Richmond
May 1962
Part I
The Evidence
I
At the time of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, on Monday, May 17, 1954, seventeen Southern and border States maintained racially separate schools. These included, in addition to the thirteen States to be treated here as “the South,” the States of Maryland, Delaware, Kansas, and Missouri, plus the District of Columbia. Each of the five speedily abandoned segregation—Kansas willingly, Missouri stoically, Maryland cheerlessly, Delaware grudgingly. The District abandoned segregation; white parents abandoned the District, and by 1962 an 82 per cent resegregation could be observed in the schools. Sic transit gloria Monday. None of the four States was in any real sense a part of the South; their constitutional or statutory requirements for segregated schools were appendages more or less ripe for the clipping. And though southern Missouri and the Delaware shore submitted to desegregation with some bitterness, the surgery was not especially painful and the operations, on the whole, were uneventful.
This essay is concerned chiefly with the other thirteen States, with attitudes and practices that then prevailed widely in all of them and still prevail overwhelmingly in some of them: the States of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. A possibly more definitive list might eliminate Oklahoma and Kentucky from this neo-Confederate fold; their Negro populations comprise no more than 6 or 7 per cent of the State total, and Oklahoma looks to the Southwest while Kentucky (mildly anesthetized by Mr. Bingham’s Louisville Courier-Journal) looks nowhere in particular. Yet I myself was reared in Oklahoma, and I know at first hand of the intensely Southern sentiment that still obtains in much of the State; my Kentucky friends write me poignantly, as one writes from East Berlin or Poland, asking CARE packages and seeking prayers, and I judge that many Kentuckians continue to look upon integration as they might look upon orange slices in a julep. They will drink the horrid thing, but their sense of propriety is outraged.
These thirteen States together make up a fascinating part of the American Republic. Their combined area amounts to nearly 863,000 square miles, or about 28 per cent of the continental United States. The 1960 census found in them 48,802,000 persons, of whom 24,036,000 were males and 24,755,000 were females; and, more to our point, the census found in them 38,404,000 white persons, 10,231,000 Negro persons, and 167,000 other nonwhites, mostly Indians in Texas, Oklahoma, and North Carolina.
The census of 1960 turned up a great many other figures useful to an understanding of the American South. Some of these are best presented in tabulated form. These figures, for example, bear close study:
Negro Population, Thirteen Southern
States, 1900-1960
| Per cent Total Pop. | Per cent | Number | |||
| State | 1900 | 1920 | 1940 | 1960 | 1960 |
| Alabama | 45.2 | 38.4 | 34.7 | 30.0 | 980,271 |
| Arkansas | 28.0 | 27.0 | 24.7 | 21.8 | 388,787 |
| Florida | 43.7 | 34.0 | 27.1 | 17.8 | 880,186 |
| Georgia | 46.7 | 41.7 | 34.7 | 28.5 | 1,122,596 |
| Kentucky | 13.3 | 9.8 | 7.5 | 7.1 | 215,949 |
| Louisiana | 47.1 | 38.9 | 35.9 | 31.9 | 1,039,207 |
| Mississippi | 58.5 | 52.2 | 49.2 | 42.0 | 915,743 |
| North Carolina | 33.0 | 29.8 | 27.5 | 24.5 | 1,116,021 |
| Oklahoma | 7.0 | 7.4 | 7.2 | 6.6 | 153,084 |
| South Carolina | 58.4 | 51.4 | 42.8 | 34.8 | 829,291 |
| Tennessee | 23.8 | 19.3 | 17.4 | 16.5 | 586,876 |
| Texas | 20.4 | 15.9 | 14.4 | 12.4 | 1,187,125 |
| Virginia | 35.6 | 29.9 | 24.7 | 20.6 | 816,258 |
| The U.S.A. | 11.6 | 9.8 | 9.8 | 10.5 | 18,871,831 |
The Negro component within the American Union, it is evident, remains today about what it has been all along. Within the Southern States, the Negro population is dropping steadily as a percentage of the whole. Negroes comprised 11.6 per cent of the nation’s total in population in 1900, 9.7 per cent in 1930, and 10.5 per cent in 1960. But this 10.5 per cent of 1960 has shifted dramatically across the nation. Of 18,872,000 Negroes, 8,641,000 or 46 per cent, were living in 1960 outside the thirteen States of the South. There were more Negroes in New York City (1,227,000) than in all of Mississippi or Alabama. Philadelphia turned up 26.4 per cent Negro; Georgia is 28.5 per cent Negro. Chicago counted almost as many Negroes in its city limits (813,000) as there were in the whole of Virginia (816,000), and they represented a larger part of the total—a concentrated 23 per cent in Chicago, a scattered 21 per cent in Virginia.