rural county and most of its people, especially Negroes, are agricultural workers. In 1955 the Nation described the county as a place where the people
talk of Citizens’ Councils and the “economic squeeze,” where the Ku Klux Klan met with Bryant Bowles, head of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, as a featured speaker, where integration is freely referred to as a “Communist-Catholic-Jewish plot,” where a place of business displays the latest newspaper clippings showing crimes of Negro against white, where private citizens discuss the hated Ford Foundation along with the price of tobacco, where the NAACP has only a small chapter and where you hunt long and hard for a defender of the Negro.[52]
The Clarendon case, technically known as Harry Briggs, Jr., et al., appellants, versus R. W. Elliott, et al., appellees, had its origins in 1948 when a group of Negro citizens brought suit in federal court to require state and county officials to provide school buses for Negro pupils. Federal District Judge J. Waties Waring dismissed this suit on the ground that the state as a governmental unit did not supply school buses for any students. The following year Negro parents in Clarendon petitioned authorities to bring Negro school facilities up to the standards of the county’s white schools. The petition threatened legal action if equality were not provided. In May, 1950, citing failure of local officials to equalize school facilities, a suit was filed asking that school authorities be compelled to provide equality. In December, 1950, this suit was dropped and another, filed by forty Negro parents, attacked segregation per se as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and asked the abolition of all segregation in public schools based on race.[53] The suit was filed under NAACP auspices.
In May, 1951, the case was heard by a special three-judge court presided over by Federal Circuit Judge John J. Parker of North Carolina and District Judges George Bell Timmerman, Sr., of Columbia and J. Waties Waring of Charleston. The suit represented the first all-out legal attack in the deep South on the system of racial segregation on the public school level. It was clearly a test case; the ruling would provide a basis for future court decisions in similar cases. The appellants were represented by Thurgood Marshall, chief counsel for the NAACP; the appellees by attorneys Robert McC. Figg of Charleston and S. Emory Rogers of Summerton. Figg is an able Charleston corporation lawyer; Rogers, a determined defender of white supremacy at any price, was attorney for the Summerton school board.