The Southern Case for School Segregation

by James Jackson Kilpatrick

One scarcely knows where to begin on books dealing with the Negro as such. The literature in this field is unending. In fairness, the student should seek out a couple of books that advance the traditional Southern view: Earnest Sevier Cox’s White America (1923) and, from as far back as 1910, E. H. Randle’s slim Characteristics of the Southern Negro. In the same year that Randle wrote his book, an English critic, William Archer, brought forth Through Afro-America. These three works are period pieces now, but they still have value.

I have relied heavily in writing this book on Nathaniel Weyl’s The Negro in American Civilization. Needless to say, a hundred other works are arrayed against his point of view. The student doubtless will have to begin with almost anything from W. E. B. DuBois, keeping in mind that DuBois, the grand old Red of the NAACP, formally joined the Communist Party in 1961. His works are important, nonetheless. Jerome Dowd’s The Negro in American Life (1926) is long, and outdated, but still most useful. A thoughtful reader will find a few hours for Tuskegee’s Robert R. Moton; his autobiography of 1920, Finding a Way Out, even then predicted a day when the white South would “stop feeling and begin thinking” about its Negro problem, and his What the Negro Thinks (1929) offers an insight into the continuing nature of Negro goals. A more militant work by the NAACP’s James Weldon Johnson, Negro Americans, What Now? appeared in 1934. And thinking of the NAACP, Mary White Ovington’s The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1947) contains some material not available elsewhere.

Of more recent vintage, half a dozen studies of the Negro deserve mention as reference works. Primus, of course, the monumental (and monumentally unreadable) work of Gunnar Myrdal and his associates, An American Dilemma. There are said to be eleven persons in the United States, apart from the collaborators, who have read the whole two volumes; I am not among them. But I ploughed through most of it. Arnold Rose, Myrdal’s chief assistant, has brought out a condensation, published in 1948 as The Negro in America. Rayford W. Logan of Howard University, one of the most prolific writers in the field, has produced a number of works of substantial value, among them The Negro in American Life and Thought and The Negro in the Postwar World. His colleague, Edward Franklin Frazier, also has published extensively; his The Negro in the United States (1957) is quite useful. Still another Negro writer, Arna Werdell Bontemps, should be consulted through her 100 Years of Negro Freedom. An interesting work that I came across after this manuscript was finished is Gilbert Franklin Edwards’ The Negro Professional Class (1959).

In the narrower field of political action, the general reader should begin with V. O. Key’s major work, Southern Politics in State and Nation, which sets the scene, and then go back to William Felbert Nowlin’s work of 1931, The Negro in American National Politics. A good contemporary work is The Negro and Southern Politics, by Hugh Douglas White. Of less value, in part because of its arrogant tone, is Henry Lee Moon’s polemical Balance of Power: The Negro Vote (a typical reference is to the “political zombies who infest the sub-Potomac region”). Report of the Civil Rights Commission and the Southern Regional Council are indispensable.

For the absolute amateur, coming cold into the field of anthropology, E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s BBC lectures, Social Anthropology, offer a most congenial introduction. This should be followed, I suggest, by Alfred Louis Kroeber’s Anthropology, originally published in 1923 and updated in 1948. It is hard work. Then, in a hard-driving rush: Ralph Linton’s The Tree of Culture, Carleton S. Coon’s The Story of Man, Hooton’s Apes, Men and Morons and Up from the Ape, Clyde Kluckhohn’s Mirror for Man; almost anything by Toynbee and Breasted; and warming to the more immediate theme, Franz Boas’ Anthropology and Modern Life (1928) and his Race, Language and Culture (1940). Boas was the great-granddaddy of the whole Liberal movement in social anthropology; he influenced a generation or more of dutiful followers. Melville Herskovits, of Northwestern, has written (1943) an agreeable biography of him. It merits a reading. And so do Herskovits’ own works, The American Negro (1928) and his more definitive The Myth of the Negro Past (1958). Otto Klineberg’s works are important: Negro Intelligence and Selective Migration (1935) and the useful anthology, Characteristics of the American Negro (1944). The famous UNESCO pamphlet on race has been covered in the text; Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish belong in a footnote. A very small footnote. Ashley Montagu, a monstrously irritating man, has to be read, or at least scratched: Man: His First Million Years, Human Heredity, and Man in Process. This last work I fetched home only a week ago. I do not like Ashley Montagu. Langston Hughes’ African Treasury is about what you would imagine Hughes would put out. Better, on African background, are John Coleman De Graft-Johnson’s African Glory: The Story of Vanished Negro Civilizations (1955) and Maurice Delafosse’s The Negroes of Africa (1931). But the bibliography in this area is extensive, and it grows more rapturous all the time. The African Colonization Movement, by P. J. Staudenraus (1961) is as good a roundup of this early nineteenth-century movement as I have come across.

In the text, I have called attention to Dr. Audrey M. Shuey’s Testing of Negro Intelligence. Let me call repeated attention to it here. This is an indispensable reference work, of unimpeachable integrity, for any student who proposes seriously to investigate Negro scores on intelligence tests. The student also should seek out Dr. Henry E. Garrett’s Great Experiments in Psychology (1951), and he should get his subscription in to Mankind Quarterly, 1 Darnaway St., Edinburgh 3, Scotland. At the University of Chicago, Dr. Dwight J. Ingle has demonstrated a fierce and wonderful courage in admitting unorthodox views to his Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, in which Dr. Montagu has been recently skewered.

This gets me, by hop, skip and jump, to reference works in the area of Constitutional history, law, and contemporary politics. The Federalist, of course. Elliot’s Debates. Madison’s Notes. Tocqueville. Jefferson’s Letters. Madison. There is no stopping point. The biographies of Marshall and Washington. James Morton Smith’s Freedom’s Fetters. Bibliography is futile. The student of the Constitution will read a thousand works, and then read a thousand more. He shouldn’t miss Charles Warren’s The Supreme Court in U.S. History. Yale’s Fred Rodell is a derisive fellow; his Nine Men is a fine, extended raspberry cheer, but it should be read. Most of the members of the Court have been loquacious; they cannot keep their tongues tied down. The law reviews fairly bulge with important material. Robert B. McKay’s long essay in the New York University Law Review (June, 1956) is no help to my position, but it merits a reading. Basic source material, of course, is available through the indispensable Race Relations Law Reporter. The student interested in getting both sides of this dispute should look up Senator Eastland’s “Era of Judicial Tyranny,” available through the Citizens Council, and Alfred J. Schweppe’s article in the American Bar Association’s Journal of February, 1958, “Enforcement of Federal Court Decrees.” On the question of private schools, a biased and snippy book by Donald Ross and Warren E. Gauerke, If the Schools Are Closed, merits a reading. The two Emory professors are anti-private school, but the source material is there. I have already mentioned Charles J. Bloch’s States Rights: The Law of the Land; it is a first-rate piece of work.

On the Fourteenth Amendment: Joseph B. James’ work is basic, The Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment (1956). See also Walter J. Suthon’s article in the Tulane Law Review at December, 1953, “The Dubious Origin of the Fourteenth Amendment”; Horace E. Flack’s “The Adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment,” in John Hopkins Studies (1908), and Joseph F. Ingham’s “Unconstitutional Amendments,” in the Dickinson Law Review of March, 1929, among many other sources.

It is futile to attempt any bibliographical note on the specific subject of school desegregation since 1954. The library of the Southern Educational Reporting Service in Nashville is a storehouse of material to be found nowhere else. I am indebted to Reed Sarratt and his associates there for making its riches available to me. Don Shoemaker’s With All Deliberate Speed; Harry Ashmore’s The Negro and the Schools; and Public Education in the South Today and Tomorrow, by Ernst W. Swanson and John A. Griffin (1955), are basic references. Any serious study must take in the annual reports of the various Southern State superintendents of public education. Bill Simmons, the urbane and immensely attractive executive director of the Citizens Council in Jackson, Miss., has a wealth of material available; student debaters who get stuck with the Southern side of the question should not hesitate to write him at the Plaza Building in Jackson.

This is about all the bibliography I am up to. Any student who delves into this subject necessarily will resort immediately to the Periodical Index. It teems with magazine references. Offhand, I know of not more than a dozen articles that present some aspects of the traditional Southern view—this, out of more than two thousand indexed articles supporting the integrationist view since 1954. Look them up: Clifford Dowdey, in Saturday Review of Oct. 9, 1954; Senator Ervin, in Look of April 3, 1956; Herbert Ravebel Sass, in Atlantic of November 1956; Tom Waring, in Harper’s, January 1956; Virginius Dabney, in Life of Sept. 22, 1958; William F. Buckley, Jr., in Saturday Review of Nov. 11, 1961; Perry Morgan, in Esquire for January, 1962; Donald R. Davidson in the Star Weekly Magazine for Nov. 9, 1957. There may have been a few others. The Citizens Council has a wealth of pamphlets, booklets, and other ephemera available to the student who troubles to ask for reference material. And of course the microfilmed resources of the Southern Educational Reporting Service are invaluable.