Profile
in
Black
and
White

A FRANK PORTRAIT
OF SOUTH CAROLINA

By Howard H. Quint

PUBLIC AFFAIRS PRESS, WASHINGTON, D. C.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

For the past eleven years Professor Howard H. Quint has been a member of the faculty of the University of South Carolina where he specialized in the teaching of American constitutional and intellectual history. Because he believed that this book should be published but did not wish to cause embarrassment to the University of South Carolina, a state-supported institution, he resigned his position prior to publication.

Professor Quint was graduated from Yale University in 1940 and was awarded an M.A. degree from Stanford University and a Ph.D. degree from The Johns Hopkins University. During World War II he was associated with the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service as a propaganda analyst and with the Office of Strategic Services as a political and economic analyst. In 1954 he won second place in an American Historical Association competition for the John H. Dunning Prize. In 1956 he was Smith-Mundt lecturer in United States history at the National University of Mexico.

Copyright, 1958, by Public Affairs Press
419 New Jersey Avenue, S. E., Washington 3, D. C.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 58-11889

INTRODUCTION

Although this book deals with South Carolina, it is in effect a study of the Deep South. What is happening in the Palmetto State is fairly typical of the situation in other Southern states where segregation, bigotry and prejudice remain deeply entrenched.

To judge by what Prof. Quint points out in this highly discerning book, the situation in South Carolina hasn’t improved materially since the Supreme Court of the land ruled, in its historic decision of May 17, 1954, that students in publicly supported educational institutions may not be segregated because of race, creed, or color. A worsening rather than improving racial situation is indeed reflected by the views expressed by officials, newspaper editors, voluntary organizations and individual citizens, Negro and white, as cited in this book.

Although Prof. Quint handles his material with admirable restraint, the reader, even if he is personally attached to the state,[1] is likely to pronounce South Carolina’s record a melancholy one. Is the state behaving responsibly when it denies the law of the land, busies itself with contriving means of avoidance, threatens instead of addressing itself to the manifest mandate? When it revives the plea of peculiarity does it remember its own history of nullification and secession? Is it never to reject the demagogue who proclaims exploded notions of race and distorts the Constitution of the United States? In the interval for reformation which the Supreme Court has wisely allowed must South Carolina indulge bluster and vituperation in place of summoning candor and courage? Have ignorance, poverty, and prejudice fed on each other until the white community has sunk to second-rate capacity?

Consider the spectacle of an ancient commonwealth in delirium because a black child knocks on a schoolhouse door. What are the causes of this fury? They are many, but the chief is that the applicant for equal opportunity is now in a superior legal and moral position. It is the Negro who rests upon rights, to be claimed through orderly processes. He leaves desperate remedies to those who refuse him. In the rap on the door sound the measured tones of judges, the command of the President of the United States and the voice of the nation. Echoes too the demand of deprived peoples in many countries.

More solemn than all these is the call of conscience of South Carolina. Immemorial wrongs are at length to be redressed—gradually, painfully, surely. Some will say that the conscience of the state is dead, that to invoke it is delusion. If that is true, no solution offers except coercion, while we entertain the hope that prudent acquiescence will substitute for more valorous self-correction. If the white people of South Carolina furnish no worthy response in the crisis, then humiliation and rehabilitation by other hands is their portion.

In spite of the discouraging showing to date, one awaits a better prospect. Patience, double patience, in the cure of long-standing ills is the obvious counsel. Though South Carolina has had ample warning, public opinion reflects a state of shock. Additional time (but how long, oh Lord, how long?) for readjustment will bring the problem into truer focus. Extravagant allegations still industriously pressed will inevitably be discredited. Who can believe that the Supreme Court is Communist-controlled or that segregation in the schools is the bulwark of racial purity? As other states conform to the court decree and their experience is that the heavens do not fall, fanciful terrors will subside. New leaders will bid for support, persons not pledged to fierce intolerance.

Healthy elements deserve to be nursed. Wholesale condemnation, besides being inapplicable, will act to bring support to the violent, the confused, the cruel. A state may not be disparaged into compliance.

The truly restorative ingredients are within. That they will be roused and meet the nation’s demand there can be no doubt. Prof. Quint’s book makes this amply evident.

Some may feel that the author is much too critical and outspoken. I disagree. While I don’t go along with everything that Prof. Quint says, I am inclined to feel that his book needed to be written; too many things have been left unsaid too long. It’s time that South Carolina—that, indeed, the entire South—face up, boldly and realistically, to their problems. I commend this book to every Southerner and to every American.

Broadus Mitchell

[1] Mr. Mitchell is a graduate of the University of South Carolina, of which his father, the late Samuel Chiles Mitchell, was president. His mother was born in South Carolina, his father in Mississippi of South Carolina (Richland and Abbeville districts) forbears. He is now John Hay Whitney Visiting Professor of Economic History in Hofstra College, Hempstead, Long Island.

PREFACE

This is a book about race relations in the sovereign state of South Carolina. It gives particular attention to the lengths to which white South Carolinians are willing to go to maintain a caste system of society. And it shows why South Carolina, the prototype of every Deep South state, is not likely to surrender without a catastrophic struggle to accepting the proposition that the Negro is a free individual in a free society with the same rights and privileges as every other American.

In South Carolina, the race issue has always been emphasized in its most exaggerated form and the Negro has helped to create what has become a peculiar and almost unique state of mind. In many respects the state’s history has been little less than a chronicle of the white population’s reactions to the problems created by the presence of a large number of Negroes—a case of the tail wagging the dog. In 1921 Professor Francis B. Simkins considered South Carolina’s failure “to keep abreast of her sister states in non-partisan and classless progress” as intelligible and explainable “only in the light of the perennial fear of disturbing inter-racial harmony.” The state’s “proud record in interracial harmony,” he noted, was based on a policy of “absolute white supremacy.”[2] Similarly, the late W. W. Ball, the Charleston champion of aristocratic conservatism, believed that “socially and politically the presence of this race in majority” was perhaps the ruling factor in the state’s progress or want of it.[3] Summarizing the stand of South Carolina and the South on the decision of the Supreme Court to end racial segregation in public schools, R. Beverly Herbert, a Columbia attorney, expressed the same idea. “A deep sense of race and race preservation,” he wrote, “has influenced and in many cases controlled the South throughout her history.”[4]

I feel compelled to state at the outset certain basic assumptions upon which this study is premised. I believe that the abolition of racial segregation in public schools and public facilities is a desirable end; that Southerners in defending such segregation in the 1950’s are fighting the tide of history just as surely as their forefathers did in defending human bondage a century ago; and that the Negro’s drive to end this segregation will eventually be successful. I recognize the tremendous difficulties presented by this problem due to long established mores and realize that it cannot be solved quickly and without a certain amount of social friction and resentment.

This investigation reveals a way of thinking that is in a sense foreign to most non-Southerners and I ask of the latter patience, understanding and tolerance. But I feel that constructive rather than obstructive action must be taken and that compliance with rather than defiance of the Supreme Court’s verdict must be the rule. I particularly deplore the disrespect for federal law which is inherent in the official policy of the State of South Carolina. In some ways this is the most ominous development of the past few years. In all phases of this investigation I have striven for objectivity and endeavored first and foremost to allow South Carolinians, both white and Negro, to speak for themselves and thereby to express the communal psychology of the state.

Since this study leans heavily on certain South Carolina newspapers, it is appropriate to point out the following about these papers:

The Charleston News and Courier, the largest and probably the most influential of those studied, reflects the sentiments of the most extreme segregationists in the state. Conservative, if not downright reactionary, not only on the race issue but in all political, economic and social questions, the Charleston paper advocates resistance to the Court decisions to the point of defiance of federal authority. The editor of the paper is Thomas R. Waring.

While under the editorship of able Jack H. O’Dowd, the Florence Morning News was the most reasonable and constructive daily in the state with regard to the segregation problem. An advocate of “militant moderation” and an opponent of both white supremacists and the NAACP, O’Dowd became the state’s most controversial editor, subject for the wrath of ardent segregationists. Finally succumbing to pressures, he resigned the editorship in August 1956. His successor, James A. Rogers, is an “orthodox” segregationist.

Controlled by the same company that publishes the morning Columbia State, the Columbia Record, an afternoon newspaper, accepts prevailing views on the race issue, though in considerably less extreme form than the Charleston News and Courier. Also staunchly conservative, the Record leans toward the Republican Party. As of the beginning of this year, the Record’s editor, George A. Buchanan, became Dean of the University of South Carolina School of Journalism.

Decidedly anti-integrationist, the Anderson Independent is less concerned with the race issue than the other papers studied. This is in part a reflection of its upcountry location. The Independent represents to some degree the New-Fair Deal elements in the state and is an outspoken advocate of loyalty to the national Democratic Party. Editor of the paper is L. S. Embree.

These newspapers represent a cross section of the press in South Carolina both geographically and ideologically. Moreover, a study of additional newspapers would not change appreciably, if at all, the basic patterns. (As far as I am aware, there is only one paper in South Carolina which advocates compliance with the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision. This is the Cheraw Chronicle, edited and published by a young and courageous North Carolinian, Andrew McDowd Secrest.)

Other sources, notably periodical literature, the proceedings of the General Assembly of South Carolina, and the Columbia State have been used to a limited extent. For the sake of brevity the newspapers are referred to throughout the text simply as the News and Courier, the Record, the Morning News and the Independent.

The author is a native of Connecticut who has lived over a decade in South Carolina. But this book could not have been written without the assistance of a young scholar who is a Southerner. Legitimately his name should be on the title page but he desires for personal reasons to remain anonymous. Both the research for and a preliminary draft of a major portion of this study were done by him and I wish now to acknowledge this fact and also my obligation to him.

Howard H. Quint

University of South Carolina
Columbia, South Carolina

[2] Francis B. Simkins, “Race Legislation in South Carolina since 1865,” South Atlantic Quarterly, XX (June, 1921), 168.

[3] Anthony Harrigan (ed.), The Editor and the Republic: Papers and Addresses of William Watts Ball (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), p. 19.

[4] The State (Columbia, S. C.), Oct. 30, 1955, p. 1-B.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

THE DEVELOPMENT OF RACE RELATIONSHIPS

Emancipation, itself, would not satisfy these fanatics. That gained, the next step would be to raise the Negroes to a social and political equality with the whites.—John C. Calhoun

The present pattern of race relations for South Carolina was shaped in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In 1877 at the end of the Reconstruction period the mould of segregation had yet to be rigidly defined. Only in the last decade of the century was absolute segregation established. During the Reconstruction years public schools were not integrated, although Negro students attended the state university. In personal and social relationships segregation was generally practiced but more on the basis of social custom than by force of legislation. Largely if not entirely ignored was the Civil Rights law which had been passed by the Reconstruction legislature. This law, which remained on the statute books until 1889, prohibited racial discrimination by “common carriers or by any person engaged in a business, calling or pursuit” for which a federal, state or municipal license was required.[5]

In the political area the establishing of Jim Crowism was slower though no less effective and complete in its end result. Negroes voted until the 1890’s and were influential in the local government of several counties. South Carolina sent three Negro congressmen to Washington after 1876; one served until 1896. In 1882 nine Negroes sat in the state legislature, the last Negro member of that body being defeated for reelection in 1902. Yet these were the exception and not the rule for the Negro was in truth virtually eliminated as a factor in state politics by the end of the 1880’s. With the restrictions on Negro suffrage contained in the new state constitution of 1895 and the adoption of the Democratic Party primary the following year, the Negro was prevented from voting in the state. Yet, in spite of the Negro’s all but complete disfranchisement, the fear that he might be used for political purposes “prevented the whites from dividing into two parties or from breaking out of the restrictions imposed by the Democratic primary.”[6]

With the disfranchisement of the Negro, the repeal of the state Civil Rights law and the establishment of absolute and legalized segregation, a rigid system of caste based on race materialized as a means of race control.[7] It was reflected in the segregation of schools, churches, and other public and private organizations and institutions. The two races seldom came into contact except in the relationship of employer and laborer. In no sense was the concept of racial equality accepted by the dominant whites.[8]

The maintenance of absolute segregation frequently necessitated resort to either the threat or use of force or violence. The threat was ever present in the personal, economic, and political relationships between the races. Fear of slave insurrections was replaced by fear of a “vague and unknown thing,” social equality. As the nineteenth century ground to an end, application of violence was frequently approved by “respectable” whites, especially if Negroes were suspected or charged with murder or rape. The Charleston News and Courier, for example, argued that the lynching of a suspected murderer was “not mob law.” According to the paper’s editorialist, “the brute placed himself outside the pale of the law and was dealt with accordingly.”[9]

Segregation of the races in the state has been both a manifestation of belief in racial superiority and a basic distrust of democracy. Ben Tillman interpreted his election as governor as a triumph of “white supremacy over mongrelism and anarchy.” In his inaugural address he denied “without regard to color that ‘all men are created equal.’” It was not true then and it was not true when Jefferson wrote it, he thundered.[10] Carlyle McKinley, associate editor of the News and Courier, wrote in the 1880’s that in “works of art, skill, science, invention, literature, in the whole field of human enterprise, endeavor, design and discovery, in every respect that can be named, the Negro is far behind the lowliest families of the white race.”[11] The late W. W. Ball, among other things editor of the News and Courier and Dean of the School of Journalism of the University of South Carolina, declared that “every decent white man and woman” in the state maintained and exercised the “right of treating all Negroes as inferiors.” In one of his characteristic diatribes against democracy, he wrote that “universal and unrestricted suffrage” was unthinkable. Safety demanded that South Carolina “steer away from the infatuation even of universal white democracy.”[12]

In 1944, twenty-five years after Ball made the above statement, the state House of Representatives adopted a resolution which “indignantly and vehemently” denounced all organizations seeking “the amalgamation of the white and Negro races by co-mingling of the races on any basis of equality.” Such were deemed “hostile to the existence and preservation of the American Union of States.” Simultaneously, the legislators reaffirmed their belief in and allegiance to “established white supremacy,” and pledged “our lives and our sacred honor to maintaining it, whatever the cost.”[13]

In no other area have South Carolinians been so sensitive to outside criticism as on the race issue. After the end of Reconstruction “outside agitation” on racial problems was infrequent. It became even less so after the Supreme Court in 1896 gave official legal blessing to racial segregation in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. However in the 1930’s and during the Second World War, “agitation” was renewed for more civil rights for the Southern Negro. This agitation inspired passage of the above cited resolution by the state legislature. The latter demanded, “firmly and unequivocally,” that “henceforth the damned agitators of the North leave the South alone.”[14]

II

Elimination of the Negro from state politics became an article of faith, a factor of transcendant importance in the preservation of white supremacy. The instrumentality through which the Negro was effectively excluded from the suffrage was the Democratic Party primary which was adopted in 1896. Not until the late 1940’s was the Democratic primary opened to Negro voters and then only by direction of the federal courts.

Up to the New Deal period the South Carolina white primary faced little real “danger” either from “outside agitators” or homegrown “radicals.”[15] Yet a disruptive force was at work. This was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People which slowly but relentlessly was seeking to break down the restrictions placed on Negro suffrage. An initial breach, which did not directly affect South Carolina, had come with the ruling by the Supreme Court in 1915 that the “grandfather clause” was unconstitutional. South Carolina reacted to these developments by strengthening its determination to maintain and re-enforce the white primary. One venerable device in this effort was the poll tax which, of course, not only disfranchised a mass of Negro voters but many whites as well. White South Carolinians were willing to pay this price, however, to guarantee the white primary. Toward the same end other devices were resorted to as grounds for disfranchisement such as lengthy residence requirements, discretionary educational requirements, property qualifications and numerous petty crimes, supposedly common among Negroes.

Lack of organized opposition made control of the Democratic primary tantamount to control of the state government. Such control traditionally resided in the hands of politicians whose defeats resulted not in the extension of democracy but simply in the creation of a new faction to direct state politics. With great effectiveness politicians used fear of the Negro vote to forestall development of an operative two party system. They contended that a two-party system would split the white vote and thus allow the Negroes to hold the balance of political power. In opposing the repeal of the poll tax, a member of the 1944 state House of Representatives said that Negroes were “trying to vote” and if the suffrage were made too easy a two party system would surely result. To prevent both, he concluded, it was imperative to keep the Democratic Party all powerful.[16] Nor did this feeling end with the abolition of the white primary. In 1952 Governor James F. Byrnes, taking note of the increasing registration of Negro voters, lamented that there would always be white politicians in the state “willing to enter into secret political trades” for Negro votes. Such men had to be “watched” and those who were willing to deal with Negro leaders had to be defeated.[17] In 1956 Governor George Bell Timmerman, Jr., said that a two party system would bring South Carolina “nothing but permanent strife and damage.” It had brought chaos to the North “where minorities are pawns and politics is played with the lives of small children for the sake of a vote,” asserted the governor. He for one was “not prepared to turn the state Democratic Party over to any radical element or other irresponsible group.”[18]

Increased “agitation” for Negro civil rights in the New Deal and World War II periods eventuated in the end of the white primary. This disaster was the result of several federal court decisions, notably in the cases of Smith v. Allwright (1944), Rice v. Elmore (1947) and Brown v. Baskin (1948). The first and most important of these was a Texas case in which the Supreme Court declared all suffrage restrictions premised on race to be unconstitutional.[19]

Reaction of the white leaders of South Carolina to the Smith v. Allwright decision was instantaneous. Officials, public figures, and private citizens lost no opportunity to condemn it. The late Senator Burnet R. Maybank, aware that the decision was not an isolated incident but part of the developing effort to break down white supremacy, declared that regardless of any Supreme Court decision and any laws that might be passed by Congress, South Carolinians would maintain those political and social institutions which were “in the best interest of our people.” White South Carolinians would “treat the Negro fairly,” said the Senator, but they did “not intend for him to take over our election system or attend our white schools.”[20]

The then Governor Olin D. Johnston, not to be outdone, called a special session of the state legislature to meet the “emergency.” He recommended that the legislators repeal all state laws dealing with primary elections, thus giving the Democratic Party the status of a private club. This maneuver, he believed, would put the party outside the jurisdiction of federal courts. Should it prove inadequate, he announced, South Carolinians would “use the necessary methods to retain white supremacy in our primaries and to safeguard the homes and happiness of our people.”[21] The legislature, following his advice, completely divorced the state from all legal connections with the Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party of South Carolina itself took action to nullify the effects of the court decision. If Negroes could not be legally barred from primary election, they would be excluded from party membership. A state Democratic convention, held shortly after the decision, adopted a rule which provided that to be eligible for membership in the party, a person had to be a “white Democrat” who subscribed to the principles of the Democratic Party of South Carolina as declared by the state convention.[22]

In 1947 the newly enacted defenses for white supremacy in the Democratic primary were tested in federal district court and found wanting. George A. Elmore, under NAACP auspices, brought suit against the Democratic Party. He claimed that its recent actions deprived him of his right to vote. Federal District Judge J. Waties Waring[23] agreed and ruled against the state of South Carolina and the Democratic Party. In admonishing South Carolina to “rejoin the union,” he declared racial discriminations illegal in the machinery that selected the officers and lawmakers of the United States. All citizens were entitled to cast a “free and untrammelled” vote in the election. If “the only material and realistic elections” were “clothed with the name ‘primary,’” said the judge, they were no less equally entitled to vote in them.[24]

In the face of the decision, the harrassed and beleaguered state Democratic Party took two important steps to insure continuation of the white primary. By the first a dual system of voting qualifications was established which sought to disbar most Negro voters. Concomitantly a lengthy oath, designed to discourage Negro voters and required of all voters, was adopted. It compelled the voter to swear that he understood, believed in, and supported “the principles of the Democratic Party of South Carolina,” the “social, religious, and educational separation of the races,” and “the principles of states rights,” and was opposed to the “proposed federal so-called FEPC law.”[25]

These restrictions were quickly brought to a court test. In a second decision, in the case of Brown v. Baskin, Judge Waring invalidated the white primary. In a pointed and sharply worded opinion he termed the dual system of voting qualifications “a clear and flagrant evasion of the law” as enunciated in earlier court rulings against suffrage restrictions on the basis of race. He also branded the oath required of all voters in the primary as a “flagrant disregard of the rights of American citizens to exercise their own views and opinions.” The oath was patently unconstitutional.[26] The United States Supreme Court refused to review either of Judge Waring’s decisions, thus in effect upholding them.[27]

Judge Waring, a prominent Charlestonian, was condemned on all sides by white South Carolinians. His decisions were likewise criticized. After the ruling in Brown v. Baskin, Representative William Jennings Bryan Dorn asked Congress to investigate Judge Waring’s “conduct in office.” Under his ruling, said Dorn, “a Communist, a Negro, a Fascist, or a Republican could vote in the Democratic Party of South Carolina.”[28]

III

Traditionally orthodoxy on the race issue has transcended all other considerations in South Carolina politics. Consequently the state has had more than its fair share of zealots willing to play the race issue for the last ounce of its political worth. Even those most outspoken on the issue have not been free of charges of racial heresy. In the 1938 senatorial election Olin D. Johnston, attempting unsuccessfully to unseat “Cotton Ed” Smith, charged that the Senator had not always been anti-Negro. “Why, Ed Smith voted for a bill that would permit a big buck nigger to sit by your wife or sister on a railroad train,” he cried. But Smith was able to use the attack on him by Roosevelt and Northern liberals with telling effect. He boasted that he had walked out of the 1936 Democratic National Convention when a Negro minister was asked to pray. The purpose of that prayer, he declared, was “not to ask divine assistance but to invoke colored votes.” “White supremacy, that time honored tradition,” bellowed the Senator in a campaign speech, could “no more be blotted out of the hearts of South Carolinians” than could the “scars which Sherman’s artillery left on the State House at Columbia.”[29]

During the 1930’s and 1940’s under encouragement given their aspirations by the New and Fair Deals, South Carolina Negroes became Democrats in theory and in fact. Their most ambitious political undertaking was the formation in 1944 of the Progressive Democratic Party under the leadership of John McCray, a newspaperman, and James M. Hinton, a minister and insurance saleman. The Progressive Democrats supported the national Democratic Party but opposed that of the state.[30] The Progressive Democrats had little success. David Duncan Wallace, the historian of South Carolina, estimated that only about 3,500 Negroes voted in the presidential election of 1944 and about 5,000 in 1948. In the latter year the Progressive Democrats sent a slate of delegates to the national party convention and unsuccessfully challenged the regular state Democrats.[31] A similar attempt in 1956 also failed.

The increasing role of the Negro in South Carolina politics has had the effect of spotlighting such issues as civil rights, FEPC, and states rights. The white majority remains as determined as ever to maintain “the Southern way of life” and every inch of ground is yielded grudgingly. The race question is applied to nearly every political issue, either openly or covertly, and all-out attempts have been—and to be sure, still are—made to discredit any proposal or policy that would alter the status quo. The most popular method has been that of equating unpopular measures with communism, atheism, racial “mongrelization,” etc. Sometimes the results have been ludicrous. In his unsuccessful 1950 campaign for the United States Senate, Governor J. Strom Thurmond asserted that had President Truman “not been so busy playing Negro politics,” the nation would not have been involved in the Korean situation.[32] Favorite targets in the 1940’s were President Truman’s civil rights bill and his FEPC proposals. Thomas R. Waring, editor of the News and Courier and not to be confused with his cousin the judge, said the opposition to President Truman’s proposals was based on the belief that they “would be an invasion of states and individual rights” and would result in “an intermingling of races in hotels, restaurants, theaters, buses, and places of employment.” Governor Thurmond termed the FEPC proposals the closest this country had yet come to communism. They would turn the United States into “nothing more than a police state,” he warned. The proposals would force employers “to hire even Hindus.” The Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, a few hours after addressing the state legislature where he was warmly received, told a Klan rally that if the civil rights proposals passed, it would “be legal for a Negro to come up on your porch and ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage.”[33]

Particularly dismaying to the state’s political leaders has been the growing realization that neither of the national political parties can be relied upon to protect what South Carolina Democrats consider to be the best interests of the state and the South. At the 1936 Democratic National Convention the South lost an effective weapon when the party abolished the ⅔ rule for party nominations. Though President Roosevelt had been able to hold the state party leaders in line, major revolts have developed in South Carolina against the national Democratic Party in every presidential election since 1944. Shortly before the 1952 presidential campaign was underway James F. Byrnes declared that the South had become a “stepchild” in national politics while both national parties were becoming slaves to the demands of minorities which held the balance of power in key Northern cities. He labeled the 1948 Democratic platform “more socialistic than democratic,” and the result of pressures brought by “organized minorities of northern states” on the leaders of the Democratic Party. These pressures had forced those leaders “to abandon the cardinal principle of states rights.”[34]

This alleged “renunciation by the Democratic Party of the principles upon which the Republic was founded” led in 1948 to the most successful of the political revolts, if measured in terms of election results. In the presidential election of that year the “Dixiecrat” movement, with Governor Thurmond as its candidate, carried four Southern states. Though this movement was generally justified in terms of states rights and constitutional government, the race issue undoubtedly was of paramount importance in inspiring it.[35] Thurmond publicly and piously objected to the “white supremacy” theme of many of his followers. He professed to be “not interested one whit in the question of white supremacy” and referred to himself as “a progressive Southerner” who was interested in bettering the conditions of the Negro. He said he would conduct his campaign solely in support of “the sovereignty of the states as against federal government interference.” In October he reiterated that he was not running “on a platform of racial discrimination.” That was “for each state to decide.”[36]

Despite such pronouncements the race question ran prominently throughout Thurmond’s campaign speeches. Few did not contain a long attack on President Truman’s various civil rights proposals, especially FEPC. In August he said that if the “segregation program” of President Truman were enforced, “the results in civil strife” might be “horrible beyond imagination.” Lawlessness would be rampant. Chaos would prevail. Streets would be unsafe. The President’s “so called civil rights program” was written by Joseph Stalin in 1920. It was “made to order for Communist use in their designs upon national security.”[37]

In the 1952 election widespread support developed for General Eisenhower in the state because it was believed generally that the Republican Party and its candidate were more in harmony with Southern conservatism and consequently represented less of a “threat” to the South on racial and economic issues.[38] However, slightly more than a majority of the state’s voters remained loyal to the national Democratic Party; Negroes voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate.

IV

The constitution of 1868 authorized the first public school system of South Carolina. Many years passed, however, before the state had a functioning public school system worthy of the name, even for the whites. Funds allocated by the state for public education increased slowly. Though largely spent on white schools such outlays brought limited advancement to Negro education through the trickle down process. Discrepancies between the white and Negro systems continued to grow. Not until the end of the nineteenth century did the total amount spent on Negro education surpass that spent in 1879-80, despite increasing enrollments. Not until 1919-20 did per capita expenditures on Negro schools exceed those of the Hampton administration.[39]

In 1921 Professor Simkins, after making an unverified assertion to the effect that “the educational separation of races in South Carolina at present meets the approval of both races,” admitted that the disproportionate share of the school funds spent for education of the whites displeased the Negro. At this time the white schools received $11.97 per capita while the Negro pupil received only $1.23.[40]

Until the late 1940’s when the NAACP began bringing suits for equal and/or integrated public schools, little support was given in the state for providing public education for Negroes, a situation reflected in the wide discrepancies in the funds spent for white and Negro schools. This attitude, in its most extreme form, was expressed in the inaugural address of Governor Cole Blease in 1911. Blease, a blatant Dixie demagogue, recommended “liberal appropriations for all our state institutions of learning for white boys and girls.” He also favored the improvement of “the free school system so that every white child in South Carolina” could be given “a good common school education.” As for Negro education, the Governor declared that “when the people of this country began to try to educate the Negro they made a serious and grave mistake,” the worst results of which were yet to come. “So why continue?” he asked.[41]

In 1941 Governor Maybank, reputedly more enlightened, appointed a committee to study the state’s education system. It found, among other things, that nineteen counties in the state had no high school for Negroes and that there were 1644 school buses for whites and eight for Negroes.[42]

The relative status of white-Negro education in South Carolina can be illustrated, and better yet dramatized, by reference to a few statistics for the years 1940 and 1952. In 1940 statistics reflected the relative unconcern for quality Negro education. On the other hand, the 1952 figures indicated the progress that had been made by the time the Clarendon County school case was making its way through the courts. The NAACP used these statistics with devastating effect in developing its argument against separate-but-equal systems.[43] Since 1952 substantial improvements have come in both white and Negro schools. Schools for Negroes have been rapidly approaching at least a statistical equality with those of the whites.

Other statistics bear investigation in connection with the state’s public education program. In 1950 the per capita income of South Carolinians was $844, 46th in the nation. In the same year the state spent 3.3 percent of its total personal income on public schools, tenth highest percentage-wise in the country. In 1952, 42.7 percent of the pupils attending public schools in the state were Negroes, a somewhat higher percentage than Negroes in the total population. Between 1940 and 1950 the white population of the state increased 19.3 percent while the Negro population increased only 1.0 percent. Yet during the period 1940-52 the Negro school population increased 12.5 percent compared to a white pupil increase of 9.9 percent.[44]

As late as 1918 only one public Negro high school was operating in the state! Not until 1930 did South Carolina have an accredited Negro high school. By 1950 there were 80 state accredited Negro high schools, only ten of which, however, were recognized by the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. By comparison there were 301 state accredited white high schools, 56 of which met the accrediting standards of the Southern Association.[45]

The same inequality evidenced on the public school level existed in higher education. The state maintains five institutions of higher learning for whites and one for Negroes. The Negro institution was originally rather thoroughly named the Colored Normal, Industrial, Agricultural, and Mechanical College. The total state appropriation for the white colleges in 1949 was in excess of $4,500,000 while that for the Negro college was less than $600,000. Dr. Lewis K. McMillan, former professor of history at the Negro institution, described the college as “a glorified high school” treated as a “step child” by the state. Until after World War II the college did not have a nominal graduate or law school. However, in the light of a spate of federal court decisions admitting Negro students to white state universities when equal educational opportunities were lacking in state-supported Negro schools, the 1945 state appropriations act authorized the college to establish “graduate, Law, and Medical departments and such other departments as may be necessary to provide training in all lines of college activities for students attending this college.” No money was appropriated until 1946 and then a completely inadequate $25,000 for the graduate school. In 1947 $60,000 was appropriated for the Law School. “Medical and pharmaceutical training” was authorized to the extent of a paltry appropriation of $15,000 in 1950.[46]

While federal court cases in other states provided a general impetus to this program, the danger that a Negro might be admitted to the University of South Carolina loomed ominously on the horizon in 1946 when a Negro, Cleveland M. McQueen, applied for admission as a graduate student in the School of Education. The state answered his request with the appropriation for a graduate school at the Negro college.[47] In the same year another Negro, John Wrighten, applied for admission to the University Law School and was denied admittance. He then took his case to the courts which ruled that unless the state provided a law school at the Negro college “on a substantial parity with the University Law School” by September, 1947, Wrighten had to be admitted to the latter. By the deadline a law school had been established and Wrighten made no further appeal.[48] Until January, 1958, no Negro made a concerted effort to gain admission to one of the white institutions of higher education. Two Negroes applied for admission to Clemson College in 1956 but did not press their applications after being refused. But in January, 1958, as will be seen in Chapter VII, Negro students were clearing the decks for a law suit to force admission to the University of South Carolina.

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]

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.

III

Following the circuit court’s ruling the Clarendon case was immediately appealed to the United States Supreme Court. By the time the highest tribunal considered the case, the six months period allowed by the circuit court for school officials to furnish bona fide equality for Negroes had elapsed. Consequently, on January 26, 1952, the case was remanded to the circuit court which was directed to take whatever action it deemed appropriate in view of its findings. In the meanwhile Judge Waring had retired and had been replaced on the court by Judge Armisted M. Dobie of Virginia. At the rehearing counsel for the school officials reported on the steps taken by the county and on other plans contemplated under the statewide school equalization program. These plans, when completed, would provide equality in all areas for white and Negro schools, claimed school authorities. Though equality admittedly as yet had not been attained, such would be forthcoming within a “reasonable” time. Accepting these arguments at face value, the circuit court ruled unanimously that “the defendants have complied with the decree of the court to equalize facilities as soon as humanly possible and no good could be accomplished for anyone” by ordering an end to segregation.[65] The NAACP again immediately appealed to the Supreme Court.

Arguments before the Supreme Court took place in December, 1952, in conjunction with four similar cases. Clarendon County was represented by John W. Davis, noted constitutional lawyer and Democratic presidential candidate in 1924. Davis, a twentieth century “Northern man with Southern principles,” based his case mainly on grounds of constitutionalism and states rights. “What is the great national policy underlying this whole question?” he asked. “Is it not that the very strength and fiber of our federal system is local self-government in those matters for which local action is competent?”[66] Again the appellees stressed three main points. They maintained that the state was proceeding to remove “all inequalities between its white and colored schools,” as had been found by the lower court. Further, school authorities argued that the legality of school segregation had been exercised and recognized so continuously that the question was “no longer open for debate.” As for the testimony of “sundry academic persons” offered in opposition to segregation, such “opinions” presented questions of legislative policy only and formed no sufficient basis for any conclusions on the subject, least of all for a judicial finding.[67]

Thurgood Marshall, chief counsel for appellants, presented the same arguments he had used in the lower courts.

Unable to arrive at a decision on the basis of arguments advanced at the first hearing, the Supreme Court in June, 1953, asked for further pleadings on five questions. These involved essentially two points: (1) In the light of the history of the Fourteenth Amendment, was school segregation per se violative of that amendment? (2) Assuming that segregation was unconstitutional, would it necessarily follow that schools should be integrated “forthwith” or could the Court in the exercise of its equity powers remit the cases to lower courts and permit a “gradual adjustment” to integration?

Answers to these questions were prepared under the supervision of T. C. Callison, South Carolina’s Attorney General. The state maintained that the “overwhelming preponderance of the evidence” demonstrated that the Fourteenth Amendment could not be construed as forbidding racial segregation. In reply to the second query, the state held that on the assumption stated, the Court could permit gradual integration to be carried out within broad policy limitations by the lower federal courts. However, in this connection, the state argued that even assuming that the courts could declare segregated schools unconstitutional, it was not within the judicial power to determine what, if any, non-segregated system should be substituted in their place.[68]

IV

Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the Court’s unanimous opinion, a milestone in the American Negro’s struggle for human dignity and freedom.[69] After reviewing the background of the various cases under consideration, the Court declared that the history of the Fourteenth Amendment, as it applied to school segregation, was “inconclusive.” Furthermore, said the Chief Justice, the school segregation issue had never been definitely settled by the Supreme Court. Recent decisions concerning inequality on graduate and professional levels of schooling had not faced the basic issue—the legal status of segregation per se. Consequently the Court would attempt conclusively to settle the problem.

In premising its decision, the Court turned not to “tangible factors” but to the overall “effect of segregation on education.” On this basis it asked: “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?” The reply was direct: “We believe that it does.” Accepting the testimony presented in the lower court by the social scientists, the Court found that segregation of Negro children “from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race” generated feelings of inferiority concerning their status in the community that might affect “their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” In the light of such a condition the Court concluded that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

The cases were not immediately disposed of since no implementing decree was included in this ruling. Recognizing the revolutionary nature of the transition being ordered, the Court, departing from established legal tradition, restored the cases to the docket and asked all affected states, the NAACP and the United States Attorney General to appear as friends of the Court and present further argument on how best to implement the decision. The state of South Carolina refused to come before the Court in this capacity. Attorney General Callison thought that such an appearance might indicate that the state was bringing itself “within the jurisdiction of the Court in this particular case.”[70] The state, as such, would do nothing that might make the Court’s decision specifically applicable to all school districts. Clarendon officials, however, did file a brief with the Court. They urged that the case be remanded to the lower federal court to permit school authorities “the opportunity of presenting their problems fully to that tribunal and of appealing to its equitable discretion in connection with their further handling of its affairs.”[71] Attorney Figg asked the Court to give the Clarendon authorities time to allow for “community acceptance.” But privately the less suave Attorney Rogers maintained that there was going to be no integration in South Carolina.

The Supreme Court’s implementing decree was not issued until May 31, 1955, a little over a year after its momentous decision.[72] It recognized the existence of “varied local school problems.” Consequently federal district courts were given the responsibility within their local areas for supervising the compliance with the Court’s original decision. While giving attention to local conditions, the district courts were to require school officials to make “a prompt and reasonable start toward compliance” with the original ruling. Delays in beginning integration were justifiable only when “necessary in the public interest” and “consistent with good faith compliance.” In proceeding “with all deliberate speed,” school officials were to be allowed consideration for such factors as “physical condition of the school plant, the school transportation system, personnel, revision of school districts ... and a revision of local laws and regulations” requiring segregation. This decision was applicable in the strict sense only to those school districts immediately involved in the litigation. No allowance was made for applying its provisions to other school districts. Segregation therefore would be erased only when action voluntarily was taken by school authorities or when directed by federal courts following petition by aggrieved groups upon failure of local officials to follow the spirit of the decision.

On July 15, 1955, the Federal Circuit Court, composed of Judges Parker, Timmerman and Dobie, met in Columbia and disposed of the Clarendon case in conformity with the Supreme Court ruling. In an unanimous decision the three judges restrained Summerton school officials “from refusing on account of race to admit to any school under their supervision any child qualified to enter such school, from and after such time as they may have made the necessary arrangements for admission of children to such schools on a non-discriminatory basis with all deliberate speed.”[73]

There the case rested in the spring of 1958. The school officials have not yet “made the necessary arrangements” to end segregation, and Negro parents, fearing among other things that the public schools will be closed if precipitate action is taken, have not pushed the matter further.

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]

II

White South Carolinians, regarding integration with outright disdain and horror, advance many arguments in defense of segregation. These range from temporary expediency to the fear of “mongrelization” and ultimate extinction of the white race. Running parallel is the constant reiteration that segregation, which allegedly provides separate-but-equal facilities, is of greater advantage to the Negro than to the white. Such a view, to be sure, runs completely counter to the assertion of President Truman’s committee on civil rights which said in 1948 that segregation had become “the cornerstone of an elaborate structure of discrimination.” Separate-but-equal arguments, declared the committee, were the basis for “one of the outstanding myths of American history;” while facilities were indeed separate they were far from equal.[100] In defending segregation white South Carolinians are far less concerned with the equal than with the separate.

Arguments against racial integration indicate a frank belief in the inherent superiority of the white race. In a widely read article in Harper’s magazine, Thomas R. Waring argued against integration on the following grounds: (1) The incidence of venereal diseases was higher among Negroes. (2) The cultural home environment of Negroes was inferior. (3) Marital habits among many Southern Negroes were “to state it mildly, casual.” (4) Crime was more prevalent among Negroes. (5) The intellectual development of Negro school children was generally below that of their white counterparts.[101] The late Herbert Ravenel Sass, a well known Charleston author, got down to Freudian bedrock in stating that fear of intermarriage was the most important factor in Southern opposition to racial integration. In an article in the Atlantic Monthly, he asserted that “it is the deep conviction of nearly all white Southerners in the states which have large Negro populations, that the mingling or integration of white and Negro children in the South’s primary schools would open the gates to miscegenation and wide-spread racial amalgamation.” He claimed that there was “almost no hatred of the Negro” nor was there anything that could “accurately be called race prejudice” in South Carolina. In a skillful display of semantic gymnastics, he held the desire for segregation to be based on “race preference.”[102]

In rebuttal to Sass, Harvard historian Oscar Handlin declared that statistics indicated that the growth of equality between the races did not increase the rate of intermarriage. Historically racial “miscegenation” had been the “direct product of the inferiority of Negro women.” The extent of “miscegenation” varied directly in proportion to the degree of that inferiority. The idea that Negroes were eager to marry whites, he said, was “a delusion born of the white’s own vanity and of his ignorance of the real sentiments of his fellow Americans of another color.”[103]

Answering criticisms such as those of Handlin the News and Courier replied: “The separation of races in public schools, in the circumstances that exist in South Carolina, is necessary. It is not evil or immoral. It does not deprive Negroes of their rights. It does protect the rights of white people. Arguments to the contrary usually stem from ignorance. Firm decent resistance in the end will win.” The paper branded integrationists as “Meddlesome Matties” who were interfering with a custom “older than the Republic.” Only in the last few years had “native born Americans ... learned from the NAACP and the eggheads that a traditionally American practice was un-American.”[104]

The Record considered segregation a modus vivendi which enabled the two races to live together until a more suitable solution could be evolved. Such would result only from a long and slow process of education in which racial prejudice would be wiped out.[105]

The attitude of Morning News Editor O’Dowd was highly ambivalent. Four days before the Court’s original decision he had declared that segregation traditionally had been “a social, economic and political expedient” which had no “moral justification.” Yet he believed the institution continued to be necessary. Three months later he described segregation as “a benevolent and paternal social order,” which “has not been a matter of expediency.” Under O’Dowd’s successor, James A. Rogers, the Morning News moved nearer the position of the Record and the News and Courier. In his first editorial comment on the problem, Rogers stated his “sincere belief” that segregation was practiced in the best interest of both races. Under such circumstances segregation was “not an evil scheme to keep the Negro in subjection but a high road” along which the Negro could “achieve maximum development in an atmosphere without tension or ill will.” A suitable solution to the problem of integration, Rogers thought, would come only after “education, education, education for a period of generations, and patience, the practice of tolerance and the willingness to wait until the alchemy of good will has done its work.”[106] Such a proposal meant postponing integration indefinitely.

Amongst individual white South Carolinians much the same attitudes prevailed. Governor George Bell Timmerman, Jr., indignantly contended that “any statement that our law is inherently unequal is inherently untrue.” Lieutenant Governor Ernest F. Hollings, young, handsome and ambitious, told the Lions Club of Florence that he did not know anyone who believed in “any prejudice on account of race.” Segregation was based on “history, culture and economic background” rather than race prejudice. Former Governor Byrnes told the Sumter Kiwanis Club that segregation arose not from “petty prejudice” but from “an instinctive desire for the preservation of our race.”[107]

Other South Carolinians expressed these sentiments in greater or lesser degree. Charles D. Haigh of Florence pleaded with “white American fathers” to guard their “defenseless children” against all attempts at integration. Criticizing any moderate approach, he recognized only two alternatives—“segregation or integration and eventual mongrelization of the races.” Should the latter alternative come to pass there would be “no ‘Star Spangled Banner’ as a national anthem, but more than likely some such song as, ‘Rest your li’l kinky head upon my breast, w’suns is all alike.’”[108] Similarly, Gilbert Wilkes of the Charleston suburb of Mt. Pleasant had not taught his children “any prejudices against other races” except insofar as “racial purity” was concerned. In keeping his children free from prejudice he imparted to them “the knowledge that God chose members of the white race as his chosen people and then colored the others.”[109]

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]

IV

Public spokesmen offer many answers to the school integration question. The press of the state constantly urges “patience and forbearance;” “calm, careful consideration, hard thinking and studied action;” “calm, reasonable, and foresighted” actions; “cool calculation, searching forethought;” “restraint and common sense;” “planning, ... determination, perhaps ... cunning;” and “calm and wise decisions.”

Of the many proposals for circumventing the Court’s decision, voluntary segregation is the most popular. Morning News Editor Rogers thought it represented the “ultimate answer to the problem.” The News and Courier believed that “of all the approaches ... now uppermost in the minds of South Carolinians, the voluntary selection of schools by patrons according to their own race keeps recurring as the most reasonable.” Former Governor Byrnes stated that “the hope” of the South was voluntary segregation.[113] Proposals for voluntary segregation, of course, contain no provision for Negro parents who desire integrated schools for their children.

The News and Courier has been a consistent advocate of voluntary segregation. In defending this approach, the Charleston paper said:

Happiness cannot be measured in worldly goods, nor social position, nor many of the things that some of us hold too dear. Contentment is necessary for true happiness....

Too many people of all races and stations in life seem dissatisfied with things as they are. While ambition and the go-getter spirit are praiseworthy, whining for “equal treatment”—which often means excuse for shortcomings—should not be a part of a person’s equipment. Merit has a way of being recognized.

Too many people—both white and Negro—are trying to bite off more of life than they can chew. Not everyone is qualified to take a place in the front rank. Instead of being angry, they would do themselves a favor by adopting a philosophical attitude. Instead some persons dissatisfied with their own accomplishments demand a change in government, in economic laws, in the rules of society.[114]

Another solution is the migration of the Negroes to non-Southern parts of the United States, thus relieving “the pressure of numbers” on the black belt areas of the South. This proposal represents a revival of the pre-Civil War suggestion that the free Negro should be returned to Africa. But in 1955 even the News and Courier conceded that “migration to Africa seems no longer feasible.” In a letter to the editor of the paper W. W. Bragg of Columbia offered concrete proposals to encourage migration. He urged that the state provide each Negro desiring to migrate with a small sum of money—$100 to $200—and pay his transportation expenses. The Negro would be required to “go to a State in the North,” and agree not to return to South Carolina for five years. In the long run this would be cheaper for the state, argued Bragg, because the Negro paid much less money in taxes than the value he received in state services.[115]

The South Carolina Farm Bureau Federation and its president, E. H. Agnew of Starr, also advanced proposals for the continuation of segregation. Agnew, who strongly opposed “this dastardly thing of forced integration,” summarized what he considered to be the views of farmers in the state: “The farm people of South Carolina, both white and colored, are bitterly opposed to such a program as the Supreme Court outlines. They earnestly desire both separate schools and a continued relationship of peace and harmony but they are determined that this vile thing shall be circumvented. They want neither abolition of public schools nor do they want a shotgun solution to the problem but if worst must come they are ready for either or both.”[116]

In a booklet entitled “Education and Race Relations” distributed to its 20,000 members, the Farm Bureau proposed the development of a “co-racial program” of separate but equal schools. By co-racial the Bureau meant “equal status, equal opportunity and self-determination.” If facilities were truly equal, contended the Bureau, there would be “more gracious acceptance” of segregation by both races and “no white or Negro child” would be “forced to attend a school of mixed races, unwillingly.” Since segregation would, under these circumstances, be maintained voluntarily both the spirit and the letter of the court decision would be observed. The success of this program would depend on voluntary acceptance by both races. Again significantly, no provision was made to accommodate those pupils seeking integrated schools.[117]

The Record’s proposals merit special attention since in reality they cracked the door to school integration. It recommended a system (consequently adopted in part in North Carolina) which would allow Negroes in “a few rare instances” to attend white schools. Such a system, which would have assigned pupils to schools on factors other than race, would comply with the Court’s decision and at the same time maintain segregation almost 100 percent intact. Under the system “an occasional white pupil” would have to be assigned to a Negro school. The Record also recommended repeal of all of South Carolina’s segregation laws as a means of removing the basis for further court rulings against the state.[118]

The Independent, though less concerned with the segregation issue, had its own homespun suggestions as to how to circumvent the Court. Comparing resistance to integration with opposition to the Eighteenth Amendment, it suggested that the time might come “when segregated education will be ‘bootlegged’ and when federal agents, slinking behind hedges, will try to follow little Johnny to the ‘speakeasy’ school.” However, there would be plenty of old timers who could give Johnny “some valuable tips on how to confound the revenooers.”[119]

Not a few urged defiance to the point of violence in resistance to integration. Others, less extreme in their utterances, helped create a climate of disrespect for the segregation decision which made defiance easier. “Because the Supreme Court has spoken we should not submit without resistance,” said Senator Thurmond. South Carolinians, he added, “must resist integration by every legal means harder than the integrationists fought to end segregation.” The News and Courier asserted that “the will to resist goes deep into the fabric of the Southern people. They do not intend to yield their principles so long as they draw breath.” Commenting on the integration violence in Clinton, Tennessee, it declared that “organized rebellion at the local level” was “a wasteful and disturbing means of dealing with government.” But Southern states should not “give an inch in standing up to the federal government.”[120]

Despite the intransigent opposition that had developed to integration in the state and the South generally by the summer of 1955, W. D. Workman, Jr., despaired of the “blight of submissiveness” which the Court decision had spread over the land. The “cry of surrender” by those who would accept the decision as law did not “fit well into the traditional pattern of American resistance to dictation,” he declared.[121] A number of letters to the editor of the News and Courier were of the same opinion.

Occasional outbreaks of violence have come in South Carolina as a result of the integration “agitation.” These have been rare, however; the threat of violence was usually sufficient. The most prominent case of violence involved the Reverend J. A. DeLaine, an African Methodist Episcopal Church minister[122] and leader of one of the organizations sponsoring the school case from Clarendon County, where he had a pastorate. Later he was transferred to Lake City. DeLaine’s church in Lake City was destroyed by a fire of undetermined origin; his home was pelted with rocks, fruits and other objects from passing automobiles. On one occasion DeLaine, claiming that the occupants of a passing automobile had fired gunshots into his home, shot back. Two of the men were slightly injured by metal fragments from the car. The men in the car maintained that they had not fired and were in fact unarmed. As a result of this incident DeLaine fled to New York City, seeking refuge with an AME bishop. In South Carolina he was indicted for assault with intent to kill. Federal authorities took no action to return DeLaine to South Carolina. Governor Timmerman, stating that he did not want to give the NAACP another martyr who could be used for fund raising, decided not to press for extradition. South Carolina was well rid of “this professional agitator,” commented Timmerman.

Some two years later DeLaine, interviewed at New Rochelle, N. Y., where he was serving as pastor of the Mount Carmel Church, asserted that his experiences in South Carolina had permanently scarred both him and the members of his family. However, he added: “It’s worth some suffering—it’s even worth a man’s life, if he can start something that will lead to a little more justice for people.... We helped start some things that are bringing a revolution in education for Negroes in South Carolina, in modern schools and bus transportation.” Nor did the minister harbor any ill feelings toward the people of South Carolina. “There are too many good people there, white and colored. But they need to stand up against the hate-mongers,” he declared.[123]

A second notable incident of violence, which took place in December, 1956, involved the flogging of a Camden High School band leader, Guy Hutchins, by six hooded men. According to Hutchins, he was attacked while changing an automobile tire on a lonely road. His assailants accused him of making remarks in favor of racial integration, a charge which Hutchins flatly denied.

Although the Kershaw County grand jury on two different occasions refused to indict six men arrested in connection with the case, many white South Carolinians publicly criticized the incident. The Rev. Stiles B. Lines, pastor of the Camden Episcopal Church of which Hutchins was a member, declared that “fear covers South Carolina like the frost.” Referring to the flogging, he told his parishioners: “Men are afraid to speak. Freedom of speech is almost extinct in South Carolina, except for those who wish to speak in favor of and in accord with the policies of the pressure groups who self-righteously assume that they, and only they, have the answers.”[124]

Criticism of the Hutchins affair was sufficiently widespread to cause the steering committee of the Kershaw County Citizens Council to meet in special session and issue a statement declaring that “unlawful acts of violence, force or intimidation serve only to bring discredit on this community and state, and, insofar as concerns the struggle against integration, the loss of States’ Rights and loss of individual liberties, to cause diversion, dissension and dismay among those who are attempting to maintain our traditional social order and way of life.”

The comments made by South Carolina Circuit Judge G. Duncan Bellinger of Columbia on the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision were an interesting sidelight on the Hutchins incident. They were voiced in his charge to the grand jury considering the indictment of the six men accused of the flogging. Members of the Court, said the judge, had “substituted for legal principles their own personal, social, economic and political ideas, taking away the rights of states, the powers of the departments of the federal government and the rights of individual citizens.” But in urging an indictment of the accused, Bellinger declared that violence would aid only the “scalawags and carpetbaggers” who were seeking to bring about another Reconstruction.[125] By inference the judge considered fighting the “scalawags and carpetbaggers” as important as the rights of individual citizen Guy Hutchins.

Under circumstances and conditions such as those outlined above South Carolina developed its resistance to attempts of the Negro to win integration. The unanimity of opinion among those elements which spoke out on the subject encouraged silence among more moderate persons. Such a situation is further illustrated by a more detailed consideration of the various phases of resistance.

CHAPTER IV

THE WHITE FOLKS FIGHT BACK

We are surrounded by invisible dangers, against which nothing can protect us, but our foresight and energy.—John C. Calhoun

In response to the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision a number of organizations dedicated to the preservation of white supremacy mushroomed up in the state. Among these were the National Association for the Advancement of White People, the States Rights League, the Grass Roots League, American Educators Incorporated, the Federation for Constitutional Government, the Association for the Preservation of Southern Traditions and the Citizens Council. In addition the Ku Klux Klan again reared its ugly head. These organizations opposed racial integration with methods that varied from the “legal” opposition of the Citizens Council to the blunt threats of naked force by the Ku Klux Klan. Similarly, they experienced differing degrees of success. The Citizens Council, though last to be organized, has been the most prominent. With the exception of the Citizens Council, none of the organizations developed anything approaching a statewide following. Its appearance in the summer of 1955 virtually signalized the disappearance of the other groups. Only the Ku Klux Klan remains.

The Klan is the largest and most important of the white supremacy groups next to the Citizens Council. As it exists in the state during the period following the Supreme Court’s ruling on school segregation, the Klan is a continuation of the organization that had become almost defunct by the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. The Court decision gave the Klan a new lease on life. However, it has not been able to achieve recognition as the state’s chief defender of racial segregation. Essentially this results from the fact that the Klan, because of its checkered history since World War I, has no appeal among “respectable” elements, in short to the state’s “power structure.” The bedsheet brigade also has the official opposition of the state government.

In general the South Carolina Ku Kluxers have found greatest following among the less economically privileged whites, workingmen and petty tradesmen. Klan rallies, replete with burning crosses and fiery oratory, have been held at various points throughout the state. Attendance, as reported by the press, usually has varied from less than a hundred to several hundred, though Klan leaders argue that these figures are much too low. At one meeting in Union, the Klan claimed an attendance of between 12,000 and 15,000.[126]

Several independent Klan factions have been organized in the state. The national organization, with headquarters in Atlanta, recognizes the group headed by Grand Dragon J. H. Bickley, a Marion carpenter, as the “official” Klan in South Carolina. Bickley’s organization has been bothered by periodic Klan rallies which it has not sponsored and which engage in practices which, according to the Grand Dragon, tend to discredit his group and alienate its followers. Since Bickley refuses to release any information on the number of Klansmen or klaverns in the state, the numerical strength of the Klan is impossible to determine. He claims that if he had the time, he “could stage a rally each night of the week.”[127]

The purpose of the Klan according to E. L. Edwards of Atlanta, the national Imperial Wizard, is to protect Southerners “against the NAACP, Knights of Columbus and the ADL [Anti-Defamation League].” The Klan is “a white man’s organization fighting for white supremacy” and is not made up of race discriminators but people who want to live “in a segregated group.”[128] On the basis of stated aims and objectives, there is no discernible difference between the Klan of the 1920’s and that of the 1950’s.

Klan leaders deliver impassioned harangues at klavern rallies. Their principal foes, as evidenced by the organizations singled out by Edwards, are Negroes, Jews and to a somewhat lesser extent Catholics. Liberal use is made of the smear technique of accusing opponents of being pro-Communist. Speaking at Sumter Imperial Wizard Edwards charged that the Supreme Court’s ruling was “a Communist-Jewish-Catholic plot” aimed at “destroying and mongrelizing” the white race. Parties to this conspiracy included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, “the Jew Bernard Baruch,” and President Eisenhower, whom he referred to as “Eisenberger.” With characteristic disregard for historical accuracy, the Imperial Wizard branded the NAACP as an organization formed in 1906 by a “group of three people sent directly from Russia.” He urged all “one hundred percent Protestant white Americans” to join the Klan and help overcome this menace.[129]

At a Timmonsville meeting Ku Klux attitudes were well expressed by a Klan speaker identified only as a “minister of the Gospel” who would be in his pulpit the following Sunday morning. After the opening prayer, this defender of the faith announced that he hated all Jews and “niggers.”

The NAACP [he continued] is a Communist front organization. We have documents in the House Un-American Activities Committee to prove this. I was supposed to have literature here tonight to prove this, but it was late in arriving....

The main issue in South Carolina is not so much Communism as it is niggerism....

Klansmen don’t wear sheets, they wear robes. It is a shame that good Christian people have to hide themselves to do what our country was founded for....

That nigger-lovin’ Estes Kefauver wouldn’t sign the referendum (Southern Manifesto); we ought to send that nigger-lover to Africa....

The National Council of Churches is a Communist front organization. Bishop Oxnam, the former president, is under indictment by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a Communist....

I’d rather (my little boy) grow up unable to read or write than sit beside a nigger in school.

Another speaker, standing on the flat bed of a Ford truck, told a Klan rally that Henry Ford II had given $1,500,000 to the NAACP and that he (the speaker) would boycott all Ford products until Ford gave an equal amount to a white supremacy group.[130]

Klan speakers invariably include a thinly veiled threat against those who seek to upset racial segregation. The Grand Dragon of South Carolina warned that “the day the Negro steps into a white South Carolina school as a student will be the day we pick up our weapons.”[131] A “preacher” told another rally that “moderation has never been the answer to anything. It’s the extremists—you and me—who are going to solve this situation.”[132]

The lengths to which Klan “extremists” are willing to go, or more accurately the depths to which they can descend, is illustrated by an episode which occurred at Traveler’s Rest in Greenville County which is in the upper part of the state. On the night of July 21, 1957, eleven white men broke into the home of Claude Cruell, a moderately prosperous fifty-eight year old Negro farmer and Baptist deacon. Four of them proceeded to chain him up and beat him. The others watched. During the course of the beating, according to Cruell’s wife, Fannie, who was subsequently driven away several miles from the farm and made to walk home, the invaders berated the Negro couple for “trying to mix with white people.”

Specifically, the group was referring to the Cruells’ association with Sherwood Turner and his family. Turner, a tall, illiterate thirty-four year old white man who eked out a precarious livelihood as an itinerant bean picker and handyman, lived with his wife and seven small children in a nearby house which they rented from Cruell for five dollars a month. On occasion, the Negro farmer had given Turner and his family rides in his car to nearby bean fields. On the day of the beating the Cruells were caring for Turner’s children while the latter had taken his wife, a thin, anemic woman, to the Stroud Memorial Hospital at Marietta for emergency treatment for a kidney ailment. The Turner children, consequently, witnessed the beating of Cruell.

A police investigation led directly to the independent Greenville County Ku Klux Klan. It was A. Marshall Rochester, head of the Greenville Klansmen, who led the “inquisitional” party to the Cruell farm. They had intended to whip not only Cruell but also the pitiful Mrs. Turner. Rochester openly acknowledged his role in the affair. Eight of the other men arrested with him not only in connection with the Cruell beating but also that of another Negro, Willie Lewis Brown, on July 29th, admitted membership in the Klan; a tenth said that he was a “probationary” member, and the eleventh identified himself as its “chaplain.”

The Cruell incident brought an indignant protest from Grand Dragon Bickley who denounced the Greenville Klansmen. He expressed “great pleasure” that the incidents of violence in Greenville had been solved by law enforcement authorities and held that such episodes resulted “only in harmful effects upon the South and our nation as a whole.” He carefully pointed out that his own organization had no acts of violence charged against it and also that it was not on the Attorney General’s subversive list. “This is due to the fact,” said Bickley, “that in all our chartered klaverns, the klansmen are taught to respect law and order.”

When the Klansmen were finally brought to trial after an indictment by a grand jury all but six were exonerated by Judge James M. Brailsford, Jr., who ordered charges against them dismissed. The trial jury found two others innocent. The remaining four, including Rochester, were found guilty of conspiracy and assault and battery and sentenced to jail terms ranging from one to six years. Rochester received the maximum six year sentence from Judge Brailsford who remarked: “I don’t see that I can accomplish any good by lecturing these men.” He was undoubtedly right.[133]

The press of the state has universally harrassed the Klan not only in the Cruell episode but in its other activities as well. The Morning News referred to the organization as “this blasphemy against religion; this living curse against decency; this social cancer that pollutes everyone and every area it touches.” The Independent called the Klan a “latter-day bedsheet brigade” which appealed only to the “mentally immature” who had “something to hide.” The News and Courier believed that it was made up of “hotheads, crackpots and brutes,” who went “night riding for sport” and did more harm than good for the cause of segregation.[134]

Not only does the Klan have to contend with a hostile press but it also faces opposition from the state government. Governor Timmerman quixotically charged that the reorganization of the Klan was the work of the Communist Party. In early 1956 the South Carolina Klan applied for a state charter. Attorney General Callison ruled against this request on the ground that Klan ritual called for the wearing of robes and hoods, which was illegal under the state’s anti-masking law.[135] Previously Callison had joined other Southern attorneys general in a declaration which pledged joint action to “use every legal means” to check Klan growth and expose its “secret and unlawful purposes.”[136] The attorney general’s actions were applauded by the press.

Public support of the Klan is rare. An occasional letter to the editor has defended the order. The writer of one such letter to the News and Courier, for example, had “never heard of the Klu Klux Klan bothering anyone who did not need a double-dose of what they got.” Neither had he ever known of the Klan taking the law into its own hands until “the law had been notified, and had failed to take action.” Because of the nature of the Communist conspiracy, he was in “favor of America waking up” even if the Klan had to do the waking.[137] Another letter writer to the News and Courier, one C. A. Rea of Hamlet, North Carolina, a town close to the South Carolina border, said that he had attended several KKK rallies and was sure that Klansmen did “not want any trouble.” Rea, who concluded his letter with “Yours for Christianity, segregation, and decency,” praised South Carolina law enforcement officers “for their fairness and cooperation” at Klan rallies. “They recognize and respect constitutional rights of peaceful assembly and of free speech,” he declared.[138]

The other white supremacy groups, nearly all of which had short existences, were less well known than the Klan. One of these, the National Association for the Advancement of White People, apparently had only one chapter in the state. This group was located at Florence and affiliated with a national organization led by Bryant Bowles who achieved a fleeting notoriety in connection with his attempts to prevent school integration in Delaware and Washington, D.C. The NAAWP, according to its national president, represented the white man’s “last hope” against the NAACP. He pledged to fight the “trend from communism to liberalism and then to negroism in the United States.”[139]

The Florence chapter was headed by G. L. Ivey, a restaurant owner, who fired all of his Negro employees immediately after the Supreme Court decision of May 17, 1954. The pronouncements of Ivey and Bowles were similar to those made by some of the more outspoken members of the Klan. What the Negro really wanted, Ivey told white Carolinians, was “to get into your front bedroom.” Bowles protested that he was not anti-Semitic but added “the Jews are fast making me that way” through their support of the NAACP.[140]

The Morning News condemned the NAAWP as being “at least as undesirable” as the opposition it proposed to combat—the NAACP. The News and Courier, professing to know little concerning the organization, was inclined “not to endorse such a movement.”[141] Such criticism may have discouraged white supremacists elsewhere in the state from forming NAAWP chapters.

In March, 1955, apparently because of failure of the organization on both the local and national level, the Florence chapter reconstituted itself as the Florence County Chapter of the States Rights League.[142]

The States Rights League was another abbreviated attempt to combat integration. It had a few chapters in lowcountry counties, e.g. Charleston, Darlington, Florence, but never achieved more than a tiny numerical strength. Its purposes, though couched in constitutional terms, were essentially the same as those of other white supremacy groups. The Darlington chapter of the League, in applying for a state charter, listed its objectives as follows:

To promote constitutional government, including the preservation of the independence of the legislative, executive and judicial departments; the preservation of the sovereign rights of state government and the preservation of individual liberties guaranteed by the Federal Constitution....

To oppose the adoption of socialistic platforms; to seek in every Christian and legal manner the strongest opposition to decisions of the Federal Courts and the Supreme Court, which wrongly abrogated, modified or amended the provisions of the U. S. Constitution which require a separation of power between the three great branches of government....[143]

Spokesmen for the League were more blunt in stating their objectives. A member of the Darlington chapter declared that the League was seeking “to preserve Christianity, segregation, states rights and individual liberties.” The “sole purpose” of the League, announced G. L. Ivey, was “to maintain segregation.” He urged “every white man and woman” who believed that segregation provided “the only stable arrangement for mutual respect and right conduct between the races” to join the League.[144]

In promoting constitutional government, the Florence County States Rights League concerned itself with such momentous issues as passing a resolution demanding the resignation of the Reverend E. L. Byrd, a Florence Baptist minister, who had advocated “the mixing of the white and Negro races” in churches. In another equally dramatic action the League adopted and sent to officials of the Florence County Agricultural Building a resolution requesting that officials correct a situation wherein whites and Negroes had to use the same drinking fountain in the building. This move was taken following a report by a league member that he had seen a “bunch of little Negro children all around the white drinking fountain like a swarm of bees around a saucer of syrup.”[145]

Another of the ephemeral Class B white supremacy groups was the Grass Roots League of Charleston. President of the League was the elderly Stanley F. Morse. Though highly vocal, the Grass Rooters were numerically insignificant. Their method of attack was through the issuance of “Research Bulletins.” Bulletin No. 2, for example, “proved” that the NAACP “was infiltrated by the Communist party in 1925.”[146] Bulletin No. 3 accused the National Council of Churches of distributing “leftist propaganda” which echoed “the subtle Marxist line that the South must give up its constitutional States Rights and necessary local customs in accordance with the Supreme Court’s left-wing segregation ruling.” This Bulletin was prepared by the League’s Religious Affairs Committee whose chairman, Micah Jenkins, was later to become president of the state Citizens Council organization.[147]

The purpose of the Grass Roots League, as stated by its president, was to combat the “threat to the continued existence of our free American Republic,” a threat which resulted from the Supreme Court’s segregation ruling. Various facets of this threat included the “Communist aim” of weakening “America’s constructive white civilization by mongrelization;” the attempt of the Supreme Court to seize legislative powers and destroy the principle of States Rights; the Supreme Court’s surrender to “political expediency” in cooperating with the Eisenhower administration’s “unscrupulous effort to win the Negro vote;” and “the cowardly reluctance of too many Southern businessmen, newspapers, radio stations, etc.,” to support resistance to “the black phases of the Red revolution.” Almost two years later, in February, 1957, Morse further expounded his views on the integration controversy in a letter to the editor of the News and Courier: “In brief the racial issue is political and biological—not religious. Since it is promoted by the atheistic Reds, it is anti-Christian. If the pro-Negro drive of the Communists succeeds, our United States may be wiped out and Christianity may receive a terrible setback. It is incredible that many clergymen and other ‘intellectuals’ are so unfamiliar with the laws of God (natural laws) and the facts of history that they have been duped into participating in this pagan attack on our civilization.”[148]

Still another transitory organization combatting racial equality was the American Educators, Incorporated, with headquarters in Hartsville. The American Educators apparently consisted of little more than their president, George W. Waring, who was connected with other similar groups, notably the States Rights League. Chartered in August, 1955, the American Educators sought to instruct the public to “the dangers of the communistic, socialistic, left wing, and modernistic trends to destroy Christianity and other religious faiths, the Constitution of the United States, individual liberties, high morals and self respect.” President Waring favored the application of economic pressures against “all members and sympathizers of the NAACP as well as any other communist-dominated organizations.”[149]

The Federation for Constitutional Government with headquarters in New Orleans is a “national” coordinating organization for white resistance groups. It has affiliates in South Carolina, notably among the Citizens Councils. The Federation was organized in December, 1955, in Memphis, Tennessee, by representatives from twelve Southern and border states and a sprinkling of delegates (self-appointed) from other states. Among the South Carolinians attending were Micah Jenkins, who was elected to the Executive Committee of the Federation, and Congressman L. Mendel Rivers of Charleston, who offered a resolution, adopted by the Convention, supporting interposition. Present at the Memphis meeting were many persons prominent in pro-segregation organizations such as the Citizens Councils and rightist organizations such as We the People and For America. The motives which brought these elements together, according to the News and Courier, were the same as those which guided “the founders of our Republic”—“the preservation of rights and freedoms built on centuries of Anglo-Saxon culture.”[150]

In the development of organized resistance to integration efforts, the Citizens Council has emerged as the most effective opponent of the NAACP. The Council was a relatively late comer to the state, first appearing in the summer of 1955, a full year after the Court’s original ruling. The “need” for an organization which would rally “moderate” and “respectable” whites was apparent to many segregationist leaders. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacy groups were unable to generate anything approaching popular support and furthermore they represented not particularly desirable white elements. In May, 1955, Farley Smith, son of the late Senator “Cotton Ed” Smith, complained of the “apathy of the average white citizen” toward pro-segregation movements and urged establishment of a white counterpart of the NAACP. Smith, S. Emory Rogers, the Summerton attorney who helped argue the Clarendon school case, and others recognized the Council as the answer to the undermining of segregation by the NAACP. The News and Courier, too, believed that the Citizens Council might succeed in steadying the shaking “foundations of the Republic” by providing leadership of the type which was “sorely needed” in the “uncertain times” of 1955.[151]

The Citizens Council idea originated in Indianola, Mississippi, where the first Council was formed in July, 1954. The movement spread rapidly throughout the South. In the late summer of 1955 Thomas R. Waring of the News and Courier wrote a series of articles on the Mississippi Councils to acquaint South Carolinians as to their nature and purpose with a view to encouraging the creation of similar groups in the state. He reported that the Councils proposed “to preserve separation of the races” against the combined assaults of the NAACP and the federal government. At the same time they allegedly were dedicated to the protection of rank and file Negroes “from the wrath of ruffian white people.” Membership in the Councils, said Waring, was recruited from “private, patriotic citizens,” who were the “pillars of the community.” Council members were citizens who “run the Chamber of Commerce and the Community Chest, serve as officers of churches and do the civic chores in every town worthy of the name.” Meeting the criticism of liberals both in the North and the South, Waring stated that Council leaders were “in no sense the architects of an American Fascist movement.” On the contrary, they were “firm supporters of the Republic and Jeffersonian democracy.” The Councils screened all potential members carefully “for character and dependability, as well as for their determination to keep the races separate,” and accepted only those who could be trusted with “the powers of organized civic righteousness.”[152]

The aims of the Citizens Council do not, in fact, differ particularly from those of other white supremacy groups; in its methods, however, the Council places greater emphasis on economic pressure, legal resistance and respectability. Its members wear business suits instead of bedsheets. In 1956 the State Legislature adopted a resolution commending the Citizens Councils in South Carolina as organizations designed

to preserve and maintain proper relations between all races residing in the State of South Carolina; to oppose the use of force by radicals and reactionaries; to disseminate information concerning radicals and reactionaries who may attempt to disrupt the peace and good relations among the races; to make every legal and moral effort to maintain the segregated public schools of the state; to study and develop ways and means for providing adequate education for children of all races in the State of South Carolina in the event that radical agitators should force the abandonment of the public schools; to operate segregated public schools by agreement between the races on a voluntary basis; to acquaint public officials without the State of South Carolina with the conditions in our State which make integration impossible; to acquaint such officials with the fact that the vast majority of the citizens of our State, both white and colored, favor the continuance of segregation in the public schools as now exists; to continue the present American way of life; and for other eleemosynary purposes.[153]

The emphasis on white supremacy is more apparent in a newspaper advertisement of the Florence Council soliciting membership. After describing the organization as the “modern version of the old town meeting,” it stated that the “Council is the South’s answer to the mongrelizers. We will not be integrated! We are proud of our white blood and our white heritage of sixty centuries.” To do battle with the “mongrelizers” the Council needed “every patriotic white Southerner, rich or poor, high or low,” who was “proud of being a white American.” All such persons were urged to join the Council for the protection of “those baby children at home.”[154] Micah Jenkins, president of the Charleston Council, said the movement aimed “to promote better race relations, and in every way preserve for the South its own way of life.”[155] The Reverend L. B. McCord, the Clarendon County school superintendent and one of the founders of the Clarendon Council, justified formation of the Councils on the ground that should an emergency arise such organizations would be available to give it “thoughtful and prayerful attention.”[156]

The immediate cause for the rapid growth of the Citizens Councils in South Carolina was the appearance of the school integration petitions in the summer of 1955. These petitions served as a catalyst to crystallize the previously unorganized opposition among whites to integration. The first Council was formed at Elloree in Orangeburg County in early August, 1955, immediately following a petition by Negroes for school integration. From this beginning the Councils spread rapidly throughout the lowcountry and into several counties in the upper part of the state. During the first year’s existence, Councils were formed at the rate of better than one per week so that by July 1, 1956, South Carolina had 55 separate Councils.[157] Only a few have been added since that date.[158]

In October, 1955, representatives from the various Councils met in Columbia to lay the foundation for a statewide association. This was effected in December, 1955. Micah Jenkins, a Charleston nurseryman, was named state chairman and S. Emory Rogers executive secretary. Inasmuch as the local Councils were autonomous, the purpose of the state organization was to give overall coordination and direction to activities on the state level. The state association had a speakers’ bureau and a legal advisory committee composed of one member from each of the state’s judicial districts in which at least one Council was organized. The board of directors was made up of one representative from each county in which a Council had been organized. Membership totals were not maintained by the state headquarters but were variously estimated between 25,000 and 40,000 in the summer of 1956.[159]

The South Carolina Citizens Councils are affiliated with the national Citizens Councils of America which has headquarters in Greenwood, Mississippi. The national organization published an official newspaper, The Citizens Council, which had a circulation in early 1957 of approximately 4,000. In 1957 The Citizens Council ran in serial form “A Manual for Southerners,” a segregation handbook designed for public school pupils. That portion designed for third and fourth graders read in part:

Negroes and white people do not go to the same places together. We live in different parts of town. And we are kind to each other. This is called our Southern Way of Life.

Do you know that some people in our country want the Negroes to live with the white people? These people want us to be unhappy.... They want to make our country weak....

Do you know what part of our country you live in? You live in the South.... We are called Southerners. Southerners are people who live in the South. You are a Southerner. You live in the South....

God put the white people off by themselves. He put the yellow, red and black people by themselves. God wanted the white people to live alone....

White men built America. The Negro came to our country after the white man did. The white man has always been kind to the Negro. But the white and black people do not live together in the South....

[Those who seek integration] say we are not good if we don’t live together. But we know it is wrong to live together.... They want to make our country weak. Did you know our country will grow weak if we mix our races? It will.[160]

Although this quotation requires no comment either from the standpoint of logic or historical accuracy, the reaction of Margaretta P. Childs of Charleston is noteworthy:

Such pontifical judgments [she wrote] may not edify the third grade pupil for whom they are intended, but will surely amuse a wide audience all over the country. The Mississippians’ intimate knowledge, perhaps even complicity in, the Deity’s intentions will also catch the attention of the nation’s Biblical scholars and theologians....

Unfortunately for the school child, if he learns any history or geography he may be more perplexed than confirmed in a fine old Saxon interpretation of divine will. If God wanted the white man ‘to live alone’, why did He send the white man across the ocean to trespass on the lands of the red men or to make long voyages to settle among the dark-skinned people of Africa and Asia?

The pamphlet in its ‘simple, easy-to-read style’ will not fool the children for long and will furnish lots of jokes to observers of the Southern scene. Too bad that H. L. Mencken, keenest critic of bigotry, false sentiment, and hypocrisy, is not around to enjoy and lampoon this latest tasteless expression of the cracker mentality. The intellectual bankruptcy of the die-hard segregationists is clearly shown for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.[161]

Local Councils maintain several committees, each charged with specific functions. An information and education committee is assigned to gather and disseminate information on racial problems on all levels. A committee on politics and elections has the responsibility of studying candidates for political office and presenting their qualifications to the voters. A membership and finance committee seeks to enlist “all patriotic white citizens for membership” and thus assure the organization of support. Membership fees are generally set at $5.00. A legal advisory committee provides “legal knowledge” to the Council in its fight against integration.[162] Some of the Councils are organized on a countywide basis while others correspond to a local school district.

The Citizens Councils have quickly endeavored to make their influence felt in the political arena. Although the state organization declares that it will “steer clear of partisan politics,” it nonetheless exerts direct political pressure. Using its power “for principles, not persons; for causes, not individuals,” the state Council makes sure that all candidates hold orthodox views on the race question. The aim is not so much to endorse particular candidates but to insure that all are “safe.” As the News and Courier noted, the Council aimed “to give support to strong officials and put backbone into weak ones.”[163]

In the state elections of 1956 the Council submitted to the candidates a list of questions designed to detect any deviation from orthodoxy on the race issue. The most revealing of these asked: “Do you here and now promise not to seek the Negro vote directly or indirectly?”[164] A joint statement in reply to the queries by five of the six members of the state’s delegation to the House of Representatives—L. Mendel Rivers, John J. Riley, W. J. Bryan Dorn, Robert J. Ashmore and John L. McMillan—reflected the attitudes of South Carolina politicians. Said the representatives:

We believe continued segregation to be in the best interest of South Carolina and the United States. Our country is threatened from abroad and from within by an atheistic menace which will stoop to any methods to create unrest and disunity. South Carolina’s record of tolerance, patriotism and understanding is second to that of no other state. It is far superior to that of some other states which spawn the chief critics of our way of life and harbor fugitives from justice.

There are in South Carolina many patriotic colored citizens who are not misled by outside agitation and who are working at the local level with our white citizens to solve this complex problem.

The votes of such Negroes, continued the congressmen, would and should be welcomed by all South Carolina politicians.[165]

Political leaders, the state press and other moulders of public opinion endorse the Citizens Council in its role as spokesman for “the Southern way of life.” Indicative was the appearance of Senators Thurmond and Johnston, Representatives Rivers and Riley, former Governor Byrnes, State Representative Burnet R. Maybank, Jr., and others of less political note at a Council rally held in Columbia. Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi, the principal speaker, told his audience that the Supreme Court decision had been “dictated by political pressure groups bent upon the destruction of the American system of government and bent upon the mongrelization of the white race.” In making the decision, the Court had “responded to a radical pro-communist political movement.” Senator Thurmond commended the Councils for the “orderly and lawful manner” in which they had approached the “problem” created by the Supreme Court decision.[166]

Among the state press, the News and Courier has become a sort of unofficial organ for the Councils. The Charleston paper presents these organizations as “moderate and sound” in approach and representative of a “deep public sentiment” against integration. To the News and Courier the movement is evidence that the South has “not shrunk from revolution and rebellion,” words which were “honorable” when the cause was just.[167] The Record endorses the Councils but the Independent, reflecting upcountry distrust of lowcountry domination of the Councils, expresses little interest in the movement.

Scattered opposition has developed amongst the South Carolina white population to the Councils. Initially, the Morning News mildly condemned them, stating that their appearance was “tacit admission” that the NAACP occupied a position of superiority in the segregation controversy.[168] Stronger protest has come from the South Carolina Methodist Church. In a statement adopted at its annual conference in 1955—before the Citizens Councils had consolidated their position in the state—the Methodist leaders condemned the movement. They noted that “it is properly supposed that these councils are being formed for the express purpose of exerting economic pressure upon a portion of our citizenry to prevent the exercise and development of their moral conscience and their civil rights according to the dictates of their consciences.” Such action, declared the Methodists, was a “contradiction of the basic teachings of our Lord and Master.”[169] The national executive council of the AFL-CIO has approved a report that contained an especially strong condemnation of the Councils. The labor leaders referred to them as “this new Ku Klux Klan without hoods” whose actions bore “ominous” resemblance “to the pattern of the growth of Naziism and other totalitarian movements which have fed on hatred and defied constitutional democracy.”[170] Expressing similar sentiments, Thurgood Marshall said that “the really vicious part about these groups” was the creation of an “atmosphere of respectability” in which other less scrupulous groups could “intimidate, threaten, beat up and kill Negroes.”[171]

The principal method used by the Citizens Councils in opposing integration is the economic boycott. This policy, which belies professed reliance on constitutional forms of opposition, has been employed from the very beginning. Leaders of the Elloree Council declared their immediate purpose was to exert “economic pressure on all persons connected with the NAACP.” Specifically, these spokesmen were referring to the seventeen Negro parents who had signed the petition seeking the end of race discrimination in Elloree public schools. The effectiveness of the policy was indicated within two weeks following the formation of the Council. Several Negro petitioners lost their jobs or were peremptorily evicted from their farms as a consequence of which fourteen of them asked that their names be removed because they “did not fully understand the meaning of the language of the petition” at the time of their signature.[172]

The overall object of the economic boycott has been to discourage all persons sympathetic to the idea of integration. Because of their generally inferior economic status, Negroes are especially vulnerable to such pressures. In areas where the boycott has been invoked any Negro who did not support segregation could expect to find business and personal credit withheld, home mortgages and installment loans denied, employment terminated or refused, rental quarters barred to him, and business and professional patronage withdrawn.

The city of Orangeburg provides an excellent study of the way in which the economic boycott operates. Located about fifty miles southeast of Columbia, Orangeburg had a population in 1950 of approximately 15,000. It is the county seat of Orangeburg County, a predominantly agricultural area the population of which is approximately fifty percent Negro. The white population of Orangeburg had always considered the city a model of “biracial amity, interracial cooperation, and educational progress.”[173] This attitude prevailed until fifty-seven Negroes petitioned for public school integration in the summer of 1955. The white citizenry was stunned by this action, considering it a breach of good faith on the part of the Negro parents. Reaction was instantaneous. A Citizens Council was organized which immediately began a policy of economic pressure against the petitioners. A number of prominent businessmen joined the boycott and several Negro retail merchants among the petitioners found their supply of such basic commodities as bread and milk curtailed. White merchants refused to extend credit to the petitioners and asked that all outstanding accounts be settled immediately. The white community terminated financial assistance that had previously been available to petitioners.

Negro leaders, realizing that economic pressure was a two-edged sword, immediately began retaliating in kind against those merchants prominent in the Citizens Council boycott. Since Negroes represented approximately fifty percent of Orangeburg’s population, their counter boycott was of considerable proportion and keenly felt by many white merchants. A boycott list of twenty-three local firms was distributed among the Negro community. It included only the more outspoken of the white boycott leaders and those most dependent on Negro trade. According to Reporter magazine, at least one white retail merchant was put out of business.

More positive steps were also taken to aid the Negro boycott victims. A fund, eventually reaching approximately $50,000, was deposited in the Victory Savings Bank, a Negro institution in Columbia, and was made available for small loans to Orangeburg Negroes. This fund included $20,000 donated by the NAACP, $5,000 deposited by an unidentified Catholic church, and $5,000 deposited by the National Council of Churches. The Negroes cooperated among themselves in other ways to help make their counter-boycott effective.

Accompanying the two-sided economic boycott was a general breakdown in race relations. To a suggestion by Negro ministers that they hold joint prayer services to help solve the problem, the white ministerial alliance of Orangeburg replied, “This is not the time” for praying together.

Boycott and counter-boycott reached an impasse and in the spring of 1956 both sides realized the desirability for compromise. The whites made several concessions, notably the resignation of Council Chairman W. T. C. Bates who had been largely responsible for the extreme position taken by the whites. With both sides easing up on the economic boycott, there was a general lessening of tension. However, neither side would compromise the basic issue. Negro parents continue to demand an end to school segregation (the number of petitioners was reduced by the boycott from fifty-seven to twenty-six); whites continue to stand adamantly against ending school segregation.[174]

An important incident in the Orangeburg controversy was the protest against intimidation by the student body and certain faculty members of the State Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes. The college is the only state supported institution of higher education for Negroes in South Carolina. Its presence in Orangeburg gives the local Negro community an unusually well educated and effective leadership. Several of the faculty members were at least sympathetic to the policies of the NAACP. The anti-segregation sentiment of these and other persons prominently connected with the college brought a request from Rep. Jerry M. Hughes, Jr. of Orangeburg for an investigation of NAACP activities among the faculty and students. Consequently in March 1956 the state legislature approved a resolution establishing a nine-member committee to determine which individuals at the college were “members of and sympathizers with” the NAACP; the extent of participation of the faculty and students in the activities of the NAACP; whether or not the faculty and students were “serving to mislead the Negro citizens and foment and nurture ill feeling and misunderstanding between the White and Negro races;” and if the activities of the faculty and students were “detrimental to the welfare of the college, its students and the State of South Carolina as a whole.” The resolution described the NAACP as an organization dedicated to the “fomenting and nurturing of a bitter feeling of unrest, unhappiness and resentment among the members of the Negro race with their status in the social and economic structure of the South.”[175]

Following adoption of this resolution, a portion of the student body and faculty of the college framed its own resolution which condemned “pressures and attempts at intimidation” being applied to the college and expressed approval of the policies of the NAACP.[176]

As unrest among the student body grew, Governor Timmerman directed the State Law Enforcement Division’s attention to “information that certain subversive elements” might attempt to sponsor a demonstration against the state government. He directed the law enforcement agency “to keep the situation under surveillance and to arrest immediately any law violators.”[177]

These incidents together with the white-Negro boycott then in effect in Orangeburg led to a protest strike by the student body of the Negro college. During the strike the students presented President Benner C. Turner with a list of grievances which protested against the investigation and the patronage by the college of certain Orangeburg business firms operated by men prominent in the economic boycott against Negroes. The strike lasted a week, achieving little for the students. Fred Moore, student body president and leader of the strike, was expelled from school. At the end of the year the contracts of several faculty members were not renewed and some twenty-five students were requested not to return.[178]

The investigating committee met in July, organized itself and selected Rep. James H. McFaddin of Clarendon County as chairman. When the investigation began, committee members were told by the compliant President Turner that since the student strike had been ended and several faculty members dismissed, there was no longer anything to investigate. Consequently after a perfunctory one-day meeting, the committee held no further hearings.[179]

Use of the economic boycott at Orangeburg and elsewhere has generally been approved by the press of the state. Its dangers are realized but the end is considered worth the risk. The Record has compared the white boycott to Gandhi’s policy of “non-cooperation” (passive resistance) against the British![180] Not surprisingly the policy receives its most enthusiastic support from the News and Courier:

We would not encourage unfair retaliation against any citizen, whatever his race, for free expression of opinion. This is a truly free country and people can say or write whatever they wish.

In exercising this freedom, people must be ready to bear the consequences. If those consequences include unpopularity, public dislike or refusal to do business with them, they need not be surprised.[181]

On another occasion the News and Courier declared that “Negroes wishing to engage in activities repugnant to white people are also free to earn a living elsewhere.” To secure employment in the South, Negroes should be willing “to observe community customs.”[182]

The policies of the Citizens Council at least temporarily have been successful inasmuch as they have postponed an immediate showdown on the school segregation issue. Just how long such unofficial measures will continue to be successful is problematical.

CHAPTER V

THE BROTHERHOOD OF SEGREGATED MEN

The ministers to our forefathers had the Bible, but not Socialism; and for them segregation was compatible with Christianity. Our modern ministers have the Bible and Socialism; and for them segregation is incompatible with Christianity. The only difference is Socialism. The Bible hasn’t changed; and, if Socialism is omitted, segregation and Christianity are still compatible.—S. Emory Rogers

During the 1850’s the church provided one of the bulwarks in the Southern defense of slavery. In that decade pro-slavery theologians prepared elaborate treatises “proving” slavery divinely authorized. The 1950’s finds the churches of South Carolina dangerously close to taking a similar position—only this time on segregation. Religious groups of the later period, however, are less unanimous or enthusiastic in support of “traditional race patterns.” In South Carolina, in fact, a small number of ministers and laymen have opened the most important crack in the solid wall of white segregationist sentiment. The importance of their protest should not be overemphasized; in many cases it is little more than academic. Protestant church organizations have given no direct endorsement to the abolition of racial segregation. The Methodist Church’s condemnation of the use of economic coercion against Negroes by the Citizens Council has been to date the outstanding criticism of white supremacy efforts by any Protestant group.

On the national level the church represents perhaps the most segregated of all public institutions as Reinhold Niebuhr has so well pointed out. Only a small fraction of church members, even in the North, is associated with integrated churches. Nonetheless, national church organizations outside the South have been making rapid progress in removing all official barriers to church integration. This is also true of most South-wide church organizations. The Southern Baptist Convention, the Southern Presbyterian Assembly, and the Southeastern Jurisdiction of the Methodist Church, for example, have all gone on record as opposed to segregation based on race. These organizations are much ahead of their South Carolina affiliates. Many leading segregationists, who have always considered themselves staunch church supporters, consequently are caught in a squeeze between church leadership and their own attitudes toward segregation. This patently unhappy situation has led some outspoken “Christian segregationists” to question the church’s taking a stand on the issue. The News and Courier wistfully hoped “that religion could be held above the complicated social, political and economic features of the present debate over race.” It was difficult enough “to fill churches with worshippers and to insure financial support of religious work” even when people were not being “alienated by social conflicts.” The “pressure in the churches” for an end of segregation was “only one of the symptoms of a sick world” which “plain people, guided by their own sure instincts, must resist with all their might.”[183]

In the best tradition of the Social Gospel, the Morning News initially took the opposite view, holding that the church certainly “should become interested in segregation. So long as we limit ministers to talks of home, mother, God and country,” wrote Editor Jack H. O’Dowd, “we won’t have a Christian nation, but a nation that tolerates the seeds of Christian thought and influence.” More churchmen were needed who were willing “to tie the power of Christianity to the problems of living.” Yet in less than three months O’Dowd was criticizing the Reverend Edward L. Byrd of Florence for attacking segregation. He argued that while segregation could not be justified “on the basis of Christianity and absolute morality,” it was “easily defended on the grounds of public good and social expediency.” Religion was of “greatest benefit” only when its application would “enrich the people. An immediate application of the theory of segregation’s immorality would not be a blessing to our Southland.” Disparaging Byrd’s call for “courageous and Christian leadership” in facing the problem, the Morning News stated that leadership was neither “a matter of blowing the bugles of war from the rear” nor “a matter of leading your people into destruction for a cause being fought the wrong way at the wrong time.”[184]

Among the various Protestant religious denominations opponents of integration have been either strong enough to prevent any action from being taken or able to place the church on record as favoring a continuation of racial segregation. The Methodist Church provides perhaps the best example of a division of opinion. In October, 1954, the annual conference of South Carolina Methodism by a vote of 289 to 148 adopted a resolution stating that the question of racial integration in the public schools could “best be resolved on the state or local level.”

It is apparent to us [said the resolution] that an attempt to integrate the races in our public schools without regard to their relative numbers would work grave injustice to many innocent persons, and in the present instance we fear the Negro would suffer most, as he has often when those far removed from his every day problems have undertaken to speak in his name.

Consideration must also be given to the large number of Negro teachers and administrators in our public schools, lest they be denied leadership among their people.

To compel a parent, whether white or Negro, to send his child to school and at the same time to compel the child to live under conditions which the parents regard to be detrimental to the highest interest would, in our judgment, introduce problems of serious import.[185]

The News and Courier applauded this statement as “a strong and fearless stand,” “a common sense approach,” and “a more truly Christian attitude than the twisting of ‘equality’ to mean forced association.”[186]

The following year, however, the Methodist Church’s annual conference pulled the rug from under its more ardent segregationist friends. On that occasion the conference officially recorded its opposition to the Citizens Councils as organizations “formed for the express purpose of exerting economic pressure.” This statement, introduced by the Reverend A. McKay Brabham, Jr., of Aiken, and the Reverend J. B. Murray of Orangeburg County, drew only scattered negative votes.

Reaction throughout the state was almost unanimously hostile. The Methodists’ resolution, declared the News and Courier, “is not necessarily a full reflection either of the facts or of the sentiments of most churchmen in South Carolina. It is one thing to regard our fellowmen as all God’s creatures. It is quite another thing meekly to submit to pressure against customs and convictions held by our people these many centuries.”[187] L. B. McCord, a former Presbyterian minister, thought it “not unChristian to fire or not hire anyone whose conduct is not wholesome and [does not] contribute to the best interest in the home or wherever that person may work.”[188] The Kingstree Methodist Church, in an especially strong condemnation of its parent body, was still more emphatic. It charged that “too many leaders and ministers in our Methodist Church have been saturated with propaganda and even made to have a guilt complex with reference to the question of integration of the races and have used their high offices as ministers and writers, though innocently we hope, for the purpose of disseminating propaganda which we believe is inspired by Communist or Communist-front organizations.”[189]

The extent of the opposition in some areas to the resolution is well illustrated by the action of the Reverend J. B. Murray’s congregation in forcing his removal from his Orangeburg County charge. In announcing Reverend Murray’s transfer, Dr. Pierce E. Cook, the Orangeburg District Superintendent for the Methodist Church, stated that the Citizens Councils were “not as bad” as the resolution implied. The Councils, he said, were “trying to do something our people in this area are in sympathy with.”[190]

Another example of pressure on supporters of the resolution was the case of the Reverend E. S. Jones of St. Paul’s Methodist Church of Orangeburg. Less than two weeks after adoption of the resolution, Jones, one of its prominent backers, felt constrained to declare publicly: “I have from the beginning felt that it was unwise for the races to be thrown together in the public schools, and I have not changed from that position. It is my conviction that the Church and its ministry must always be positively Christian, not only in its ends but in the ways and means adopted to attain these ends.”[191]

Only the maverick Morning News found any merit in the Methodist stand. The Conference’s action, wrote Editor O’Dowd, “was proper and timely ... [and] to be commended.” Segregation extremists, he thought, would have a hard time labeling this as the action of “communistic and brainwashed” outsiders.[192]

On the local level several Methodist churches, generally in the low-country, have exhibited concern about growing integration support among church elements. The Hemingway Methodist Church adopted a statement condemning the Supreme Court ruling as “groundless and defenseless,” an “improper interpretation of the U. S. Constitution” and an “unholy invasion of State’s Rights.” To place the white and colored children together in churches and schools would be “to guarantee the loss of the sense of biological difference” between the races which would becloud “our fair land with a mongrelized, second-rate people cancelling five or more centuries of progress.” Integration was being accomplished “by propaganda and open advocacy and by the cunning of idea infiltration.” The Methodists of Hemingway graciously conceded “the Negro to be human just as the white man, to be a growing citizen and entitled to equal cultural and economic advantages.” The “mixing” of the races in church and school, however, should be “allowed to die and remain so forever.”[193]

The Women’s Society of Christian Service of the Kingstree Methodist Church insisted that “voluntary separation” of the races was no denial of the “Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man.” The Society desired “the advancement of Colored People, but not through the agency of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” In the spirit of humility and soul searching, the ladies resolved that “we desire to continue to work out our way of worshipping God and in helping our Colored Brethren to do the same for themselves. All sections of our great country are not the same, and what is best for one section may not be best for another. We believe that in the sight of God we have been working out our problems in a way acceptable to Him, even though that way be not perfect, perhaps.”

“In some areas of Brotherhood” Church elements favoring integration were “moving too fast,” continued the Kingstree ladies. “The coming of the kingdom of God is gradual. We should concentrate on some of our sins of greed, selfishness, worldliness, etc., before we attempt too great a change otherwise.”[194]

The Manning Methodist Church adopted a resolution which affirmed belief in the divine origin of man and the principle that all men “stand on a spiritual equality.” But the Manning Methodists asserted that “certain social, economic and cultural factors exist which make it impractical and undesirable that members of the Negro race be received into and made a part of this congregation.” Should the South Carolina Methodist Church adopt a policy of racial integration in its churches, the Manning Methodists would find it “impractical” to continue connection with that body.[195]

The closeness of the division of opinion amongst South Carolina Methodists toward the question of church integration was dramatized at their annual conference in August, 1957, when by a vote of 287-261 it was agreed to permit the denomination’s Negro churches to affiliate with white Methodists where both agreed. Presiding Bishop Nolan B. Harmon of Charlotte, North Carolina, was careful to point out that the new course of policy had nothing to do with integration so far as individuals were concerned and emphasized that no white church was obliged to take in anyone. J. C. Holler of Columbia, conference lay reader and one of the authors of the proposal, declared that “the object of the plan was to take the race issue out of church law.” It solidified local control as represented by States Rights, he asserted. But opponents of the proposal thought differently. A Methodist layman, D. D. Brown of Hemingway, warned that the plan was “a highway to integration—a sedative to keep us quiet while the integration plan is put into force.” Such proposals, he added, played into the hands of “subversives” and would hasten the “mongrelization” of the races. The Reverend B. Rhett Turnipseed, a retired clergyman from Greenville, delivered an impassioned speech against the proposal. At the time of the unification of the Northern and Southern branches of the Methodist Church, said the Reverend Turnipseed, he was assured by two bishops that the question of integration within the church would not arise. “Brethren,” he declared, “I have kept the faith. My position hasn’t changed.... It is unfortunate at this time for a denomination to register itself for a paper like this. This is my swan song.”[196]

The Baptist Church, the state’s largest denomination, faced, or more accurately dodged, the race issue at its annual convention in November, 1954. The convention received a report from its Social Service Commission urging Baptists to “protect the public school system and seek to strengthen it in all possible ways.” Noting that “these are the times that try men’s souls,” the Commission offered several “guideposts” for Baptists to follow “in this crisis.” “God’s will” should be “earnestly and prayerfully” sought. White Carolinians should recognize and “humbly confess” that “in spite of strenuous efforts, and because of inherited traditions ... adequate educational opportunities for all our children” had not been provided in the past. And finally, Baptist action should be based upon the recognition “of every person as an individual, precious in the eyes of God.”[197] The Baptists, by receiving a noncommittal statement of principles rather than in adopting a formal resolution, deftly sidestepped the issue.

Individual Baptist ministers who have spoken out too strongly against racial segregation have not been immune to pressure. The most widely publicized incident involved the Reverend G. Jackson Stafford, pastor of the Batesburg Baptist Church. The Reverend Stafford’s case was particularly notable because Federal District Judge George Bell Timmerman, Sr., and his son, Governor George Bell Timmerman, Jr., were members of his congregation. Judge Timmerman, who has the hard face of a Puritan elder, was chairman of the board of deacons. Stafford’s difficulties arose from his vote in favor of a resolution adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention endorsing the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision. As a result, opposition to the minister rapidly developed within the Batesburg congregation and finally forced his resignation. With rare courage Stafford refused to renounce his convictions “regarding Christian race relations.” He charged that his resignation was made necessary by “several highly placed members of the Batesburg church playing politics” with religion.[198]

One of the most notable and quoted addresses against integration by a minister was delivered before the state Baptist conference on evangelism in 1956 by the Reverend Dr. W. A. Criswell, president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. Dr. Criswell told the Carolina evangelists:

That thing [integration] they are trying to ram down our throats is a thing of idiocy and foolishness. Any man who says he is altogether desegregated is soft in the head.

I’m a segregationist when it comes to whom my daughter is going to associate with. I know some white trash I don’t want my daughter running with.

I’m a segregationist when it comes to the woman I take home at night. I pick out one, and that one is my wife. We are a segregated family. We don’t invite everybody to come home with us. If we did, we would not have a home, and the same thing applies to the church....

Who is stirring up all this stuff? Is it God’s people or is it somebody else? I happen to know it is somebody else....

This [resistance to desegregation] is part of the ordeal by fire. When a true minister stands up and is true to God he will have to face these pressures. But God will not let us down.

They may put your feet to the fire, they can cut off your head, but you can’t quit. You might want to be dead, but you can’t quit. God has called you and you must go on.

God help us to be absolutely honest and absolutely fearless in the things we believe, saying with Martin Luther, “Here I stand, I can do no other.”[199]

The day after delivering this oration, the Reverend Doctor Criswell was invited to address a joint session of the state legislature. In a speech similar in tone and content to that quoted above, he told the solons: “Sometimes you can get broad and liberal and it doesn’t matter ... but there are other things that are precious to you such as whom are you going to marry and who is it that daughter of yours is going to marry.”[200]

South Carolina Baptists, of course, are affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. The latter was organized in pre-Civil War days in protest against abolitionist activities of Northern Baptists. Now one of the nation’s largest denominational groups, the Southern Baptists have prospered and spread over most of the country. (The Convention’s 1957 annual meeting, for example, was held in Chicago.) In recent years the Convention has wandered further and further away from the “traditional Southern viewpoint” on race relations, especially since the 1954 Supreme Court decision. The Convention’s action in forthrightly condemning racial segregation and approving the Court decision has placed South Carolina Baptists in a quandary. Increasingly local churches and church groups have been prone to criticize the national Convention. Shortly after the 1957 Convention’s condemnation of racial segregation the congregation of the First Baptist Church of Orangeburg, one of the largest in the state, passed a resolution offered by its Laymen’s Class which not only criticized the Convention’s action but declared that “if such practices are continued by the Southern Baptist Convention it will be for the best interest of the Baptist Churches of the South to withdraw from the so-called Southern Baptist Convention and organize an association with churches” which favor racial segregation. Baptist churches in Olar, Denmark, Manning, Sumter, Andrews and Branchville adopted similar resolutions.[201]

South Carolina Episcopalians, who have a central jurisdiction for both white and Negro churches, took a wavering stand on the segregation issue at their 166th annual convention in 1956. By a vote of 94 to 43 they resolved “that there is nothing morally wrong in a voluntary recognition of racial differences and that voluntary alignments can be both natural and Christian.” The resolution continued that it was “the sense of this convention that the integration problem caused by the Supreme Court decision of 1954 as it applies to the Episcopal Church should not be characterized as Christian or un-Christian, by reason of the fact that it is either inter-racial or non-inter-racial. In such choices, Christians may wisely exercise personal preference.”[202] In adopting this resolution, the convention rejected “by a large majority in a voice vote” a substitute resolution that would have urged Episcopalians “to employ at diocesan and parochial levels a strong degree of calmness and mutual toleration and respect for disagreement.”[203]

The endorsement of voluntary segregation by South Carolina Episcopalians was scathingly denounced by The Living Church, official organ of the national Protestant Episcopal Church. Comparing the resolution to the “Aryan Paragraph” which Hitler attempted to force on all German churches, The Living Church declared that “Christians do not have the right to exercise personal preference to keep other people out of the church.... It is one thing to be gentle and understanding about sin; it is another thing to pass resolutions commending sin on a ‘voluntary’ basis ... open church membership is a first principle of Christianity. When the church door is closed to a man because of his race, a sin has been committed. When the church says that it is all right for this to be done a heresy has been enunciated.”[204]