II
Only slowly had white South Carolina awakened to the threat to legal school segregation contained in the repeated petitions and suits of Clarendon Negroes. By the time the state legislature convened in January, 1951, the menace was fully realized. A definite fear had developed that the courts might rule in favor of the Negro petitioners. Basis for this fear was a long line of recent United States Supreme Court rulings outlawing segregation in state university graduate and professional schools even when facilities provided Negroes were in fact substantially equal to those for whites. The legislators and other state officials clearly recognized that by no criteria were white and Negro schools even remotely equal, not only in Clarendon but over the entire state. White South Carolina’s only hope, they reasoned, lay in an immediate and far reaching program to provide equal facilities for each race. At the same time certain precautionary measures had to be taken against the possibility that the courts might hold segregation per se illegal.
Leadership in this program fell to Governor James F. Byrnes, who, after a long career in the federal government, including a short period of service on the Supreme Court, had broken with President Truman and the national Democratic Party and had returned to South Carolina to vent his frustration against the national government and the Democratic Party. Elected governor in 1950, he was inaugurated in January, 1951. Almost immediately Byrnes began a long range program which was to provide a basis for the state’s defense of the racial status quo and the doctrine of separate-but-equal schools. The program subsequently was enacted by the 1951 state legislature. The position of Byrnes, as well as that of many of the state’s other leaders, was summarized in a series of the governor’s speeches in early 1951. South Carolina, he announced, would not then “nor for some years to come mix white and colored children” in public schools. To prevent this situation the state would, if necessary, “reluctantly” abandon its public school system. “A lawful way” would be found to educate all children “and at the same time provide separate schools for the races.” While conceding the inferiority of Negro schools, Byrnes insisted that the educational crisis facing the state was caused by “the politicians in Washington and the Negro agitators in South Carolina” seeking to alter the “Southern way of life.” But they would find that “what a Carpetbag government could not do in the Reconstruction period” was likewise impossible in 1951. The governor would protect the “innocent Colored children,” the victims of those elements which sought to end segregation. With a prescience characteristic of white spokesmen for racial separation, he insisted that “the overwhelming majority of colored people in this state” did not want integrated schools. Byrnes denied that new school policies were based on the expediency of necessity rather than on high principle. He righteously observed shortly after the district court ruling that “had there been no suit... I would have urged this school program to help the white and colored children” of the state.60
The most important undertaking in the Byrnes educational approach was the beginning of a tremendous school construction program. The cost was estimated at $75,000,000 though the amount actually spent on the project by 1957 was more than double the original figure. To finance new school construction, Byrnes secured legislative passage of a three percent sales tax.61 This program, in which more than half the funds were spent for Negro schools, had the result of giving the Negroes better physical school facilities in some localities than those of the whites.
In addition to these constructive measures, the state legislature, upon Byrnes’s recommendation, enacted several “preparedness measures” for use in the event the federal courts outlawed segregation. Local school officials were given authority to sell or lease school property. Churches or other private groups thus would be enabled to maintain schools under some sort of private school plan. Another strategem provided that pupils could be transferred from one school to another only with the approval of the superintendents of both schools affected.62
A measure that caused understandable hesitation on the part of many public officials and civic groups was the repeal of the constitutional provision requiring a state supported public school system. The NAACP and other Negro groups vigorously opposed repeal, but in February, 1952, the legislature approved a referendum on the proposal. In the referendum, held the following November, 68 percent of those voting favored repeal. Opponents of the measure considered the 32 percent against repeal something of a moral victory for their side.63
To coordinate state policy on the segregation issue, the legislature created a special 15-member committee. This group came to be known as the Gressette Committee, after its chairman, State Senator L. Marion Gressette, a fifty-three year old Phi Beta Kappa, farmer-lawyer from the low country Calhoun County. The committee had a double function. First, it was directed to study the conditions that would confront the state should the federal courts direct an end to segregation in public schools. Second, it was to recommend to the legislature a course of action which would “alleviate the serious condition which would result” from such an eventuality.64 This committee, after assisting Byrnes in developing his program in 1951, was inactive from that time until the Supreme Court ruling of May 17, 1954.