The judgments below, except that in the Delaware case, are accordingly reversed and the cases are remanded to the District Courts to take such proceedings and enter such orders and decrees consistent with this opinion as are necessary and proper to admit to public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the parties to these cases. The judgment in the Delaware case—ordering the immediate admission of the plaintiffs to schools previously attended only by white children—is affirmed on the basis of the principles stated in our May 17, 1954, opinion, but the case is remanded to the Supreme Court of Delaware for such further proceedings as that Court may deem necessary in light of this opinion.
It is so ordered.
A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
There stands in the Grove of Academe, or so I have often imagined, a certain idolatrous image. It is a crane-like creature with italic wings, the great god Ibid., and before it, strutting on their tiny six-point feet, the pedant peacocks daily make obeisance. They look up, supra, and down infra, and spreading their tails with asterisk eyes, they march with robed scholars to lay garlands of op. cit. upon the ritual shrine.
When I launched into this book, I swore a blasphemous oath upon such phony veneration. After a long life of reading footnotes, and reading them religiously, I have concluded that 98.2 per cent of them are so much flummery: They are showin’ off befo’ God. Thus I had not planned upon notes or bibliography, and this extended note is afterthought; it is the reluctant consequence of listening to beguiling editors. They said: Where did you get all this stuff? Whence these bizarre ideas? They said: Serious students will want to know where to get supporting material intended to prove (a) that you are a fraud, or (b) that there may be something to the Southern position after all. You ought to gird up your Gothic archness with a few flying buttresses of attribution. And in a moment of weakness, I said very well.
The figures on population, area, wages, housing, and the like, in the opening pages of this book, come primarily from the 1960 Census and the Statistical Abstract of the United States for 1961. The Census people have a diabolical genius for presenting their data in the least usable possible form, but they have a monopoly on the figures and no other source exists.
As for the nature of the South: Almost every Southerner who writes for a living at one time or another has wooed this elusive theme. I would suggest that a student start with W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, not because I agree with everything Cash had to say, but because his brief star flashed with a rare brilliance across the Southern sky. The Knopf edition of 1941 is now available in a Doubleday Anchor paperback, and though parts of it are dated, it continues to offer a good basic foundation. Then, at random, William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee, and David Cohn’s Where I Was Born and Raised. The late William Polk of Greensboro, N.C., was a delightful gentleman; during an editorial writers’ convention in Boston, we once talked of the South’s problems between the bumps and grinds of an Old Howard Burly-Q. His book, Southern Accent (1953) is fine background reading. Although they are hard to find, Ward Allison Dorrance’s several books on Southern rivers are worth the effort. Some good essays appear in The Lasting South (1957), a collection edited largely by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., though my own name is on the spine too.
A great many other books about the South come to mind. Henry Grady’s The New South, published in 1890, is almost indispensable. Another necessary work, of seminal influence, is the Agrarians’ I’ll Take My Stand of 1930. I come back frequently to Matthew Page Andrews’ Virginia, The Old Dominion. C. Vann Woodward’s several books are useful: The Burden of Southern History, Origins of the New South, and The Strange Career of Jim Crow. The serious student’s reading list would find a place for Seeds of Time, by Henry Savage, Jr.; Southern Tradition and Regional Progress, by William H. Nicholls; The Southern Heritage, by James McBride Dabbs, and Goodbye to Uncle Tom, by J. C. Furnas. Thomas D. Clark’s The Emerging South is good on economic history. Virginius Dabney’s Below the Potomac, published in 1942, remains a solid work. Bernard Robb’s Welcum Hinges is at once gentle and delightful. The student should not pass by Harry Ashmore’s Epitaph for Dixie (1958) and The Other Side of Jordan (1960). And of course, before it gets overlooked by reason of its bulk and importance, the multi-volumed history of the South emerging from Louisiana State University Press is a primary reference.
Many of the foregoing titles—alas, almost all of them—are the work of Southern Liberals. And I do not seem to have mentioned P. D. East’s The Magnolia Jungle, or Hodding Carter’s Southern Legacy and Where the Main Street Meets the River, and The South Strikes Back, or Robert Penn Warren’s Segregation, or Jonathan Daniels’ A Southerner Discovers the South and Frontier on the Potomac. Nearly all the recent crop of books are cast in molds more liberal yet: Carl T. Rowan’s Go South to Sorrow; John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, and Richard Wright’s White Man, Listen! Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely have co-authored two books worth serious thought: Neither Black nor White, and Seeds of Southern Change. A student’s shelf should leave a place for William Peters’ The Southern Temper. Several books of largely contemporary, topical interest should be read: Martin Luther King’s account of the Montgomery boycott, Stride Toward Freedom; Bishop Robert R. Brown’s Bigger Than Little Rock; Virgil T. Blossom’s It Has Happened Here; and John Bartlow Martin’s generally well-balanced The Deep South Says Never. Martin’s book is the work of a professional reporter. Most of the rest of the books mentioned in this paragraph annoyed the hell out of me.
Against this monstrous amount of sack, one finds but a penny’s worth of bread. The conservative South has not lacked willing spokesmen; it has lacked agreeable publishers. A bare handful of works present a contrary view, and some of these—Herman Talmadge’s You and Segregation, and W. E. Debnam’s impudent Weep No More, My Lady, and My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night—are in paperback. The scant list of hardcover works espousing the point of view of several million white Southerners includes only Bill Workman’s The Case for the South (1960), Carleton Putnam’s Race and Reason, a Yankee View, and my own The Sovereign States (1957), a book I still like very much. (There is also Charles P. Bloch’s lawyerly States Rights: The Law of the Land, but that probably should be mentioned later in books on legal aspects of the question.)