Chapter II The Case From Clarendon
When the social needs demand one settlement rather than another, there are times when we must bend symmetry, ignore history and sacrifice custom in the pursuit of other and larger ends. From history and philosophy and custom, we pass, therefore, to the force which in our day and generation is becoming the greatest of them all, the power of social justice which finds its outlet and expression in the method of sociology.... The final cause of law is the welfare of society.
—Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo.
Culmination of the effort of the Negroes of South Carolina to win legal recognition of their rights to first class citizenship came in 1954 in the Clarendon County school case. This was the key case in the NAACP’s nationwide campaign to break down racial segregation in public schools. Negro leaders purposely singled out Clarendon County because it presented racially segregated schools in the worst possible light. Located in the state’s black belt, the county in 1951 had approximately 23,000 Negroes and 8,000 whites. Enrolled in its public schools were 6,531 Negro students as compared to 2,375 whites. Yet school expenditures totaled $395,329 for whites as against $282,950 for Negroes.49 In School District No. 22 (Summerton), the district directly involved in the suit, there were 298 white pupils and 2,259 Negro pupils.50 In facilities such as libraries, lighting fixtures, desks, play grounds, classroom space, lavatories, lunchrooms, auditoriums and teacher ratio to pupil, the Negro schools were decidedly inferior to those provided for whites. For example, the NAACP pointed out in the hearing of the case before the federal court that one of the Negro schools with 600 pupils had only two toilets, both outdoors. Another school lacked drinking faucets and water had to be brought in a bucket from the home of a neighboring minister.51
Clarendon is a typical South Carolina low country rural county and most of its people, especially Negroes, are agricultural workers. In 1955 the Nation described the county as a place where the people
talk of Citizens’ Councils and the “economic squeeze,” where the Ku Klux Klan met with Bryant Bowles, head of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, as a featured speaker, where integration is freely referred to as a “Communist-Catholic-Jewish plot,” where a place of business displays the latest newspaper clippings showing crimes of Negro against white, where private citizens discuss the hated Ford Foundation along with the price of tobacco, where the NAACP has only a small chapter and where you hunt long and hard for a defender of the Negro.52
The Clarendon case, technically known as Harry Briggs, Jr., et al., appellants, versus R. W. Elliott, et al., appellees, had its origins in 1948 when a group of Negro citizens brought suit in federal court to require state and county officials to provide school buses for Negro pupils. Federal District Judge J. Waties Waring dismissed this suit on the ground that the state as a governmental unit did not supply school buses for any students. The following year Negro parents in Clarendon petitioned authorities to bring Negro school facilities up to the standards of the county’s white schools. The petition threatened legal action if equality were not provided. In May, 1950, citing failure of local officials to equalize school facilities, a suit was filed asking that school authorities be compelled to provide equality. In December, 1950, this suit was dropped and another, filed by forty Negro parents, attacked segregation per se as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and asked the abolition of all segregation in public schools based on race.53 The suit was filed under NAACP auspices.
In May, 1951, the case was heard by a special three-judge court presided over by Federal Circuit Judge John J. Parker of North Carolina and District Judges George Bell Timmerman, Sr., of Columbia and J. Waties Waring of Charleston. The suit represented the first all-out legal attack in the deep South on the system of racial segregation on the public school level. It was clearly a test case; the ruling would provide a basis for future court decisions in similar cases. The appellants were represented by Thurgood Marshall, chief counsel for the NAACP; the appellees by attorneys Robert McC. Figg of Charleston and S. Emory Rogers of Summerton. Figg is an able Charleston corporation lawyer; Rogers, a determined defender of white supremacy at any price, was attorney for the Summerton school board.
In the arguments before the court, Marshall sought to prove first that the separate school facilities provided Negroes in District 22 were in fact physically unequal and second that segregation per se was discriminatory and therefore a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Inasmuch as school officials readily admitted that the facilities then offered Negroes in Clarendon were unequal, Marshall concentrated on sociological and psychological arguments to support his second contention. He argued that segregation invariably resulted in the development of “psychological roadblocks” which prevented Negro pupils from achieving “full absorption” of the educational process.54
To buttress this position, Marshall introduced what the late Walter White, then executive secretary of the NAACP, thought “the most impressive array of authorities ever assembled to testify as experts on the unreasonableness of segregation.” Their arguments, he said, were “irrefutable.”55 The “experts” were half a dozen social scientists from such universities as Harvard, Columbia, Vassar and Howard. They held that segregation resulted in “discordant” education that caused “moral confusion” for both whites and Negroes. Amongst Negroes it resulted in “a lowering of self-esteem, a strengthening of resentment and hostility” and a personality development that emphasized “a desire to escape or withdraw from social participation.” Amongst white children segregation developed a feeling of guilt caused by their being taught simultaneously both the doctrine of brotherly love and the practice of unbrotherly racial segregation.56 Segregation was said to be building into the Negro “the very characteristics” which were then used to justify prejudice.
The counter case presented by Clarendon school officials contained three basic points. First, they maintained that segregation per se was not violative of the Fourteenth Amendment as it had been recognized as legal by the courts, Congress and the governments of seventeen states. The only condition that could be legally demanded was that the segregated facilities be substantially equal. Attorney Figg readily admitted that school facilities then being offered Negroes in the county were unequal but asked that the court allow the state a “reasonable” time in which to equalize them. South Carolina, he pointed out, was in the midst of a statewide equalization program. The second argument held that school segregation statutes were “a valid exercise of legislative power,” a matter of state legislative policy rather than of constitutional right. No legal compulsion could oblige a state to accept “scientific opinion” that its school program “must be geared to personality development.” The third contention of appellees was that to disturb drastically the racial status quo in the deep South would produce “dangerous tensions and unrest.” Racially segregated school facilities, Figg insisted, were the “normal” result of a racial conflict heritage in the state of South Carolina.57
The court ruled two to one against the appellants. Judges Parker and Timmerman held that segregation per se was not a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. They said, however, that “the educational facilities and opportunities” provided both races “must be equal.” Equality had to be provided “promptly” and “in good faith.” Consequently school officials were directed to report to the court after six months as to what actions were being taken to provide equality. In rejecting Marshall’s line of argumentation the court asserted that judges had “no more right to read their ideas of sociology into the Constitution than their ideas of economics.”
Judge Waring dissented vigorously. The majority opinion, he wrote, was “unreasonable, unscientific, and based on unadulterated prejudice.” He condemned the “sadistic insistence of the ‘white supremacists’ in declaring that their will must be imposed irrespective of rights of other citizens.”58
Governor James F. Byrnes hailed the majority ruling upholding school segregation as “unanswerable.” The court’s “well-reasoned opinion,” he maintained, completely vindicated the separate-but-equal doctrine.59