III
The course of race relations in the state during the period following the court decision was indicative of the moves and counter moves by the proponents and opponents of integration. Segregationists were unanimous in asserting that race relations had been harmonious in the state in the days before the “agitation” began. Historically, said the News and Courier, “whites and Negroes have got along with a minimum of friction in the South.” Likewise, “the South was making rapid progress toward elimination of racial prejudice,” claimed the Record. “There was sympathy and understanding among whites for Negroes in the South.” This era of good will allegedly had been overturned by those who would force integration on an unwilling South. For the “cold war” between the races, full responsibility rested with the “titular Negro leadership.”110
During the year between the original ruling and the implementation decree there was little outward evidence that relations between the races had changed appreciably. Each side appeared to be awaiting final action by the Court before digging in and taking its stand. Abruptly in the summer of 1955 the situation changed. The implementing ruling came on the last day of May. Almost at once there followed such “overt actions as the filing of NAACP-sponsored integration petitions.” In response, the whites organized the Citizens Councils which employed or threatened to employ the economic boycott as a means of ending the attempts by Negroes to secure school integration. The most notable example of the economic boycott in action came in the city of Orangeburg in 1955-56. Orangeburg Negroes retaliated in kind and relations between the races deteriorated generally, remaining at their lowest between the summers of 1955 and 1956. The New York Times, in surveying race relations in early 1956, noted this retrogradation. So did the News and Courier’s W. D. Workman, Jr., who reported “a massive deterioration of the racial amity which had been developing and increasing between whites and Negroes.” “Distrust, suspicion and growing bitterness” had supplanted good will. By the following December, when the full implications of the boycott were felt and realized by both whites and Negroes, Workman noted that relations between the races seemed “considerably more tranquil” than a year earlier. He observed that while neither side had compromised “its adamant position,” each was attempting to soft-pedal the issue.111
A few whites, by indirection, conceded that the “mutual respect and affection” which allegedly had traditionally characterized the relations between the races in South Carolina resulted from the Negro’s submission, in the face of overpowering odds, to a modus vivendi dictated by the white man. Dr. E. E. Colvin, pastor of the Immanuel Baptist Church of Orangeburg, thought segregation had been a success even if the South “used to have an occasional lynching. Almost invariably the Negro who was lynched had committed some terrible crime.” By contrast, “up North where they don’t have segregation they have a race riot every once in a while.” Similarly, Dr. J. G. McMaster of Kingstree wrote that “whites have sometimes taken advantage of colored but that can be expected and on the other hand, Negroes are less honest with each other than are whites with them.”112