Chapter III The Emergence of Patterns
So strongly drawn is the line between the two races... and so strengthened by the form of habit and education, that... no power on earth can overcome the difficulty.
—John C. Calhoun.
The May 17, 1954, decision of the Supreme Court in the school segregation cases issued in a new era in race relations in the South. From this point onward the race issue centered on public school integration. Reaction to the ruling tended to vary in proportion to the percentage of Negroes in the local population. Some border areas began preparations for compliance; the deep South was defiant. South Carolina, with a high percentage of Negro population (between 35 and 40 percent) and with a strong master-servant tradition governing its race relations, was among the most intransigent of the deep South states. Few white South Carolinians were willing even to consider compliance with the decision as being among the possible solutions to the segregation problem.
The Clarendon verdict momentarily stunned the white citizenry of South Carolina. Though politicians and their allies in the “power structure” of the state quickly warmed to their traditional thespian role of championing white supremacy and competed in lambasting the Court and the decision, the general public was slow in grasping its full implications. It was this seeming state of indecision that misled those moderates who were willing to go ahead and at least try school integration. The majesty of a Supreme Court decision lent conviction that little needed to be done and in any event there was no sense in antagonizing one’s neighbors. As a consequence the moderates rested on their oars and did virtually nothing to help prepare the way for the implementation of the Court’s ruling. This was a tragic error. But in retrospect and admittedly with the benefit of historical hindsight, it was no more an error than the Court’s allowing the Clarendon County officials an unspecified length of time to achieve integration. Had the Court ordered immediate integration, compliance might well have been forthcoming since at the time there was no alternative course of action. As was, the Court allowed the Clarendon officials time to develop stalling tactics and the state to adopt a public policy which together have been successful in preventing even one Negro child from entering a white public school in South Carolina.
Official reaction to the decision was universally condemnatory. Governor James F. Byrnes was “shocked” to learn that the Court had overthrown the Plessy doctrine. The late Senator Burnet R. Maybank labeled the ruling “a shameful political edict rather than a judicial decision.” The Court made the ruling, he asserted, only “under the duress” of Chief Justice Earl Warren and Attorney General Herbert Brownell. Had the Democrats been in power, the decision would never have been made. Senator Olin D. Johnston, too, saw the fine Venetian hands of Warren and Brownell in the decision which he described as “a flagrant, direct appeal for the political favor of minority groups.” He deplored the Court’s “radical departure from the well-reasoned” separate-but-equal doctrine as being written largely by “subversive groups.”74
Senator J. Strom Thurmond was, if anything, even more critical. Blaming the decision on “pressure and power politics,” he termed it “one of the worst ever handed down by any court... in this country.” Most of the authorities cited by the Court, he said, “were either members of Communist-front organizations” or their loyalty was “in serious question.” Broadening his attack, Thurmond declared that integration was “impractical, illogical, and unconstitutional” and undesired by white people or “good Negro people” of the South. The trouble came from “outside agitators” who were stirring up Negroes with discrimination charges.75
Similarly, Attorney General T. C. Callison saw “no constitutional authority, no statutory authority, no judicial precedent, no reason and no justice in that decision.” Callison, a small town lawyer, described Gunnar Myrdal, “the principal authority” used by the Court, as “a foreign Socialist, with no first hand knowledge of conditions in the South.” Many of Myrdal’s “collaborators” in the writing of An American Dilemma were allegedly “members of Communist front organizations.”76
In sharp contrast to the comments of the state’s leading political figures was the reaction of James M. Hinton, state NAACP president. Hinton believed that there was “no place in a democracy, and certainly not in the Christian church, for segregation.” Both whites and Negroes of South Carolina, he thought, would accept “any decision from the U. S. Supreme Court.”77
The press was no less critical than the politicians. The Charleston News and Courier was especially outspoken. This paper attacked the decision on several grounds. It gave new meaning to the Constitution; “drove another nail into the coffin of states rights;” consisted of a “sociological finding, as contrasted with an affirmation of the law;” constituted an abridgement of “the freedom of white people;” repealed and outlawed laws and customs that were “older than the Republic;” and was the result of packing the Supreme Court “to represent the New-Fair Deal viewpoint” to the exclusion of the “States Rights viewpoint.” Noting the embarrassingly favorable reaction to the decision throughout the non-Southern part of the country and the world, the News and Courier asserted that the only ones “unhappy” with the ruling were “white Southerners... and the rank and file of self-respecting Negroes,” who were “not interested in being compelled to associate with one another.” While Editor Thomas R. Waring’s paper urged “wisdom and tolerance,” it opposed “cowardice” on the part of Southerners.78
The Columbia Record was more realistic. Southerners should not have been surprised by the Supreme Court’s “bouleversement on segregation,” said Editor Buchanan, because such a decision was the logical result of previous cases affecting graduate and professional levels of education. It was based “not upon law but upon sociology and psychology, so-called social sciences which true scientists agree today are not scientific.” The opinion was “a sociological interpretation of the Constitution” and segregation was “sociologically, not legally... unconstitutional, null and void.” The Court was guilty of getting “too far ahead too fast of public opinion in the South.” The Justices might have held that segregation per se was inequality, suggested the Record, but then concluded that because of “the cultural, health, and other differences between children of the two races and in the preponderance of Negroes in its school population” the Clarendon district had problems which would make integration “harmful, psychologically and sociologically.” The capital city paper, a strong supporter of President Eisenhower, took issue with those who blamed or credited the decision on the Republican administration. Buchanan insisted that the decision was a Democratic ruling eight to one, since Eisenhower had appointed only one justice to the Court. In seeking to absolve Chief Justice Warren of responsibility, the Record declared with a good deal of truth that there were “some indications” that the case had been decided before Warren’s appointment.79 The editor of the Record refused to concede that what was involved was an “American” decision rather than either a Republican or a Democratic one.
The Anderson Independent likewise stressed the non-legal nature of the Court’s action. Taking exactly the opposite direction from the Record, the upcountry paper said that the decision, which combined “a bit of law along with large doses of psychology and sociology,” was not unexpected in view of the pro-integration policies of the Republican administration. It conveniently ignored the attitude of the national Democratic Party toward the segregation issue. Decision or no decision, said the Independent, the races would “not be mixed in South Carolina schools today, tomorrow, next year or in the years to come.”80
Only the Florence Morning News admitted the end of school segregation in South Carolina a probability. On the day following the decision, Editor Jack H. O’Dowd announced, prematurely to be sure, that “segregation is ended in Southern schools.” He then added, “It can be assumed that South Carolina, in the immediate future, is to have integrated schools, or no public schools.... The question is no longer whether or not segregation is proper, the present question is what the state is to do in the face of the Court’s decision.” Within a year, however, the Florence editor saw the South Carolina light, or felt the intolerably hot breath of the white population on his neck, and became more critical of the decision. In April, 1955, he chastised the Court for having “swapped law and legal tradition for... warped ideas of sociology” which only endangered the “medium through which the Negro has made his greatest gains—public education.”81
White South Carolinians generally were no less antagonistic toward the decision than their political leaders and newspapers. W. D. Workman, Jr., the News and Courier correspondent in Columbia, thought the Court was more concerned with the Southern Negro than his white neighbor. And this in spite of the fact that the latter had always relied upon the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution “rather than upon the changing social and political standards of a polyglot nation.” Southerners, boasted this young apostle of the old order, “have been and still are, closer by blood, by belief, and by behavior to the framers of those two documents than are persons of any other section of the country.”82 L. B. McCord, the Clarendon County school superintendent and former Presbyterian minister, thought the decision “one of the worst things that has happened in this century,” endangering as it did “the splendid relation” which had previously existed between the races “in this good old Southland.”83
Stanley F. Morse, president of the Charleston Grass Roots League, a white supremacy organization, viewed the decision as “just another successful step in the Red Revolution against the United States,” marking “the attainment of one of the objectives of the Communist drive among U. S. Negroes started in 1920.” The fact that the decision was unanimous was “indicative of powerful pressure on the Court by ‘liberal’ politicians and Marxian Socialist conspirators.” In a similar manner another Charleston man, Huger Sinkler, attorney and former state legislator, considered the decision to be “but another aftermath to Appomattox.” He believed that
... the authors of this latest outrage are as deeply imbued with hatred for our Southern customs as was Thaddeus Stevens. And, unfortunately, in both periods, we find as President a man whose decisions are obviously made for him by others.
In the case of Grant, it was the man with the mulatto mistress, Thaddeus Stevens, and the small corps of abolitionists. In the instance of Eisenhower, it would appear to be Dewey, Brownell and Dulles, men whose political ambitions lead them to pose as friends of the underprivileged, and, in the case of Dewey, a man with an open hatred for the South....
Reconstruction days were harsh, but, notwithstanding the scalawags, the carpetbaggers and the federal bayonet, the basic principles for which the South fought were not destroyed.
Today, we face a similar challenge. Perhaps, if we have the strength of character, exhibited by the generation preceding, the dawn of a new 1876 will arrive.84
The reaction of the white people of Clarendon County to the decision, according to Record reporter Carlton Truax, a former missionary, ranged from “resignation to bitterness and violent rebellion.” A minority “fringe group” openly expressed the opinion that blood would flow if Negroes sought admission in white Clarendon schools. Truax found “much bitterness, some deep frustration and often a sense of helplessness.” At a meeting held in June, 1955, approximately 350 white residents of the Summerton school district agreed that the schools should be kept open only until the courts ordered the admission of a Negro pupil to the white school.85 The white Clarendon community had decided that segregation was more important than education.
Reaction to the implementing decision of May 31, 1955, was less critical than that of the earlier ruling. The Columbia Record considered the Court’s plan to remand the cases to lower courts a partial Southern victory even though the justices failed to change their original decision. Similarly the Florence Morning News saw “some small comfort” for the South in the Court’s failure to establish a deadline for compliance. In a more critical mood, the Anderson Independent declared that “the poison prescribed when the Supreme Court wrote new law into the Constitution last year is no less deadly offered in the small doses as now directed.” The Charleston News and Courier believed that the Court’s “as soon as practicable” meant “never at all.”86
Attorney General T. C. Callison, speaking for the state leaders, termed the implementing decision “quite unsatisfactory.” He asserted once again that integration in South Carolina would “bring about every condition which will create a breeding bed for communism.”87
An outgrowth of the Supreme Court’s invalidation of segregation in the public schools was increased criticism of the Court itself. Extremists expressed scorn for the Court as an instrument of government; others urged the Court’s powers be curbed by Congress. Senator Thurmond maintained that the members of the Court were “not worthy to wear the robes of their high office.” James H. Hammond, former state senator and direct lineal descendant of the ante-bellum United States senator of “Cotton is King” fame, called the justices “a bunch of skunks.” At a rally at Laurens, E. L. Edwards, the Grand Dragon of the national Ku Klux Klan, referred to the “nine buzzards on the Supreme Court.” State Representative George Harrell of Florence County introduced into the state legislature a resolution which urged Congress to investigate the Court for “attempting to enact and enforce as law the sociological concepts of its members.”88
According to the News and Courier the Court had become “an instrument to uphold the right of Big Government to slap down state and individual rights.” It was more concerned with “the rights of leftist labor officials and Communist editors” than “the rights of white Southerners.” And it had degenerated into a mere political arm of the Eisenhower administration. Indirectly accusing the President of court-packing in the appointment of John Marshall Harlan, the News and Courier peevishly declared that “a suitable man could have been found whose grandfather had not been the only dissenter to the basic (Plessy-Ferguson) decision in the 1896 issue.”89 The need of the country, said the Record, was “a Supreme Court in the pre-New Deal tradition, one of integrity, stability, learning and judicial outlook.” Unfortunately neither national party offered hope in this area. Warren was “a political appointment” and on the Court he had been a “political Chief Justice.”90 No less critical of the Court, the Independent suggested that the justices would be less subject to “political pressures” and “radical departures” if they were appointed not for life but for specified terms.91 The Columbia State, not to be undone, opined that the popularity of the Supreme Court among “sound thinking people seems to resemble that of measles.” It asserted on another occasion that the Court had rather “meander through Myrdalism than precedents.”92
Congressman Robert J. Ashmore, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, criticized the Court for a long line of “foolish, unconstitutional and un-American” decisions. Sooner or later, he asserted, Congress would realize that the real aim of the justices was “to set up their socialistic ideas as supreme.” In like manner Representative William Jennings Bryan Dorn accused the Court of degenerating into a mere “rubber stamp” for the Eisenhower administration.93
Former Justice James F. Byrnes spoke for states righters who would curb the powers of the Court as a means of halting “creeping centralism.” Holding the desegregation decision an amendment to rather than an interpretation of the Constitution, Byrnes criticized the Court for impairing “progress and... freedom,” undoing the South’s “steadily advancing racial amity,” and undermining the Constitution. He blamed the decision on political factors and attempted to discredit the sources cited in the Court’s opinion. The one-time New Dealer quoted Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi as authority for the statement that the files of the House Un-American Activities Committee were “replete with citations and information” concerning Theodore Brameld and E. Franklin Frazier, whose studies were considered by the Court. Allegedly, the files contained “18 citations of Frazier’s connections with Communist causes in the United States.” Byrnes was especially critical of the use of Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. He branded as obviously false Myrdal’s statement that “in the South the Negro’s person and property are practically subject to the whim of any white person who wishes to take advantage of him or to punish him for any real or fancied wrongdoing or insult.” Removed from the bench and no longer the wearer of the judicial ermine, Byrnes stated flatly that the only solution to such a situation was to limit the authority of the Court. The trend toward centralization of government powers in Washington, said the ex-War Mobilizer, was bringing “joy to the Communists and their fellow travelers, for they could more easily influence one government” than forty-eight.94
Illustrative of the widespread opposition to the Court and its anti-segregation decisions was a resolution signed by 52 prominent white South Carolinians and circulated throughout the state for signature by other Carolinians. All the original signers of this resolution could be included in the State’s “power structure.” The more outstanding included E. H. Agnew, Eugene S. Blease, Robert R. Coker, Rev. Edward B. Guerry, R. Beverly Herbert, Col. Wyndham M. Manning, Thomas H. Pope, Herbert Ravenel Sass, Ellison D. Smith, Jr., Farley Smith, the Rt. Rev. Albert S. Thomas, Ransome J. Williams and William D. Workman, Jr. These people, said the News and Courier, “are not crackpots, extremists, Klansmen, rightists or leftists. They are largely middle-of-the-roaders. They are intelligent white men. They are leaders in law, clergy, business, farming, education, and politics of our state. In other words, they are a cross section of the better-class moderate, white people of South Carolina.”95
The “Committee of 52” resolved that the Supreme Court relied “not upon the body of established American law, but upon the dubious conclusions of sociologists and psychologists whose number includes persons tainted with Communism;” that pressure from the NAACP and other “self-serving organizations” had “lowered the will of politicians and the public generally to resist encroachments upon the sovereign rights of states;” and that such pressure was endangering both “the public school system of South Carolina and the harmonious relationship between the white and Negro races.” Therefore, the resolution urged the state legislature to take such steps as “may be necessary or desirable to interpose the sovereignty of the State of South Carolina between Federal courts and local school officials.”96 The petitioners had some initial success and within a week 7,000 persons had reportedly signed the resolution. However, this movement soon lost its drive and produced no tangible results.
As already observed, one of the tactics most widely used by the segregationists was ridicule and disparagement of the Court’s use of sociological and psychological authority. W. D. Workman, Jr., some fifty years behind the times, spoke of the “new school of sociological jurisprudence.” If Negro children required the company of white children “to fully develop personality and education,” he wrote, then South Carolina needed help because in some areas there weren’t “enough white folks to go around.” In a heavy handed attempt at facetiousness, he suggested that the Supreme Court set up the number of white and colored children necessary to form an acceptable classroom situation. In like vein, the Record complained that “nobody knows what the law is today or what it will be tomorrow with a Supreme Court making its decisions on whim, fancy or pseudo sociology.”97
The News and Courier, which shudders at all innovations, was critical of the Court’s emphasis on “psychiatry.” The injection of psychiatry into the controversy brought a letter to the editor from Dr. Norton Williams, a Charleston psychiatrist, who felt that the Supreme Court had “used unwise judgment” and accepted “bad advice” from the psychiatrists who testified in the Clarendon case. “False interpretations” of psychiatry “in the hands of some psychiatrists with misguided motivations” would lead to “unhappy situations” such as the anti-segregation riots in Delaware and Tennessee. Many psychiatrists, according to Williams, “using good, profound psychiatric principles,” realized the need for maintaining segregation. The Negro, a member of a culturally inferior race, was not yet ready for integration. Until he had developed his own culture he would remain unready. To force integration suddenly would make the Negro feel “inferior, hostile, or defiantly competitive.”98
Only on the rarest of occasions did a white South Carolinian speak out in favor of the decision of the Supreme Court. On one such occasion H. B. Clark of Charleston, in a letter to the News and Courier, criticized the white man’s “conception of the Negro as something slightly subhuman, a sort of beast of burden for the exploitation of the white man.” He declared that
All the restrictions upon economic and educational opportunity, all the degrading Jim Crow laws which we impose upon the Negro say, in effect, “We no longer own you as slaves, but we are determined to keep you in a subordinate position in our society, and to impress upon you in a thousand small ways every day that you are an inferior race.” Now the justices of the Supreme Court are not black-hearted villains who have sold their souls to the devil of political expediency; on the contrary, they are simply nine Americans honest enough to face inescapable conflict between these undemocratic values of the South and the principles of equality and freedom on which the Constitution is based, and courageous enough to proclaim the necessity of eliminating this paradoxical state of affairs no matter what the cost in terms of readjustment of traditional thinking.99