TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been placed at the end of the book.

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the [end of the book.]

James Jackson Kilpatrick

THE SOUTHERN
CASE FOR SCHOOL
SEGREGATION

The Crowell-Collier Press

First Crowell-Collier Press Edition 1962

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-17492
Copyright © 1962 by The Crowell-Collier Publishing Company
All Rights Reserved
Hecho en los E.E.U.U.
Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction

May it please the court:

When this book was conceived, it was intended to be titled “U.S. v. the South: A Brief for the Defense,” but it seemed a cumbersome title and the finished work is not, of course, a brief for the South in any lawyer’s sense of the word. It is no more than an extended personal essay, presented in this form because the relationship that exists between the rest of the country and the South, in the area of race relations, often has the aspect of an adversary proceeding. We of the South see ourselves on the defensive, and we frequently find ourselves, as lawyers do, responding in terms of the law and the evidence.

It is an unpleasant position for the South, which regards itself as very much a part of the American Republic, and it is an uncomfortable position also: We find ourselves defending certain actions and attitudes that to much of the country, and to much of the world, appear indefensible; some times we are unsure just what it is we are defending, or why we are defending it. We would like to think more upon these questions, but in this conflict there seldom seems to be time for thought or for understanding on either side. When one side is crying “bigot!” and the other is yelling “hypocrite!,” an invitation to sit down and reason together is not likely to draw the most cordial response.

This brief for the South, as any brief must be, necessarily is a partisan pleading. My thought is to present the South’s case (with a few digressions, irrelevancies, reminiscences, obscurities, and mean digs thrown in), but I hope to present it fairly, and without those overtones of shrill partisanship that drown out the voice of reason altogether. And it seems to me, if the suggestion may be advanced with due modesty, that a Virginia Conservative is perhaps in an unusually advantageous position to write such a brief. By tradition, inheritance, geography, and every intangible of the spirit, Virginia is part of the South. The Old Dominion, indeed, is much closer to the “Old South” than, say, North Carolina or Florida. Richmond was for four years the capital of a de facto nation, the Confederate States of America; to this day, our children play soldier in the trenches and romp happily on the breastworks left from the bloody conflict in which the CSA were vanquished. The Confederacy, the War, the legacy of Lee—these play a role in Virginia’s life that continues to mystify, to entrance, sometimes to repel the visitor to the State. Virginia’s “Southernness” reaches to the bone and marrow of this metaphysical concept; and if Virginia perhaps has exhibited more of the better and gentler aspects of the South, and fewer of the meaner and more violent aspects, we nevertheless have shared the best and the worst with our sister States. On questions of race relations, of school segregation, of a modus vivendi tolerable to black and white alike, Virginia’s views have been predominantly the South’s views.

Yet it is evident, as this is written, that the immediate battle over school segregation has passed Virginia by. The Old Dominion no longer struggles in the arena; we watch from the grandstand now. The desegregation of our public schools has been accepted in principle; a State Pupil Placement Board voluntarily has assigned hundreds of Negro children to schools that formerly were white schools. In our largest cities, most department-store dining facilities, in theory at least, serve any customer who asks to be served. Segregation has ended in transportation facilities, in libraries, in parks, in most places of public assembly. Negroes register and vote freely. It is true of Virginia, I believe, that the more things change, the more they stay the same; down deep, very little has changed. But by and large, Virginia has been eliminated from the fight. I wrote one book about the South a few years ago, when Virginia was still in the thick of it, and I was on horse and the pen was a lance. The sidelines offer a better perspective.

A word of definition is in order. When I speak in this essay of “the South,” what I mean is the white South, and more narrowly still, I mean the white adults of thirteen States who continue to share, in general, an attitude on race relations that has descended from attitudes of the “Old South.” There is, of course, a Negro South, but it is mysterious and incomprehensible to most white men. And there is a Liberal South, comprising a large number of white persons who oppose racial segregation in principle if they seldom oppose it in daily practice. These groups have their own able and articulate spokesmen; they have filed their own briefs by the dozen. And it is simply to avoid interminable qualifications—“most white Southerners feel,” or “the large preponderance of opinion among white adults in thirteen Southern States holds”—that I here define “the South” for my own immediate purposes.

With those preliminary remarks, let me turn, if I may, by slow degrees, to argument on the case at bar.

James Jackson Kilpatrick

Richmond
May 1962

Part I
The Evidence

I

At the time of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, on Monday, May 17, 1954, seventeen Southern and border States maintained racially separate schools. These included, in addition to the thirteen States to be treated here as “the South,” the States of Maryland, Delaware, Kansas, and Missouri, plus the District of Columbia. Each of the five speedily abandoned segregation—Kansas willingly, Missouri stoically, Maryland cheerlessly, Delaware grudgingly. The District abandoned segregation; white parents abandoned the District, and by 1962 an 82 per cent resegregation could be observed in the schools. Sic transit gloria Monday. None of the four States was in any real sense a part of the South; their constitutional or statutory requirements for segregated schools were appendages more or less ripe for the clipping. And though southern Missouri and the Delaware shore submitted to desegregation with some bitterness, the surgery was not especially painful and the operations, on the whole, were uneventful.

This essay is concerned chiefly with the other thirteen States, with attitudes and practices that then prevailed widely in all of them and still prevail overwhelmingly in some of them: the States of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. A possibly more definitive list might eliminate Oklahoma and Kentucky from this neo-Confederate fold; their Negro populations comprise no more than 6 or 7 per cent of the State total, and Oklahoma looks to the Southwest while Kentucky (mildly anesthetized by Mr. Bingham’s Louisville Courier-Journal) looks nowhere in particular. Yet I myself was reared in Oklahoma, and I know at first hand of the intensely Southern sentiment that still obtains in much of the State; my Kentucky friends write me poignantly, as one writes from East Berlin or Poland, asking CARE packages and seeking prayers, and I judge that many Kentuckians continue to look upon integration as they might look upon orange slices in a julep. They will drink the horrid thing, but their sense of propriety is outraged.

These thirteen States together make up a fascinating part of the American Republic. Their combined area amounts to nearly 863,000 square miles, or about 28 per cent of the continental United States. The 1960 census found in them 48,802,000 persons, of whom 24,036,000 were males and 24,755,000 were females; and, more to our point, the census found in them 38,404,000 white persons, 10,231,000 Negro persons, and 167,000 other nonwhites, mostly Indians in Texas, Oklahoma, and North Carolina.

The census of 1960 turned up a great many other figures useful to an understanding of the American South. Some of these are best presented in tabulated form. These figures, for example, bear close study:

Negro Population, Thirteen Southern
States, 1900-1960

The Negro component within the American Union, it is evident, remains today about what it has been all along. Within the Southern States, the Negro population is dropping steadily as a percentage of the whole. Negroes comprised 11.6 per cent of the nation’s total in population in 1900, 9.7 per cent in 1930, and 10.5 per cent in 1960. But this 10.5 per cent of 1960 has shifted dramatically across the nation. Of 18,872,000 Negroes, 8,641,000 or 46 per cent, were living in 1960 outside the thirteen States of the South. There were more Negroes in New York City (1,227,000) than in all of Mississippi or Alabama. Philadelphia turned up 26.4 per cent Negro; Georgia is 28.5 per cent Negro. Chicago counted almost as many Negroes in its city limits (813,000) as there were in the whole of Virginia (816,000), and they represented a larger part of the total—a concentrated 23 per cent in Chicago, a scattered 21 per cent in Virginia.

Between 1950 and 1960, the Census Bureau has reported, the South experienced a net out-migration of about 1,457,000 Negroes. The figure represents the number of Negroes that census enumerators of 1960 would have expected to find in the South if the Negro populations of 1950 had stayed put and had experienced a normal increase of births over deaths. Alabama, which should have gained 225,000 Negroes on this basis, gained only 1000 in the decade; South Carolina, which normally would have gained 226,000 Negroes, gained only 8000. Mississippi actually experienced a net loss in Negro population, from 986,000 in 1950 to 915,000 in 1960.

Where did these Negro migrants go? To the North, primarily—more than a million of them. Others went west: California experienced a net in-migration of 354,000 Negroes. Large numbers moved to Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan. The migration was almost entirely to Northern cities, and ironically, to urban societies of the North almost as segregated by geography as the Old South is segregated by custom.

Yet for all the steady decline of Negro components in Southern States, it still is true that the South, as a region, houses the largest concentration of colored citizens. Of the fifteen States that in 1960 had more than 500,000 Negro residents, all but four (New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey) were in the South. The thirteen Southern States that were 35 per cent Negro in 1900 were still 21 per cent Negro in 1960, and in 140 Southern counties, white residents in 1960 remained numerically in the minority.

Consider some further statistics:

Urban and Rural Population
Thirteen Southern States, 1900-1960.

These figures, as I hope to demonstrate after a while, should be treated with some reserve, but on their own they tell a revolutionary tale. Of the twelve States that were firmly rural in 1940, only North and South Carolina, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Mississippi were found predominantly rural in 1960. This migration from the countryside has seen the number of farms in the South drop from 3,100,000 in 1910 to 1,650,000 in 1959; the number of farms either owned or operated by Negroes has dropped from 890,000 to 272,000 in the same period.

In many aspects, to be sure, the census of 1960 found the South hardly changed at all. The region still is composed overwhelmingly of native-born Americans; except for Florida and Texas, none of the thirteen States has as much as four-tenths of 1 per cent foreign-born population. Southerners still are moving out of the South more rapidly than non-Southerners are moving in, but the Southern tendency to stay put remains much in evidence: 90 per cent of the citizens of Mississippi were born there, and the percentage is almost as high in Alabama and the Carolinas.

In terms of material wealth, our people remain relatively poor. Per capita incomes in 1959 ranged from $1162 in Mississippi to $1980 in Florida, against a national average of $2166. Wages in the thirteen States then averaged $73.31 weekly and $1.82 hourly, far below national averages of $90.91 and $2.29. As one consequence, housing conditions are sadly below par. The 1960 census found, in the country as a whole, 18.8 per cent of all dwellings “dilapidated or lacking plumbing facilities”; the percentages were 49.2 in Mississippi, 44.9 in Arkansas, and 41.2 in Kentucky; and no State outside the South approached these poor ratings.

The picture is not entirely bleak. Poor as they are, the Southern States in general are exerting a much greater effort than their wealthier Northern sisters. Over the country as a whole, State and local governments in 1959 raised $102.12 per capita from their own tax sources. Seven of the thirteen Southern States were far above this average: Mississippi, for example, raised $128.76 per capita from local sources, a figure that compares with $108.92 in New York, $83.56 in Connecticut, and $81.51 in Delaware. With much less to levy upon, the Southern States proportionately are pouring more into their schools. And the outlook is brightening steadily. Between 1929 and 1959, while the nation as a whole was increasing its per capita personal incomes by 208 per cent, South Carolina was jumping 393 per cent and Louisiana 280 per cent.

Permit a few more statistics. The South’s traditional distaste for government remains quite evident. Florida, Louisiana, and Oklahoma have slightly more than the average number of State and local government workers in terms of population, but the others are far below the national average. The South has small appetite for the welfare state; our relief rolls are large, owing chiefly to social difficulties among the Negroes, but grants are kept relentlessly low. Our people are churchgoers, in fantastic numbers. We continue to produce more moonshine whiskey than any other region. In 1961, there were 486 daily newspapers in the South, with a circulation of 12,500,000. Almost 40 per cent of the country’s radio stations are in the South; North Carolina has more AM stations than the State of New York, and Texas has more radio stations than anybody.

II

The foregoing figures tell little enough, to be sure, about the South; you learn nothing much about a sonnet by a footnote on its rhyme scheme. For it is a truism that there is not one South; there are, it is said, many Souths.

Eighteen hundred miles separate the Rio Grande at El Paso from the James at Hampton Roads. The intervening land is immensely varied. The South begins, at its western rim, in canyon country, red-walled, black-hilled; the bare and bony mountains stretch across the prairie like the skeletons of dinosaurs. This is hard country, burned by the sun and wrinkled by the unceasing wind; this is Texas, and almost everything men say of it is true. Oklahoma, to the north, is a pocket paper-back edition of its brawny southern neighbor. Both States offer moments of surpassing beauty and long stretches of surpassing dullness; they offer a splendid, lonesome emptiness of time and space, and then, abruptly, the sophistication of Dallas and the busy commerce of Oklahoma City and Houston.

Coming east, one finds Arkansas, and below it Louisiana; Ozark country, the endless foothills that never quite reach to the foot of anything, to the south the flatlands and bayous, the white cranes flying, the River, incredibly massive, the jeweled city one caresses as a mistress in his dreams.

Across the River, Mississippi and Alabama: cotton country, bottom land, mules and iron; small towns that evoke in bank and clock and feed store, in the inevitable bronze soldier standing guard in courthouse square, the image of small towns everywhere; progress and poverty, the hot breath of Birmingham, the Monopoly suburbs, their roofs all in line and neat bibs of crab grass under their chins.

On to the east, Georgia: red clay and cotton, the prosperous incongruity of Atlanta, resting on the homely landscape like a diamond stickpin on a shabby tie. To the south, the separate nation that is Florida, post-card blue, lemon yellow, an old man nodding on a St. Petersburg bench, a swamp child gazing from a quiet pier; Miami, and the Beach, the liquid ripple of Cuban tongues; the bonefish, silver as sixteenth notes in amethyst water. Back again to the north: Tennessee, timbered, taciturn, green-hilled, the great lakes of the TVA; Memphis and Knoxville and Nashville; the accent that thins a short e to a short i. Above Tennessee, Kentucky, tied inescapably now to the North and Midwest, hard politics, soft speech, burley tobacco, and good bourbon.

To the east again, Virginia and South Carolina, with North Carolina between them, “a valley of humility between two mountains of conceit,” or more accurately, a peak of giddy-up between two valleys of whoa. South Carolina is moss and small creeks, camellias, azaleas, the rugs a little thin, the white tapers gleaming, ancestors on the walls and Calhoun’s brooding spirit still alive, Camden and Columbia, and a classic capitol still pocked by Yankee shells. To the north, tobacco country; Charlotte, thrusting ahead, brief-cased, snap-brimmed; universities, schools, textiles, furniture mills, the black cypress quietude of the inland waterway.

Finally, Virginia, stretching four hundred miles from her coal country to her beaches; tobacco and peanuts; the gem that is Williamsburg, the plantation country, the somnolent Northern Neck, Mr. Jefferson’s University, the hunt country, the changelessly changing capital city where I write.

This land of ours is many-rivered, and the rivers have lovely names: the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee, Pee Dee, Yadkin, Tombigbee, Brazoo, Mobile, the York, the James, the Mattaponi. Our mountains are mostly old, worn down, the edges rubbed off: the Blue Ridge, the Alleghenies, the Great Smokies, the Ozarks. Our summers are hot and humid; the winters are uninteresting outside of Florida; but spring in the South is a cool rosé, and October in Virginia is a sparkling champagne. I speak to the court in this brief, as Your Honors will have noted, with an affection that ought perhaps to be brought back in bounds; along with the most beautiful horses in the world, we have some of the meanest mosquitoes south of New Jersey, an oversupply of shif’less dogs, and vast quantities of stinging nettles; we have sandflies, horned toads, and chiggers; we have our fair share of men who give short weight, of bigoted men, unkind, intolerant; we are given in a Cavalier South to drinking too much, and in the Bible Belt, to drinking not enough; we have men who honk at traffic lights, and women who giggle, and politicians who are full of wind; the Southern Shintoism that is sometimes a blessing is as often a curse; some of our cities are dirty, and most of our streets have lumps in them. But this is the many-faceted, cloudy, crystalline compound called the South.

Yet, no, it is not the South. The truism of “many Souths” will not stand too much weight. Every region in the country has its contrasts, its extremes, its anomalies, its measurable differences. An essential point can be missed in overconcentration on the Rural South, the Urban South, the New South, the Old South, the Liberal South, the Conservative South. There remains a great and well-understood meaning simply in the South; there is, in fact, a sense of oneness here, an identity, a sharing, and this quality makes the South unique in ways that New England, and the Midwest, and the West do not approach. The Confederacy was, as a matter of law, a state in being; but it was first of all, and still is, what so many observers have termed it: a state of mind. And running through this state of mind, now loose as basting thread, now knotted as twine, now strong and stubborn as wire, coloring the whole fabric of our lives, is this inescapable awareness: the consciousness of the Negro.

III

How, in 1962, does one begin to discuss this awareness? Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa? No, perhaps, the best observation to make at the outset is that the South, in general, feels no sharp sense of sin at its “treatment of the Negro.” The guilt hypothesis is vastly overdrawn. If wrong has been done (and doubtless wrong has been done), we reflect that within the human relationship wrong always has been done, by one people upon another, since tribal cavemen quarreled with club and stone. And whatever the wrongs may have been, the white South emphatically refuses to accept all the wrongs as her own. For the South itself has been wronged—cruelly and maliciously wronged, by men in high places whose hypocrisy is exceeded only by their ignorance, men whose trade is to damn the bigotry of the segregated South by day and to sleep in lily-white Westchester County by night. We are keenly aware, as Perry Morgan remarked in a telling phrase, of a North that wishes to denounce discrimination and have it too.

But let us begin gently. The Southerner who would grope seriously for understanding of his own perplexing region, and the non-Southerner who would seek in earnest to learn more than his textbooks would tell him, cannot make a start with Brown v. Board of Education on a May afternoon in 1954. Neither can he begin with Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, or with ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, or with Appomattox three years earlier. A start has to be made much earlier, in 1619, when the first twenty Negroes arrived from Africa aboard a Dutch slaver and fastened upon the South a wretched incubus that the belated penances of New Englanders have not expiated at all.

We of the South have been reared from that day in a strange society that only now—and how uncomfortably!—is becoming known at first hand outside the South. This is the dual society, made up of white and Negro coexisting in an oddly intimate remoteness. It is a way of life that has to be experienced. Children mask their eyes and play at being blind. Even so, some of my Northern friends mask their eyes and play at being Southern; they try to imagine what it must be like to be white in the South, to be Negro in the South. Novelist John Griffin dyed his skin and spent three weeks or so pretending to be Negro, looking for incidents to confirm his prejudices. But a child always knows that he can take his hands from his eyes, and see, that he is not really blind; and those who have not grown up from childhood, and fashioned their whole world from a delicately bounded half a world, cannot comprehend what this is all about. They wash the dye from their imaginations, and put aside The New York Times, and awake to a well-ordered society in which the Negroes of their personal acquaintance are sipping martinis and talking of Middle Eastern diplomacy. They form an image of “the Negro” (as men form an image of the French, or the British, or the Japanese) in terms of the slim and elegant Harvard student, the eloquent spokesman of a civil rights group, the trim stenographer in a publishing office: Thurgood Marshall on the bench, Ralph Bunche in the lecture hall. It is a splendid image, finely engraved on brittle glass, an object of universal admiration on the mantle of the New Republic. It is an image scarcely known in the South.

My father came from New Orleans. His father, a captain in the Confederate Army, returned from the War and established a prosperous business in ship chandlery there. And though I myself was born in Oklahoma, Father having moved there just prior to World War I, we children visited along the Delta in our nonage. We sailed on Pontchartrain, and crabbed at Pass Christian, and once or twice were taken from school in February to sit spellbound on Canal Street and watch the Mardi Gras go by. Our life in Oklahoma was New Orleans once removed; it was a life our playmates accepted as matter-of-factly as children of a coast accept the tides: The Negroes were; we were. They had their lives; we had ours. There were certain things one did: A proper white child obeyed the family Negroes, ate with them, bothered them, teased them, loved them, lived with them, learned from them. And there were certain things one did not do: One did not intrude upon their lives, or ask about Negro institutions, or bring a Negro child in the front door. And at five, or six, or seven, one accepted, without question, that Calline and Cubboo, who were vaguely the charges of a Negro gardener up the street, had their schools; and we had ours.

Does all this have the air of a chapter from William Gilmore Simms or a post-bellum romance by Thomas Nelson Page? I myself lived it, forty years ago; my own sons have lived it in this generation. My father lived it, and his father before him. For three hundred years, the South has lived with this subconsciousness of race. Who hears a clock tick, or the surf murmur, or the trains pass? Not those who live by the clock or the sea or the track. In the South, the acceptance of racial separation begins in the cradle. What rational man imagines this concept can be shattered overnight?

We had two Negroes who served my family more than twenty years. One was Lizzie. The other was Nash. Lizzie was short and plump and placid, and chocolate-brown; she “lived on,” in a room and bath over the garage, and her broad face never altered in its kindness. Nash was short and slim, older, better educated, more a leader; she was African-black; and as a laundress, she came in after church on Sundays, put the clothes down to soak in the basement tubs, gossiped with Lizzie, scolded her, raised Lizzie’s sights. On Monday, the two of them did the wash, hanging the clothes on heavy wire lines outside the kitchen door, and late in the afternoon Nash ironed. She pushed the iron with an economical push-push, thump; turn the shirt; push-push, thump. And I would come home from school to the smell of starch and the faint scorch of the iron and the push-push, thump, and would descend to the basement only to be ordered upstairs to wash my hands and change out of school clothes.

Toward the end of their lives, disaster came to both of them. Lizzie went slowly blind, through some affliction no surgeon could correct, and Nash lost the middle three fingers of one hand when her scarf tangled in the bellows of a church organ. Nevertheless, they stayed with us until age at last put them on the sidelines. And as far as love and devotion and respect can reach, they were members of the family. Yet I often have wondered, in later years, did we children know them? Did Mother and Father know them? I do not think we did.

This relationship, loving but unknowing, has characterized the lives of thousands of Southern children on farms and in the cities too. White infants learn to feel invisible fences as they crawl, to sense unwritten boundaries as they walk. And I know this much, that Negro children are brought up to sense these boundaries too. What is so often misunderstood, outside the South, is this delicate intimacy of human beings whose lives are so intricately bound together. I have met Northerners who believe, in all apparent seriousness, that segregation in the South means literally that: segregation, the races stiffly apart, never touching. A wayfaring stranger from the New York Herald Tribune implied as much in a piece he wrote from Virginia after the school decision. His notion was that whites and Negroes did not even say “good morning” to each other. God in heaven!

In plain fact, the relationship between white and Negro in the segregated South, in the country and in the city, has been far closer, more honest, less constrained, than such relations generally have been in the integrated North. In Charleston and New Orleans, among many other cities, residential segregation does not exist, for example, as it exists in Detroit or Chicago. In the country, whites and Negroes are farm neighbors. They share the same calamities—the mud, the hail, the weevils—and they minister, in their own unfelt, unspoken way, to one another. Is the relationship that of master and servant, superior and inferior? Down deep, doubtless it is, but I often wonder if this is more of a wrong to the Negro than the affected, hearty “equality” encountered in the North. In the years I lived on a farm, I fished often with a Negro tenant, hour after hour, he paddling, I paddling, sharing the catch, and we tied up the boat and casually went our separate ways. Before Brown v. Board of Education, it never occurred to me that in these peaceful hours I was inflicting upon him wounds of the psyche not likely ever to be undone. I do not believe it occurred to Robert either. This is not the way one goes fly-casting on a millpond, with Gunnar Myrdal invisibly present on the middle thwart. We fish no more. He has been busy in recent years, and I too; and when I came across the flyrod recently, I found the line rotted and the ferrules broken.

I say this relationship “has been,” and in the past perfect lies a melancholy change that disturbs many Southerners deeply. In my observation, a tendency grows in much of the white South to acknowledge and to abandon, with no more than a ritual protest, many of the patent absurdities of “Jim Crow.” Many of these practices, so deeply resented in recent years by the Negro, may have had some rational basis when they were instituted in the post-Reconstruction period. When the first trolleys came along, the few Negroes who rode them were mostly servants; others carried with them the fragrance of farm or livery stable. A Jim Crow section perhaps made sense in those days. But in my own nonage, during the 1920s, and in the years since then, few Southerners ever paused to examine the reasons for segregation on streetcars. We simply moved the little portable sign that separated white from Negro as a car filled up, and whites sat in front of the sign and Negroes sat behind it. This was the way we rode streetcars. After Brown v. Board of Education, when the abiding subconsciousness of the Negro turned overnight into an acute and immediate awareness of the Negro, some of these laws and customs ceased to be subject to reason anyhow; they became, confusingly, matters of strategy; they became occupied ground in an undeclared war, not to be yielded lest their yielding be regarded as needless surrender. Many aspects of our lives have gone that way since. The unwritten rules of generations are now being, in truth, unwritten; in their place, it is proposed by the apostles of instant integration that there be no rules at all. It seems so easy: “What difference does the color of a man’s skin make?” “Why not just treat them as equals?” “There is no such thing as race.”

Ah, but it is not so easy. The ingrained attitudes of a lifetime cannot be jerked out like a pair of infected molars, and new porcelain dentures put in their place. For this is what our Northern friends will not comprehend: The South, agreeable as it may be to confessing some of its sins and to bewailing its more manifest wickednesses, simply does not concede that at bottom its basic attitude is “infected” or wrong. On the contrary, the Southerner rebelliously clings to what seems to him the hard core of truth in this whole controversy: Here and now, in his own communities, in the mid-1960s, the Negro race, as a race, plainly is not equal to the white race, as a race; nor, for that matter, in the wider world beyond, by the accepted judgment of ten thousand years, has the Negro race, as a race, ever been the cultural or intellectual equal of the white race, as a race.

This we take to be a plain statement of fact, and if we are not amazed that our Northern antagonists do not accept it as such, we are resentful that they will not even look at the proposition, or hear of it, or inquire into it. Those of us who have ventured to discuss the issues outside the South have discovered, whenever the point arises, that no one is so intolerant of truth as academicians whose profession it is to pursue it. The whole question of race has become a closed question: the earth is a cube, and there’s an end to it; Two and two are four, the sun rises in the east, and no race is inferior to any other race. Even the possibility of a conflicting hypothesis is beyond the realm of sober examination. John Hope Franklin, chairman of the history department at Brooklyn College, sees Southern attitudes on race as a “hoax.” Their wrongness is “indisputable.” To Ashley Montagu, race is a myth. A UNESCO pamphlet makes the flat, unqualified statement that “modern biological and psychological studies of the differences between races do not support the idea that one is superior to another as far as innate potentialities are concerned.” And when one inquires, why, pray, has it taken so long for the Negro’s innately equal potentialities to emerge, the answers trail off into lamentations on the conditions under which the Negro has lived. Thus, the doctrine of environment, like the principle of charity, is trotted out to conceal a multitude of sins. The fault, if there be any fault, is held to be not in men’s genes, but in their substandard housing.

All this is to anticipate some of the points this brief is intended to develop, but it is perhaps as well to know where the argument is going. The South does not wish to be cruel, or unkind, or intolerant, or bigoted; but in this area it does not wish to be unrealistic either. We do not agree that our “prejudice” in this regard is prejudice at all, in the pejorative sense in which the word is widely used. The man who wakes up ten times with a hangover, having had too much brandy the night before, is not “prejudiced” against brandy if on the eleventh occasion he passes the brandy by; he has merely learned to respect its qualities. And what others see as the dark night of our bigotry is regarded, in our own observation, as the revealing light of experience. It guides our feet. As Patrick Henry said, we know no other light to go by.

IV

The consciousness of the Negro, I have said, is one common thread in the fabric of the South. There are others, identified by countless observers who have looked upon this tapestry, that merit some discussion also. Let me expand for a few moments on three themes: The Southerner as Conservative, the Southerner as Romantic, the Southerner as Realist.

Russell Kirk, in The Conservative Mind, examined the philosophy that generally is identified as “Southern conservatism” and found it rooted in four impulses. Apart from the Southerner’s sensitivity to the Negro question, he said, there is (1) his half-indolent distaste for alteration, (2) his determination to preserve an agricultural society, and (3) his love for local rights. These are good starting points. It was John Randolph who laid it down, as a first principle of political activity, never needlessly to disturb a thing at rest. The pace of life is slower in the South, and the tendency cannot be accounted for simply in terms of a climate that often makes it “too hot to move.” We are by nature a contemplative people, and I am inclined to believe this stems from the agrarian tradition. A farm boy learns early that some things can’t be hurried—the birth of calves, the tasseling of corn, the curing of tobacco. On the farm, life is governed by patience, by the inexorable equinoctial rotation of the seasons, by factors beyond man’s control. It is, we say, “God’s will.”

And until quite recently, as the census records show, the agricultural society was our prevailing society. Moreover, the 1960 census figures on urbanization, within the context of the South, can be highly misleading. A great part of this statistically “urban” population lives in towns so small that the towns are spiritually and economically a part of the rural countryside around them. There were in 1960 only seventy metropolitan areas of more than 50,000 population in the thirteen States, and twenty of these were in Texas. In Mississippi, Jackson has edged past 100,000, but no other city in the State is even close to that mark. Outside of Fort Smith and Little Rock, Arkansas is a State of small towns. This is even truer of North Carolina; fewer than one-fourth of the State’s four and a half million residents live in the six principal cities (the largest is Charlotte, with a metropolitan population of 272,000). The others are scattered through scores of towns and villages. Georgia is statistically “urban” now, but urban attitudes are largely concentrated in Atlanta, and perhaps four other cities. Beyond Charleston, Columbia, and perhaps Greenville, South Carolina is almost as countrified today as it was in the time of Calhoun.

The slowness of life in the country, where diversions are few and the reasons for haste almost nil, tends to breed men who are highly resistant to change. They know, as well as they know anything, that change and progress are not necessarily to be equated; and for all the tub-thumping that goes on in local chambers of commerce, many a Southerner is not so sure he is in favor of progress anyhow. The Northern Neck of Virginia, for one example, has a positive antipathy to altering anything.

The conservatism that is identified with the South, as W. J. Cash remarked in his great work, The Mind of the South, runs continuously with the past. It embraces also a strong sense of community, of place, of local institutions and families and classes. Primogeniture vanished with the American Revolution, but its vestigial spirit may be observed at every hand; whole generations of Randolphs have been lawyers, and whole generations of Tuckers have been doctors and ministers. The South is a land not only of “Juniors,” but of “IIIs” and even “IVs.”

Because of this intense spirit of local as well as State identification, an almost universal dedication to “strong local government” is apparent. There is more to this than local sentiment. If there is one aspect of Southern conservatism more pronounced than the others, it is the instinctive suspicion of all government that forever stirs uneasily in the Southern mind. Cash has described as “the ruling element” of Southern tradition, this “intense distrust of, and, indeed, downright aversion to, any actual exercise of authority beyond the barest minimum essential to the existence of the social organism.” We do not like authority, especially needless, lint-picking, petty authority, and a broody pessimism constantly evokes the apprehension that government, if given half a chance, will put a fast one over on the people. In the eternal conflict of man and the state, the South stands in spirit, at least, firmly on man’s side. From the very beginning of the American Republic, our ruling doctrines have been based upon strict limitation of the powers of government. The people of Virginia came warily into the Union, in 1788, on the explicit understanding that the political powers they were lending the central government “may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression,” and the Virginians wanted it known that “every power not granted [to the central government] under the Constitution remains with them and at their will.” Ten years later, when this promise of pessimism was abundantly fulfilled in the Sedition Act, Kentucky and Virginia were beside themselves. What could be done to restrain officials who usurped power? “Bind them down,” thundered Jefferson, “with the chains of the Constitution!”

Still another aspect of Southern conservatism, deeply rooted in the agrarian tradition, is the respect for property that dwells inherently in the Southern mind to this day. George Mason, composing the Virginia Declaration of Rights, did not hesitate to use the word itself; man’s inalienable rights, he declared, embraced not only the enjoyment of life and liberty, but also the means of acquiring and possessing property. Part of this feeling may stem from the Englishman’s tradition of his home as his castle, and part from the farmer’s conviction that, though the bottom fall out of the market on corn or pigs or cotton or tobacco, in the end his land will sustain him.

Whatever the root sources, the tendency has carried over even to the expanding cities of the urbanized South. It has not been a fear of integrated housing (this specter is a late arrival on the scene) that has made the South relatively so slow to embrace Federal grants for slum clearance, public housing, and urban renewal. Much of the public resistance, sometimes made manifest and sometimes merely sensed, is a consequence of this inbred feeling for property; it is a feeling that responsibility for housing rests with the individual first of all, and that no man’s property should be taken under eminent domain except for literal public use. When Southern cities experienced their first wave of dime-store “sit-ins,” early in 1960, the startled reaction sped at once to the rights of the store owner: This lunch counter was his property. Did he not have a right to control its use?

Finally, I would suggest that the Southerner as Conservative is affected, perhaps more strongly than he himself would acknowledge, by a respect for divine power. Again, the agrarian inheritance plays a part in this legacy. The miracle of the seed, the continuum of the forest, the closeness of animal birth and life—these work a profound influence on men whose existence is tied umbilically to nature. In the loneliness of field or prairie, the smallness of man and the largeness of God strike to the heart’s core. The blessing of the harvest, the wrath of the storm, and the benediction of a slow and mizzling rain on freshly seeded land speak to the Southerner of God’s handiwork.

Perhaps by reason of these influences, organized religion, predominantly among low-church Protestant denominations, continues to play a pervasive role in Southern life. To be sure, the parent Protestantism gives off some notable sports—the Faith Healers, snake-handlers, and the Holy Rollers—and the abiding fundamentalism of the region continues to manifest itself in pockets of strict Prohibition and in contemporary versions of the Tennessee Monkey Trial. But religion crops up in other ways, in the grace before meals expected at every public function, in the phenomenal sales of religious books, and in the incredible proliferation of choirs, sodalities, ladies’ auxiliaries, young peoples’ groups, vestries, boards of deacons, church suppers, and building-committee meetings that characterize life from Brownsville to Virginia’s Eastern Shore. A Southerner who does not belong to some church is not regarded as suspect, exactly, but he is just a little odd. And if the low-tax Southerner traditionally is penurious in rendering unto his Caesars the things that are Caesar’s, he is often sacrificial in rendering unto God the things that are God’s.

The deference that is paid to Holy Writ and to evidences of divine intervention doubtless contributes to the character of the Southerner as Romantic. Faith and superstition and myth are cousins, hardly even once removed, and whatever else it may be, the South is first of all a land of legends. This is a terrible annoyance to historians; they look upon our pretty myths, and know they are not so, and expose their fallacies in a thousand footnotes, but like the South, the legends rise again. “Few groups in the New World have had their myths subjected to such destructive analysis as those of the South have undergone in recent years,” C. Vann Woodward once observed.

Yet the myths persist. There is the Old South legend of the white-columned plantation, the hoop-skirted belles, the hot-blooded men. In the foreground, beneath the magnolia trees, the darkies are plucking banjos; in the background, rows upon rows of cotton, and off to one side, a steamboat coming around the bend. Master loves the Negroes, and the Negroes love old Master. The words and music are by Stephen Foster. This, we like to say, was how things were in the ante-bellum South. The exasperated scholar, emerging from his Will Books, cries out his anguish in the quarterly reviews: The records prove it was not so; they prove that slave ownership was limited; the records prove that Southern Negroes—as many as 100,000 or 200,000 of them—deserted to the Union cause in the War; the records probably prove there weren’t but thirty-two banjos in all of Carolina.

These labors of genealogy go utterly unrewarded. With what Cash has described as the South’s “naive capacity for unreality,” our people pat the historians on their fevered brows, thank them kindly just the same, and return untroubled to an intuitive devotion to the things that never were.

“I am an aristocrat,” cried Randolph of Roanoke. And the Southerner regards him with an affection not extended to Clay or Calhoun or Jefferson. So, we imagine, were they all—all aristocrats, men of ease, and grace, and elegance, and high birth; men who lived by a code of honor, and died beneath the dueling oaks; men who gambled with skill, and loved with passion; men who fought with a royal disdain for risk. Well, Cash and Woodward and a dozen others have had a hand in exploding this Cavalier myth. Tediously, with infinite pains, they have dredged up the pedestrian facts. The Southerner will have none of them; he knows better than to let a few facts interfere with a good story. His colonists all wear ruffled collars; his ladies, blue-veined, are pale and pure as talisman roses. “I am an aristocrat: I love freedom; I hate equality!” Who in the South could disclaim the Randolph inheritance?

It is not only the myths of the pre-Revolutionary South and the ante-bellum South that have been so sharply assailed. The Southwest’s legends of the cowboy have been worked over too. The frontiersmen of Tennessee and Kentucky, on examination, prove to be something less than godlike men. The Creole stories of New Orleans, the richly embroidered legends of the War of ’61-’65, the tales of Reconstruction hardships, even the twentieth-century chronicle of Jim Crow, have been cracked by the academic refineries—but no catalyst ever seems wholly effective. As soft as Spanish moss, and almost as insubstantial, legends subtly dominate the Southern mind.

And it is not a bad thing. Legend is born of truth, however remote and obscure the fatherhood may be, and legend has a way of siring truths stamped in ancestral molds. The hospitality of the plantation, as a universal pastime, may not bear too strong a light; but “Southern hospitality,” its descendant, is a working truth today. Not all the colonists were Cavaliers, and not all the Cavaliers, we may reasonably assume, were mannered men; but a Southern manner, born of the Cavalier myth, persists in our own time. It is the Virginian’s “Sir,” the Texan’s “Ma’am.” To the Southerner, in Burke’s phrase, manners are always more important than law. Deference to women, principles of personal honor, the payment of a gentleman’s debts—these are operative aspects of the “Southern Way of Life.” Objections of “unreality” are put to one side.

But, may it please the court, there is the Southerner as Realist too. It is the weight that balances. Cash wrote of the tendency in New England, in the Reconstruction period, for men to turn increasingly to science and technology, and increasingly away from the customary forms of religion. “But in the South,” he said, “the movement was to the opposite quarter. For invariably when men anywhere have come upon times of great stress, when they have labored under the sense of suffering unbearable and unjust ill and there was doubt of deliverance through their own unaided effort, they have clung more closely to God and ardently reaffirmed their belief. Invariably they have tended to repudiate innovation, to cast off accretion, to return upon the more primitive faith of the past as representing a purer dispensation and a safer fortress. And if I have represented our Southerners as determined to have the mastery, yet it must be said that terror was continually threatening to seize the ascendancy, that there was in their thought a huge vein of gloomy foreboding, which trembled constantly on the verge of despair.”

The student of our affairs who does not understand this much about the South does not understand the South at all. I do not know who it was who made the observation first—Donald Davidson, or Richard Weaver, or Louis Rubin, or Arthur Schlesinger, or Vann Woodward, or some forgotten historian of eighty years ago; it does not really matter; untutored, I wrote it myself in high school—that alone among all the regions of the Union, the South has known defeat. To know defeat is to know sin; it is the ultimate blasphemy against the American theology. As a nation, we are geared to instant success: Listerine will vanish bad breath, and Bufferin will cure a headache; a touch of Wildroot will clear up one’s dandruff; any boy may aspire to be President, or to make a million dollars, or to play center field for the Yankees. Failure—permanent, total, unqualified failure—is unknown. It is intolerable. It shatters the grand American illusion.

But the South has known failure. It has known what it is to do one’s best, to fight to exhaustion, and to lose. This huge vein of gloomy foreboding, this constant trembling on the verge of despair, was not an isolated phenomenon of the Reconstruction period. In Cash’s phrase, it is part of the collective experience of the Southern people. We have known defeat.

And not in war only. Long before the War, as the industrial North leaped to surpass the agrarian South, the thin, serrated edge of poverty began to cut across the South. The Tariff of Abominations was a beginning of it, and Calhoun and the South cried out in anger against its unfairness. The terrible institution of slavery contributed to it, but slavery was a tiger by the tail, and men could not cling to it successfully or safely let it go. There was the War, and the westward expansion, and the lines of commerce that flowed east and west but seldom north and south. The bitter years of Reconstruction resulted in a lean and grinding poverty, a poorness the more pitiful for its stoic acceptance by a proud people. And we know that poorness yet: Look at the Statistical Abstract.

Defeat. Poverty. And Woodward adds to these two grim horsemen still a third: a sense of guilt. While the rest of the Republic has basked complacently in its own virtue, the South’s preoccupation has been with guilt, not with innocence, “with the reality of evil, not with the dream of perfection.” To Woodward’s shrewd insight, I would add a few reflections of my own. This preoccupation with guilt and this reality of evil have not been burdens the South has felt it could regard honestly as entirely its own responsibility. The “peculiar institutions” of slavery and segregation have descended upon the South like pregnancy upon a woman whose lover has ridden away. The New England slavemasters had their fun, and made their dreadful profits, and sailed off to Maine; and they left the South to raise the alien child. Oh, it was a willing union. It was not rape, not seduction. The Southerners who bought the frightened blacks lived for a hundred years in agreeable sin with the European and New England slavers who sold them. But when the assignation ended, the South had all the problems, and the North had all the answers. Thus the preoccupation with guilt is mixed with a resentment for hypocrisy; and when the North speaks loftily to the South, and asserts that we of the North are holier than thou, three hundred years of skepticism seek an outlet: Pray, sirs, since when?

This should be said, too, about Woodward’s “reality of evil.” Surely there have been evils in the South’s policies of racial separation. Poor as the South was, in the sixty years after Reconstruction that preceded World War II, much more could have been done, and should have been done, to encourage the Negro people closer to a cultural and economic equality. I have said it countless times, and say it willingly here: If the South had devoted one tenth of the effort toward keeping schools equal that it devoted to keeping them separate, Brown v. Board of Education would not have created so dramatic a crisis. Yes, there have been evils, and very real and poignant and tragic evils, in the South’s treatment of its Negro people.

But I would raise the question if the “evils” have been all on the side of the white South. All of them? The reality that the South has had to cope with most constantly, beyond the realities of defeat and poverty, is the reality of the Southern Negro. Other races of men, caught at the bottom of the ladder, have clambered up. The identical decades that saw Negroes set free in the South saw the Irish set down in New England. “No Irish need apply.” The signs hung outside New England mills as uncompromisingly as the “white only” signs outside an Alabama men’s room. Who would have imagined in, say, 1880, that a Boston Irish Catholic would be President? But the Irish fought their own way up, on merit and ambition and hard work. They made a place at the table. They won acceptance, and they paid their own way.

No such reality has been visible in the South. Instead of ambition (I speak in general terms), we have witnessed indolence; instead of skill, ineptitude; instead of talent, an inability to learn. It is all very well for social theorists to say of Southern Negroes that they are capable of this, and their potential is for that, and if it were not for segregation and second-class citizenship and denial of opportunity, they would have achieved thus and so; but the Southerner, to paraphrase Burke, is not so much interested in determining a point of metaphysics—he is interested in maintaining tranquility. The Southerner may dwell more than others upon the past and brood more intently on the distant future, but in his daily life he has to be concerned with the here and now—in brief, he has to be concerned with reality.

The first reality he faces squarely is the one reality most often shunned: the inequality of man. The typical Southerner, out of the observation and experience of his lifetime, would accept Burke’s thesis that universal equality may exist, but only as the equality of Christianity—moral equality, or, more precisely, equality in the ultimate judgment of God. He knows that “no other equality exists, or may be imagined to exist.” The South holds small enthusiasm for egalitarian doctrines based upon the infinite perfectibility of man. With John Adams, who would have made a splendid Southerner, we know that men are foolish; that men are not benevolent; and we regard this as a normal condition of existence. Theoretically, to be sure, men are born to equal rights; but empirically, for good or ill, these rights are incapable of equal exercise. All men are not born with equal powers and faculties, said Adams, “to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages through life.” These are realities, and the Southerner as Realist accepts them.

It is necessary, even in the most affectionate examination of the South and its case before the bar, to insert a number of qualifications and to take account of some dismaying contradictions. The South, I have said, is a distinct political, cultural, and social entity, knit together by hundreds of years of shared experiences. But it was a lively and a valid question, in the postwar decade that preceded the Brown decision, whether this entity would survive. On every hand the “New South” was heralded; the rural tradition was dying, and bulldozers were ripping up the groves of the Nashville agrarians. The provincialisms that had distinguished the South, sometimes mocked, sometimes admired, seemed to be on the way out: Southern cooking, the Southern accent, the South’s pride in being Southern. Dixie, it was said, was rejoining the Union; soon it would rejoin the twentieth century.

The future of “Southern nationalism” still seems to me a valid question. Does it have a future? In the years that followed immediately upon the Brown decision, make no mistake, the essential unity of the South was abruptly revived. Mr. Chief Justice Warren’s gavel echoed the guns of Sumter, and the “Southern Manifesto” in Congress rang with the sound of bugles. Every latent instinct in the mind of the traditional South rose to the fore: States’ rights, strict construction, resentment of central authority, deference to the past. The Southerner as Conservative found his principles outraged; the Southerner as Romantic saw his dream castles besieged by barbarians; and the Southerner as Realist, with a sense of dreadful foreboding, turned to the coming storm.

The Brown decision operated with galvanic force upon the South; but as this is written, eight years after Brown, it is apparent that the electric shock has lost at least some of its impact. The South, in many respects, is still one; but the prodigious energies that were set in motion after World War II are beginning to reassert themselves widely. If one reads the recent Messages and Inaugural Addresses of Southern Governors, he will find segregation barely mentioned. Everywhere, the emphasis is on industrial promotion, tourist promotion, expansion of higher education. The problems that increasingly absorb Southern legislatures are problems common to such bodies across the Republic—taxation, highways, mental health, the control of air and water pollution.

In brief, I doubt that “the Negro question,” by which is meant the fear of integration and of a revolutionary Negro ascendancy, will provide a sufficient force, in itself, to keep the South welded together. The fears of 1954 are subsiding, as it becomes apparent that there will be no significant integration (not in the definitive sense in which I use the word, as a condition quite distinct from “desegregation”); and we observe that the revolution so many Northerners jubilantly anticipated in Brown is not to be a two-day coup d’état, but a thirty-year Peloponnesian War. Beyond the borders of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, interest wanes. In Virginia, the assignment of a Negro child to a formerly white school now rates a two-inch item on The News Leader’s page 48.

What of the other common themes that tie the South together and make the region distinct? What of Southern conservatism? What of the Southern manner? These traits will endure, I believe, though a wry acknowledgment may be made of persuasive evidence to the contrary. It is perfectly true that the Conservative’s traditional animosity to centralization has a way of disappearing in the South when bills are called up in the Congress to support cotton, and peanuts, and tobacco. The Conservative opposes socialism and all its works; it is his favorite devil; but the steam plants of the TVA seem to be marvelously exempt from his anathema. It was a Georgian whose name was longest and most lustrously identified with foreign aid, and an Alabaman whose plan of Federal subsidies for hospitals bears his name, and an Oklahoman who has led the Liberal forces in behalf of a Federal program of medical care. The case for “Southern conservatism” totters before the voting records of Kefauver, Gore, Fulbright, Sparkman.

The defense would respond to this indictment by saying that all things are relative, and in an increasingly Liberal society, it is only the political center that has moved. The old Conservative instincts remain, and if they have been much corrupted, they still manifest themselves in a hundred ways not necessarily susceptible to roll-call vote. A wise and enlightened conservatism does not resist all change; it resists what it views as impulsive change, or change simply for the sake of change, and this tendency, I believe, remains more apparent in the South than in other regions. We still resist abrupt innovation, in art, music, literature, architecture, religion, public morals. Other regions, in our view, should be the first to lay the old aside. Instead of casting away all our old prejudices, as Burke once remarked cheerfully of English Conservatives, “we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed the more we cherish them.” This process of cultural husbandry, this laying by, has been too long ingrained in the South. I cannot imagine its abandonment any time soon.

The South’s identification with “conservatism” will survive, among other reasons, because it fits so perfectly into the real or imagined Southern manner. These days, liberalism is identified with the masses, and not merely identified with them but equated with them. The race issue to one side, this equation simply is not a process that comes easily to the Southern temperament. Implicit in the conservative faith is a high respect for individual variations, for class, and order, and rank; and all these are implicit in the Cavalier ideal as well. Aristocracy is wasted in a shower room; and to the extent that public institutions are reduced to the level of a public bath, the Southerner is bound to object. The graces, the little elegancies, the privileges of birth and office and position—these too are long ingrained; they persevere.

To be sure, a good deal of cynical evidence may be amassed to suggest that this Southern manner, this Southern romanticism, is as unreal as the myths on which it is based. When a gang of foul-mouthed Mississippi white men lynch a fifteen-year-old colored boy, the Southern manner seems a long way away. And when a rabble of black-jacketed young punks assemble to jeer at law-abiding Negro students, notions of noblesse oblige may seem just that: notions.

But if Southern conservatism may yield now and then to the temptation of the pork barrel, and Southern romanticism be attenuated by the impatience of an impatient age, the last of my four threads may prove stronger than ever: Southern realism, and with it, the tradition of Southern defeat. For decades to come, despite the phenomenal population shifts (and in many instances because of these population shifts), the South will have to live realistically with the interracial realities it alone, among all the regions of the country, has known well. “It is a condition which confronts us,” said Cleveland of the tariff, “and not a theory.” Just so with race relations in the South. The gentlest concepts of brotherhood, the broadest reaches of the law, the finest theories of integration, go through a sea change in crossing the Potomac. These comfortable Liberal attitudes emerge from the gauzy mists of illusion and encounter the blazing sun of fact: These rural schools, these country people, these children, white and black, in these particular towns and villages. The Negro is not moving in any substantial numbers to the remote rural counties of the North; he is moving predominantly to the cities, where everything works in his favor during a period of transition: job opportunities, the melting-pot tradition, the impersonal anonymity that protects him in a larval time. Yet millions of Negroes remain back home in the South, salt-and-peppered across the rural countryside, and they and their problems and aspirations are daily, personal realities to the Southerner. He knows he must cope with them somehow.

And the Southerner knows more than this. He knows, in the marrow of his bones, that new defeats are entirely probable. He takes this much profit from the lessons of the past, that he learns something for the future. Desegregation, as a legal principle, is accepted inwardly by many of the Southerners who cry out most vehemently against it. Something of the spirit has been surrendered. One more defeat has been experienced, and we know it. In the first few years after Brown, we perceived in this judicial Gettysburg nothing finally decisive. The talk then was of sending Governors to jail, or of challenging the Justice Department to arrest whole legislatures. Let them call out the troops! Well, Mr. Eisenhower did call out the troops; and our Governors had second thoughts about going to jail, and not even the Louisiana legislature could devise a way to get itself arrested. Little by little, the hopeless conviction has begun to seep in that it has happened again, that the courts really mean this, that so far as laws and litigation are concerned, nothing remains but the long road to Appomattox. Proud Virginia gazed upon the voluntary desegregation of her schools with bitter distaste, but in the end we were like Byron’s heroine who “vowing she would ne’er consent, consented.” Defeat.

And yet; and yet. The fabric of the South is snagged with a beggar’s lice of contradictions. The jesting exhortation that the South will rise again has a hard kernel of truth at the bottom. It is precisely because the South has experienced defeat, again and again, in Nullification, in the Missouri compromise, in the War, in Reconstruction, in the postwar generations, time and again, in contradiction to the success of our neighboring regions, that defeat has become an old friend. We meet it, and survive; we rise again. And paradoxically, the prospect of defeat in lunch counters, waiting rooms, public schools, places of assembly, is no harbinger of ultimate despair; the prospect is an old friend, the face of defeat, and in the South it is a symbol not of disintegration but of unity. Misery loves company. It does, indeed; oh, it does indeed! And we are our own best company.

I speak with a mild cynicism, and do not mean to: It floats to the surface. The mystical entity that is the South is held together, in a lovely, helpless, hapless bond, by its consciousness of the Negro, by its abiding conservatism, by its dedication to romanticism, and by its inexorable sense of realities, and whenever one of these threads wears thin, another is redoubled and twice twined together to knit the fabric whole. The defeated South is never wholly defeated; the romantic South cannot be wholly disillusioned; the conservative South can flirt with liberalism and remain as chastely conservative as before; and to the twin inevitabilities of death and taxes we philosophically add a third: the Negro, in saecula saeculorum, world without end. Amen.

V

Let me move on, may it please the court, with fewer digressions and random interpolations, to the South’s case against “integration.” The quotation marks are intended to suggest that the noun has a distinctive meaning. This is as good a place as any for a definition of terms.

Increasingly, in the Southern lexicon, words that are used interchangeably elsewhere in the country have come to take on a special and well-understood meaning. By “segregation,” for example, we now mean the body of practices enforced by State or local law. Prior to Brown, our schools were legally segregated. As this is written (though probably not for long), places of assembly, athletic contests, certain public records, also are segregated by law in several States. As these laws and institutions one by one are bowled over by court decree, a process of desegregation sets in. It is an abominable word, by any philological standpoint, as madly illogical as “irregardless” or “inflammable,” but a new spirit of lexicography is abroad in the land: Whatever is, is right. Our schools, save in Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, are entering upon desegregation.

By racial separation, we mean something much less precise. In almost every aspect of Southern life, the races are separate, though not necessarily (or even very often) are they segregated. Day in and day out, white and Negro inevitably are thrown closely together in the South—shopping in stores, working in factories, riding in elevators and buses, standing in queues at banks or liquor stores or post offices—but this is the normal condition of existence. I have termed it an intimate remoteness. It is a condition that goes beyond the ordinary impersonal encapsulation of strangers; it is a subconscious recognition that ours are separate races, separate worlds. This does not imply that there is no communication. On the contrary, the Southern white and the Southern Negro are gregarious animals; thrown temporarily together, they will make agreeable conversation: “Think this rain will ever stop?” “It suttinly is po’in, it is that.” This is the relationship that conditions all human intercourse in the South. A murder has been committed; the police reporter’s first question, before he thinks of who or where or why or when, is simply “white or colored?” A candidate qualifies for public office: Is he white or colored? News values start from this point. (Even as I write this paragraph, the telephone rings, and it is an informant at the State penitentiary calling to tell me that clemency has been granted a prisoner in death row. I am not familiar with the case. “White boy or colored boy?” I ask. Doubtless it makes no difference; they are equally fallen sparrows, but the question is automatic, instinctive, inescapable. It is a consequence of racial separation, and this is a part of the world we live in.)

Finally, by way of definition, integration has come to mean a willing suspension, or abolition, of the state of mind I attempt to convey by separation. So defined, integration is almost nonexistent in the South. The term embraces the complete and unrestrained intermingling of races, on terms of social equality, without constraint of any sort; it is color-blindness, voluntarily accepted; it is more than mere joint membership on civic committees or school boards. And it is not something that can be achieved by writ of mandamus. A court can impose a legal condition of desegregation, and thus put an end to segregation; but a court cannot enjoin separation and thus achieve integration. The arm of the law, long as it is, cannot reach into certain areas of the human spirit.

It would be pointless, at this late stage, to prepare even a hypothetical brief directed wholly against “desegregation.” The desegregation of public institutions is a fait accompli. True, the process is far from complete; in the Deep South, in this late spring of 1962, the process has not even begun—and I would not hazard a guess when it will begin, or be complete. No time soon. But my thesis here is primarily the South’s abhorrence of integration, and especially the South’s continuing stubborn resistance to a widespread desegregation of the public schools that fearfully would result in integration of the races. Why is the South resisting race-mixture in its public schools?

I am going to suggest three primary reasons. Other writers about the South might put them down as five or ten or fifteen reasons, but in the end perhaps we would cover the same points. Mine are, first, the arguments of anthropology; second, the arguments of practicality; and third, the arguments for gradualism.

VI

On the first point: The South earnestly submits that over a period of thousands of years, the Negro race, as a race, has failed to contribute significantly to the higher and nobler achievements of civilization as the West defines that term. This may be a consequence of innate psychic factors. Again, it may not be, but because contemporary evidence suggests little racial improvement, the South prefers to cling to the characteristics of the white race, as best it can, and to protect those characteristics, as best it can, from what is sincerely regarded as the potentially degrading influence of Negro characteristics.

Now, that is a “racist” thesis, and if one would listen to no more than the horrified gasps of the Liberal left, the very statement is a dreadful example of racism at its worst. Hitlerism! Fascism! Kluxism! White supremacy! To the doctrinaire theologians of a Liberal socio-anthropology, the thesis is blasphemy, and it is mortal sin even to consider it. A Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, in May 1957, denounced such heresy in unequivocal terms: “The fact is, of course, that the Negro possesses the same capacities and potentialities as does the white.”

But if this is a fact, how did it get to be a fact? How “of course”? Is the question of innate aptitudes and characteristics no more arguable than the sum of two plus two? Is the flat statement that “the Negro possesses the same capacities and potentialities as the white” to be regarded on a level with “Washington was the first President,” or “the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the square of its other two sides”? If this “fact” has in truth been so positively established, discussion of the subject is wholly pointless; nothing remains to be said, and those readers whose minds are closed to reconsideration will flee from these pages and soothe their wounded sensibilities with the balm of Ashley Montagu’s hairless prose.

But those who are agreeable to pursuing truth, wherever the quest may lead them, will stick around; they will keep their minds open; they will acknowledge at least an outside possibility that the disciples of Boas and Klineberg could be in error; they will formulate questions, and they will insist upon honest and straightforward answers to them. And if intellectually satisfying answers to their questions cannot be adduced, they will honestly acknowledge at the end: The question is still open.

Now, that is all the defense can ask. Few Southerners have made any serious attempt to read up on anthropology or to acquaint themselves with the results of intelligence tests. Their judgments and attitudes—or if you please, their prejudices—are based largely upon personal observation, instinct, upbringing, the cumulative experiences of a lifetime, stored up day by day and hour by hour. An advocate for the South does not wish to be dogmatic. He does not insist that the South has all the right answers. He does not say, “the fact is, of course.” But the South does suggest that it raises some of the right questions.

Even to raise the right questions has become an almost impossible undertaking in today’s emotionally charged atmosphere. For the past twenty years at least (I write in 1962), a systematic and well-financed campaign has been under way to obliterate the entire concept of race. This calculated perversion of honest scholarship has drawn a rebuke from Dr. Carleton S. Coon, one of the world’s foremost anthropologists, who himself believes that classification by race “is a nuisance.” In The Story of Man, Coon departs from his masterly narrative long enough to register a serious protest against the activities “of the academic debunkers and soft-pedalers who operate inside anthropology itself.”

“Basing their ideas on the concept of the brotherhood of man,” Coon comments sharply, “certain writers, who are mostly social anthropologists, consider it immoral to study race, and produce book after book deploring it as a ‘myth.’ Their argument is that because the study of race once gave ammunition to racial fascists, who misused it, we should pretend that races do not exist. Their prudery about race is equaled only by their horror of Victorian prudery about sex. These writers are not physical anthropologists, but the public does not know the difference.”

Typical of the doctrinaire Liberals who shrink from the very notion of race are the scientists who make up the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry. In their disdainful view, race is no more than a “myth.” In particular, the Group denounces the “myths which have grown up about the Negro.” These “myths,” it is said, serve merely to rationalize and to justify the white man’s disparaging attitudes, because he cannot clearly recognize or understand the real source of his prejudice. We should realize, says the Group, that such “myth formation” psychologically seeks to protect individual and group security; and if we realize that, we can better understand why the “myths of prejudice” are so resistive to logic: The powerful need for safety, which “the myth” is created to insure, explains why it is clung to despite facts and logic to the contrary. Moreover, the damaging consequences of “racial myths” are misconstrued as evidence to support them.

Ashley Montagu has suggested, in Human Heredity, that the very word race be struck from the English language. There is, he says, “sound sense in the argument that the long-standing abuse of the meaning of a word constitutes the best reason for its total exclusion from common usage.” Unsound words make for unsound ideas, and the unsound ideas tend to result in unsound action: “The word ‘race’ is a horrid example.” To Dr. Montagu, race is a notion, a myth, a fallacy, an error. In the sense that the term suggests distinguishing characteristics on the part of a particular people, “the word is beyond rescue and it had better be dropped altogether.” He suggests that the term “ethnic group” be employed instead, and the most he will concede is that “slight differences may exist between some ethnic groups in the frequencies of certain genes underlying mental capacity.” This is possible, says Dr. Montagu, “but in spite of all attempts, no one has, in fact, ever demonstrated that they do.”

Otto Klineberg, who cannot bring himself to write the words race or racial without putting them in quotation marks, says the same thing: “In all probability, inherent intellectual differences between Negroes and whites do not exist.” Other writers—Kenneth Clark and Ruth Benedict, for example—are impatient with such academic impedimenta as “probabilities.” More in anger than in sorrow, they denounce the bigoted Southerner, who dares to suggest that in terms of his capacity to adjust fully to Western values, the Negro may be innately inferior. The very idea! And any recourse by the Southerner to history, as Miss Benedict puts it, is mere “special pleading.” All good historians know of the greatness of Negro achievements. To doubt this truth is to substitute for historical processes “an unashamed racial megalomania.” This is a “travesty of fact.”

In 1960, a group of distinguished anthropologists, psychologists, and social scientists, rebelling against the obstinate attitudes of the Benedict-Montagu school, launched a small publication in Edinburgh, The Mankind Quarterly. They ventured to suggest that some of these questions of “race” are not altogether closed; they commented that it was a pity to see responsible scientists so influenced by emotion and political bias that they had closed their minds to objective inquiry; and the editors proposed to publish occasional monographs exploring aspects of these issues that were banned from exploration elsewhere. Mankind Quarterly scarcely had raised its mild voice before shrill cries from the Liberal left united in a ritual chorus of denunciation. Late in 1961, the chief editor, Dr. R. Gayre of Gayre, replied to his assailants in an editorial that sums up so much of the Southern view on these matters that I should like to quote from it at some length. He began by expressing regret that persons who do not slavishly subscribe to egalitarian dogmas should be denounced automatically as “racialists” and their teachings condemned as “racism.” He continued:

The fear of being so abused has for the last one or two decades been sufficient to silence many, if not most, scholars and prevent them from writing what they believed and thought to be the facts in connection with anthropological subjects. They have, in the main, confined themselves to negative action, such as protesting when the notorious UNESCO pamphlet on race was produced, and being happy to gain, as a result, some modification of the more extreme and nonsensical assertions of the a-racist egalitarians.

That there has been such a clearly marked reactionary influence, if not domination, over our studies, is so patently obvious that it hardly needs to be stressed. Even those who have not subscribed to any form of political doctrine have felt it safer to make interpretations of the facts of race and heredity in such terms that they can bear a clearly egalitarian interpretation.... The anxiety which is shown to suppress publications and expositions which do not support egalitarianism is entirely consistent with this political direction of, and domination over, science....

[W]e wish to state categorically what are the views of the editors on the matter of racial equality. While rejecting racial egalitarianism as having no warranty in honest scientific expositions and investigations, we do not, on the other hand, subscribe to doctrines of racial superiority or inferiority. We believe that just as all individuals within a particular stock are different, so is one racial group in relation to another. In respect of some characters, various stocks will be superior to others; and in other cases inferior; but in many cases no perceptible differences may be apparent. While environment, both physical and social, may influence these characters, we believe that heredity is by far the most important single factor, and the current fashion to eschew the significance of heredity is a definite disservice to the understanding of what makes for differences in the various characters which distinguish one group from another.

Furthermore, we do not presume to judge what is desirably superior or not. We think that within the ambit of the type of civilizations erected by the White-Brown stocks or the Yellow races, the Black, which has shown no natural predilection to that form of organization, will be at a disadvantage in any competition—and is in that sense inferior. After all, a priori considerations alone would lead to this conclusion, and if modern science thinks this is not the case, it has yet to show why and how the Melanoids have remained technologically backward compared to both the Mongoloids and the Caucasoids. For the Egyptian civilization, which was basically Caucasoid (Mediterranean, Atlantic, Nordic, and Armenoid strains being the basis of that nationality), abutted on the Negroid world of Africa, and its ideas were there to be accepted and copied, so that urban technological civilizations could have been erected in Africa, if that way of life had appealed to the inherent Negroid genius and temperament. It is only within this last millennium that certain ideas generated in Egypt four millennia ago began to reach West Africa—long after the Nile Valley civilization had decayed and disappeared.

H. L. Mencken once remarked that the most costly of all follies, which he viewed as the chief occupation of mankind, is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. The aphorism applies with special force to the Negrophile social anthropologists who are so passionately determined to propound that which is palpably not true, or at least palpably not demonstrable, that in their zeal of advocacy they lose all sense of proportion. Thus, in their raptures, the most primitive mud-hut cultures of the Congo must be praised for their “sophistication” and “complexity.” Crude works of art tend to be equated with the sculpture of Periclean Athens. In the rhythmic thump of an African tom-tom, they find black Beethovens at work. Miss Benedict, in Race: Science and Politics, is fairly transported. Her technicolor illusions of African history produce “great kingdoms of wealth and splendor ... great political leaders ... men of wealth ... the spread of higher culture.” In seventeenth-century Nigeria, she sees “prized cultural achievements,” and of these African tribes she girlishly cries that “their elaborate and ceremonious political organization, the pomp of their courts, the activity of their far-flung economic life, with its great market centers and tribute collected over great areas, their legal systems with formal trial of the accused, with witnesses and with prosecutors—all these excite the admiration of any student.”

Well, one is reminded of Mark Twain’s comment that there is something fascinating about science: “One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” Let it be granted that there is much of archeological and anthropological interest to be found in the obscure and sketchy “histories” of various African kingdoms and empires. One might wish, abstractly, to know more of the Ghana Empire, the Almoravid Empire, the Mali Empire, the Songhai Empire; the teachers and the curriculum and the libraries of the Universities of Timbuktu and Sakoré might usefully be contrasted with those of the Universities of Paris and Bologna; we should like standard reference works that offered full and scholarly expositions of the kingdom Miss Benedict terms the “culmination” of African civilization, the “great empire of Bornu.” It is an empire not even mentioned by Herskovits in The Myth of the Negro Past and barely touched upon by J. D. DeGraft Johnson and W. E. B. DuBois in their works on African civilization. (DuBois does say that Bornu, a Northern Nigerian kingdom, had in the tenth century a civilization that “would appear to compare favorably with that of European monarchs of that day.” It is an assessment that leaves very little to the Carolingians, and it is the sort of tossed-off grandiloquence of the Negrophile propagandist that leaves the ordinary student more mystified than informed.)

In terms of enduring values—the kind of values respected wherever scholars gather, in the East no less than in the West—in terms of values that last, and mean something, and excite universal admiration and respect, what has man gained from the history of the Negro race? The answer, alas, “virtually nothing.” From the dawn of civilization to the middle of the twentieth century, the Negro race, as a race, has contributed no more than a few grains of sand to the enduring monuments of mankind.

One finds no pleasure in rendering such a judgment; one finds no more than the cold comfort of truth, and even that chilly companion is made the less attractive by the disdain in which this unappealing truth is held. Yet the serious students of the South’s position, like the serious pathologist examining an especially distasteful object, ought not to be deterred. If the South is wrong in this appraisal of the contributions of the Negro race (or “culture,” or “ethnic group”), then evidence of this wrongness should be readily attainable in standard works of reference; such evidence should be convincingly documented, objective in its nature, susceptible of proof by accepted tests of scholarship.

Well, then, where is this contrary evidence? What library houses the works of a Nubian Thucydides? Who was the Senegalese Cicero? One plows in vain through the works of a score of apologists. In the volumes of the most sympathetic Negrophile writers, one finds little but conjecture, surmise, vague assertions that thus and so “must have been true.” What are the contributions of the Negro culture to enduring art, or music, or literature, or architecture? To law, jurisprudence, government? To science, invention, mathematics, philosophy? Here was a race, if the horrid word may be used (or a culture or subculture or ethnic group), that lived for thousands of years in effective possession of one of the richest continents on earth. Here were a people who lived by the sea, and never conceived the sail; who dwelled in the midst of fantastic mineral deposits, and contrived no more than the crudest smelting of iron and copper. The Negro developed no written language, not even the poorest hieroglyphics; no poetry; no numerals; not even a calendar that has survived. Even so skilled a defender as Toynbee has to conclude, after a desperate flurry of coughs and sighs, that the Black Race is the only one of the primary races “which has not made a creative contribution to any one of our twenty-one civilizations.” Breasted, who wrote in a more objective time, before fashions of social ideology tended to warp critical judgment, says bluntly that “the Negro peoples of Africa were without any influence on the development of early civilization.”

Franz Boas, the father of “modern” social anthropology, posed the South’s question in this fashion in The Mind of Primitive Man: “Have not most races had the same chances for development? Why, then, did the white race alone develop a civilization which is sweeping the whole world, and compared with which all other civilizations appear as feeble beginnings cut short in early childhood, or arrested and petrified at an early stage of development? Is it not, to say the least, probable that the race which attained the highest stage of civilization was the most gifted one, and that those races which have remained at the bottom of the scale were not capable of rising to higher levels?”

Boas’ answer to his own rhetorical question, needless to say, is that most races have not had the same chances for development, that “the claim that achievement and aptitude go hand in hand is not convincing,” and that “the earlier rise of civilization in the old world ... is satisfactorily explained as due to chance.” He finds nothing to persuade him that “one race is more highly gifted than another,” and besides, he insists, Western critics ought not to judge other races by their own standards. For example, an “impression” exists that primitive men, and the less educated of our own race, have in common a lack of control of emotions; it is thought that they give way more readily to an impulse than civilized man and the highly educated. This impression, says Boas, is entirely unjustified. Too often the traveler or student measures fickleness by the importance he himself attributes to the actions or purposes in which primitive men do not persevere, and he weighs the impulse for outbursts of passion by his own standard. The white traveler, to whom time is valuable, is impatient and irritated at Negro porters, to whom time means nothing. The proper way to appraise the Negro, Boas tells us, is to consider his behavior in undertakings which he considers important from his own standpoint. So considered, the differences in attitude of civilized man and of primitive man tend to disappear.

This line of defense has a certain plausibility and merit; divorced from reality, it provides a fine topic for a sophomore’s term paper. But the American South is an inheritor of Western civilization; the South’s values are the values of the West, and it understandably must be concerned with the capacity of the Negro people for contributing to these values. The Ubangi’s mud huts may be the most artistic mud huts ever set out in the sun to bake; by tribal esthetics of the African bush, the Ashanti may be vastly more cultured than the Yorubas, and the Balubi superior to the Mogwandi. Or vice versa. These critical judgments are interesting. They are irrelevant, too.

The question that never seems to be convincingly answered is why the Negro race, in Toynbee’s phrase, is the only race that has failed to make a creative contribution to civilization. What can account for the singular failure of the Negro people, alone among the major divisions of man, to enter the mainstream of political, cultural, and economic history?

The first rationalization that is given is that the physical conditions of sub-Saharan Africa imposed such fearful disadvantages that the development of a “civilization” was patently impossible. The argument simply will not hold up. As many geographers and anthropologists have observed (in a day before such observations were reviewed as blasphemy), parts of Africa were perhaps “uninhabitable,” but other parts were not. In any event, the jungles of the Congo imposed no obstacles to Negroid peoples greater than those faced by the Mayans in the jungles of Chiapas.

And consider the Mayans: They carved out of the rain forests of Yucatán—out of an area Van Hagen has termed “the least likely place one would choose for developing a culture”—a civilization that can be identified, and studied, and photographed to this day. They raised great temple cities: Tikal, Uaxactun, Calakmul. They built roads and reservoirs. They developed complex ideographic writing, a twenty-day lunar calendar, a code of laws for crime and punishment, a flourishing industry in dyeing and weaving. To compare the crude phallic fetishism of Negroid tribes with the highly developed art of the Mayan and the Incan civilizations is to engage in a travesty upon critical judgment.

It is complained of the early Negroes that they were “isolated,” that no maritime access was possible to the African interior, hence that they had no opportunity for contact with the cultures of Europe and the Mediterranean. This is a specious argument, too. Every standard history of Africa makes plain, implicitly or explicitly, that early Negroes did indeed have contact with the outer world. Phoenicians, Arabs, Libyans, Hamites all found their way across Africa. Romans came, and Persians, Chinese, Turks, Berbers, Indians, Portuguese. Nothing aroused the Negro from his primitive sleep. He did not adapt. He did not copy. He did not profit.

In 1525, when Pizarro invaded Peru, he found a magnificent Incan civilization flourishing in the almost impenetrable fastness of the Andes. Here, indeed, was isolation from the currents of European thought! No maritime access here! Yet the Incas had built temples and labyrinths and massive palaces of stone. The palace at Cuzco offered fountains, heated pools, intricate goldwork, and polished stones. There were public granaries, a three-hundred-mile road, a decimal system, an advanced astronomy. European explorers who sought trade in Africa found nothing there to compare with this. As Nathaniel Weyl has written, the decisive fact is that centuries of intermittent contact with the growing culture and technology of the West “did not serve to stir the Negroes from their millennial torpor, to quicken their minds and prod their curiosity, to induce them at least to borrow if not to invent.”

Franz Boas has sought earnestly to explain all this away. So has Basil Davidson in Lost Cities of Africa. So has W. E. B. DuBois in The World and Africa. So has Johnson in African Glory. But when it comes down to evidence acceptable to rational appraisal, their romantic conjectures fall pitifully short of the minimum requirements of objective scholarship. It is possible to accept Boas’ judgment that some African wood carvers and potters have produced work “original in form, and executed with great care.” Coon’s slightly more enthusiastic appraisal is that Africa’s Negro tribes “developed social systems of considerable complexity and a high art, the quality of which the white world is just beginning to appreciate.” There is merit in a thoughtful appraisal by the Oxford anthropologist, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, of the complex system of witchcraft, oracles, and magic that he found among the Azande tribe of Central Africa. Granted certain postulates, he says, inferences and actions based upon a system of witchcraft are sound. But is Western civilization really prepared to “grant the certain postulates” of witchcraft in order to find a rationale for praising African culture? No. Let it be conceded that certain African arts and crafts reached a tolerably interesting stage of development. Modern dance and contemporary jazz doubtless owe much to the instinctive rhythms of ancient tribal rites. But south of the Sahara there was no literate civilization, no intellects at work to comprehend and solve the abstract problems; and Western Europe was not built by basket-weaving.

Let us move along. The story is told of a conversation between Boswell and Dr. Johnson, in which Boswell mentioned Bishop Berkeley’s theory of the nonexistence of matter. Boswell said he was satisfied the theory was not true, but he confessed he was unable to refute it. Whereupon Dr. Johnson kicked a large stone until his foot rebounded from it. “I refute it thus,” he said. There comes a time when the common, uncomplicated observation of ordinary men makes better sense than the partisan inventions of social anthropologists. Against their gauzy dreams of African “civilization,” the obscenities of the Mau Mau and the atrocities of the Congolese provide reality as hard as Dr. Johnson’s stone. One refutes it thus.

In 1944, Otto Klineberg brought together in one volume several of the monographs prepared by American students on the Negro as background memoranda for Dr. Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish sociologist whose subsequent An American Dilemma was to be seen generally, and influentially, by the Supreme Court of the United States. The first paper in Klineberg’s collection was put together by Dr. Guy B. Johnson, professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of North Carolina. Dr. Johnson served for three years as executive director of the liberal Southern Regional Council; he is a trustee of Howard University. These credentials strongly suggest that Dr. Johnson was picked by the Myrdal team to describe “the Stereotype of the American Negro” on the assumption that he would summarize the popular conception of the Negro only to say, in the end, that there isn’t a word of truth in it. If so, the Myrdal associates must have been startled by the blunt memorandum Dr. Johnson prepared. He went through the works of thirty-one representative Negro writers and forty-two representative white writers, covering the entire spectrum of political coloration, and boiled down his findings under twelve headings. His list, he emphasized, was not a list of “race” characteristics. It was “a descriptive list, based upon a fair degree of consensus, of the interests, habits and tendencies which might serve to characterize the ‘typical’ Negro.” This list of “Negro personality and culture traits” follows:

Mental: Relatively low intellectual interests; good memory; facile associations of ideas.

Temperamental: Gregariousness or high interest in social contacts; philosophical or get-the-most-out-of-life type of adjustment; high aesthetic interests; love of subtlety and indirection; adaptability.

Aesthetic: Love of music and dance; oratory and power of self-expression; high interest in and appreciation of the artistic.

Economic: Relatively low interest in material things, such as care of money, property, tools, etc.; line of least resistance in habits of work; relative lack of self-reliance.

Personal morals: Double standard of morals and ethics, i.e., one for his behavior toward Negroes and another for his behavior toward whites; in sexual conduct, higher interest in sex, high sexual indulgence, and larger sphere of permissive sexual relations.

Family and home life: Relatively low solidarity; high frequency of common-law matings and separations; role of mother strong; warmth of affection toward children; high rate of illegitimacy.

Religion and the supernatural: Rather high emotional tone; personalization of God and saints; high interest in “superstition”—i.e., belief in various supernatural forces and ways of controlling them.

Law observance: Relatively high incidence of social disorder; drunkenness, fighting, gambling, petty stealing, etc.; resentment against the white man’s law.

Public manners: Tendency toward extroversion in public contact; easy sociability, loud talk; relative carelessness in speech and dress.

Race pride: Not yet highly developed; inferiority feelings common; acceptance of white standards of physical beauty to a large extent.

Race consciousness and leadership: Lack of cohesion; high intragroup conflict and cleavage; distrust of leaders; lack of strong race-wide leadership.

Now, what does Dr. Johnson say about this Negro “stereotype”? Insofar as the list of characteristics has any validity, he comments, it is more applicable to the Negro masses than to the minority of highly sophisticated and acculturated Negroes. But how much validity does it have? Here was the shocker. For Dr. Johnson himself noted that these same characteristics had been attributed to the Negro by both white and Negro writers; and this being so, “there is more than a slight presumption in favor of the reality of the characteristics.” He suggested that the Myrdal associates “assume that after all there is some truth or basis of reality to the traits which are persistently mentioned in literature and in popular thinking.”

“It is true,” Dr. Johnson remarked, “that the whole trend of scholarship at present is to look upon the traits which the dominant group attributes to a minority group as nothing more than stereotypes which have been invented for the express purpose of justifying the position of the dominant group and controlling the status of the subordinate group. These stereotypes are sometimes referred to as myths, the implication being that they have no realistic basis whatever. It should be pointed out, however, that it is probably not necessary for a dominant group such as the white people in America, to invent and perpetuate stereotypes which are wholly unfair and untrue in order to maintain its own status of dominance.... The point here being made, which is simple and which rests upon a common-sense assumption, is that the stereotypes which a dominant group develops concerning the traits of a subordinate group will be to some extent based upon observable characteristics in the subordinate group, and that while the stereotypes may be permeated with prejudice and with the ideology of inferiority, they may still reflect a certain amount of truth concerning the subordinate group. In other words, if we can deduct from the popular stereotypes the moral judgments and the implications of inferiority and the exaggerations, we may have left a body of belief which affords considerable insight into the traits of the subordinate group.” [Emphasis added.]

The Johnson list goes to the very heart of the South’s resistance to the desegregation of its public schools. When it is asked why the South opposes integration, one might provide a tolerably complete answer simply by citing Dr. Johnson’s twelve summary findings: This is why. The most Dr. Johnson will say of the “stereotype” is that it contains a “certain amount of truth.” In my own observation, and in the observation of the white South generally, the list contains a vast amount of truth. I would dissent from the Johnson findings on a couple of points only: I doubt that the “Negro masses” (any more than the white masses) have a “high interest in and appreciation of the artistic,” and it seems to me the summary of the Negro’s typical “public manners” is overdrawn. Since 1943, when Dr. Johnson prepared his summary, a phenomenal growth has taken place in a Negro middle class, and much of the “loud talk” and “relative carelessness in speech and dress” has given way to cultivated speech and to a certain elegance in dress. In my observation, the colored children of Richmond frequently are cleaner, shinier, and more neatly dressed than many of their white counterparts.

In general, however, this purported “stereotype” provides an accurate and faithful mold of typical Negro behavior and personality. Are these traits a consequence of racial inheritance? The overwhelmingly popular view of anthropologists, social and physical, is that these are not innate characteristics. The entire school of Franz Boas, embraced by Kluckhohn, Benedict, Klineberg, Clark, Rose, Comas, Montagu, and many others, holds firmly, and in some cases almost hysterically, that whatever lags may be observed in typically Negro culture, as contrasted with typically white culture, these shortcomings are entirely owing to environment. As the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry puts it, “these handicaps are a consequence of racial discrimination rather than of racial inferiority.”

The view, however, is not unanimous, nor is the manner in which these “environmental” views are advanced universally acclaimed.

“If we in America are going to make any sense out of the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision,” Dr. Frank C. J. McGurk has remarked, “we will have to be more factual about race differences and much less emotional. We can have our dreams, if we like to dream, but we should be willing to distinguish between dreams and reality. Already, we have gone too far toward confusing these two things. As far as psychological differences between Negroes and whites are concerned, we have wished—and dreamed that there were no such differences. We have identified this wish with reality, and on it we have established a race relations policy that was so clearly a failure that we had to appeal to distorting propaganda for its support.... There is ample evidence that there are psychological differences between Negroes and whites. Moreover, these differences are, today, of about the same magnitude as they were two generations ago. These differences are not the result of differences in social and economic opportunities, and they will not disappear as the social and economic opportunities of Negroes and whites are equalized.”

Dr. McGurk is associate professor of psychology at Villanova. The quotation comes from his famous (or infamous, depending on one’s point of view) article in U. S. News & World Report of September 21, 1956. Several years later, Dr. McGurk provided an introduction for Nathaniel Weyl’s The Negro in American Civilization, in which he expanded briefly on the same theme. Weyl’s book, published by Public Affairs Press in 1960, is an almost indispensable work to the student of this subject who is sincerely interested in getting “both sides.” (Another valuable work, also published by Public Affairs Press, is Carleton Putnam’s Race and Reason: A Yankee View; Putnam has driven the Liberal anthropologists practically to apoplexy by the unfair tactic of reading their works and taking them seriously—something no layman is expected to do. The rule is that non-anthropologists must treat anthropologists respectfully, even when anthropologists write nonsense). Like Putnam, Weyl was raised and educated in the integrated North. He set out to write his book with Northern preconceptions; but the more deeply he dug for facts, the more he discovered that “material which passed for the objective findings of social scientists could more accurately be characterized as rationalizations and propaganda wearing academic cap and gown.” He demonstrated the intellectual courage to abandon his preconceived ideas, and to conclude after an exhaustive study that “the presumption is strongly in favor of innate psychic differences.”

In his introduction, Dr. McGurk describes Weyl’s book as a refreshing antidote to the one-sided, environmentalist argumentation that is all most college students ever receive, and he goes on to urge that from the standpoint of the scientist, the problem of race should be studied in an objective manner: “Appeals to beliefs, morals, ethics, or political philosophy are out of place; the issue is one of fact.... Ethnic differences are facts. In the psychic area, these differences are important facts. It seems much more sane to face these differences and investigate their causes impartially than to play ostrich about them.”

Let us go back, for a moment, to Dr. Johnson’s “stereotype.” Manifestly, many of the characteristics he finds most widely attributed to the Negro are incapable of statistical measurement. Empirical data could not well be compiled, for example, on “relative lack of self-reliance,” or “love of subtlety and indirection.” But one characteristic found to be more typical of the Negro than of the white is “high sexual indulgence, larger sphere of permissive sexual relations, ... and high rate of illegitimacy.” The illegitimacy, at least, can be statistically tabulated, and the appalling facts can be faced.

What are the facts? First, the illegitimacy rate among Negroes in this country is roughly ten times the illegitimacy rate among whites. Second, the condition is not improving, but on the contrary appears in many areas to be growing worse. Third, a disproportionately high rate of illegitimacy among Negroes obtains not only in the South, but throughout the United States.

These are the grim figures from the National Office of Vital Statistics:

Consider the record in two Southern States, Mississippi and Virginia. Here are the figures from Mississippi:

The vital statistics take on additional meaning when they are translated in terms of human beings. In the five years 1956 through 1960, white mothers in Mississippi gave birth to 1634 illegitimate children. In the same period, Negro mothers gave birth to 38,051 illegitimate children.

Substantially the same picture may be seen in the records of Virginia. Between 1938 and 1958, the white illegitimacy rate in Virginia declined slightly, from 2.6 to 2.3 per cent. In this same period, which witnessed astonishing gains in Negro education, Negro housing, Negro income, and Negro job opportunities, the rate of Negro illegitimacy increased from 19.5 per cent to 22.9 per cent.

The records of five Virginia cities and five Virginia counties of substantial Negro population are entirely typical:

The U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare periodically releases data on the nation as a whole. The figures for 1957 illustrate the story. In that year, 1.9 per cent of all white births were illegitimate; 21.7 per cent of all Negro births were illegitimate. Negro illegitimacy ran as high as 27.9 per cent in St. Louis, 29.3 per cent in Atlanta, and 34.6 per cent in Knoxville. The influx of Negroes into Washington, D. C., has given the nation’s capital, to the nation’s shame, what the Washington Post has termed “undisputed first place in illegitimacy.” In 1957, nearly 19 per cent of all births recorded in the District of Columbia were illegitimate—5.8 per cent of the whites and 26.5 per cent of the Negroes.

Now, a widespread custom among Negro apologists is to scoff these figures away. It is said, for one thing, that there is “a relatively greater understatement of illegitimacy in the white group than in the nonwhite.” For my own part, I doubt this exceedingly. It is said, also, that a greater percentage of extramarital pregnancies are aborted among white girls than among Negro girls. Perhaps. A third line of rationalization typically has been advanced by the Norfolk Journal and Guide, a Negro newspaper; this has to do with the fact that slaves were not permitted to marry prior to 1865, though they were encouraged to cohabit, and “it is foolish to suppose that a suppressed and constantly vilified minority group could wholly recover from the practice in a few generations.” A related argument, if it is an argument at all, is that in pre-War times “many white slave-owners promiscuously exploited their slave women sexually.” Other rationalizations put some of the blame for Negro sexual looseness on housing, economic opportunity, low income levels, and the like. Generally, it is all charged to the “system of segregation,” a charge that tends to collapse when it is observed that the high rates of Negro illegitimacy recorded in the South are not materially different in the integrated climes of Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Illinois, Missouri, and West Virginia.

But the basic validity of the statistics is not entirely discounted, even by Negro commentators. Carl Rowan, the Minneapolis newspaperman who came to the State Department with the New Frontier, faced up to them (after a good deal of preliminary squirming) in Harper’s in 1961. A leading Negro educator, President Thomas H. Henderson of Virginia Union University, offered some thoughtful comments in a paper delivered before the Virginia Conference of Social Work in 1957. He said:

“Let me begin by saying what the problem of a high illegitimacy rate among Negroes is not. It is not, first of all, a statistical illusion.... [T]he illegitimacy rate for Virginia Negroes has been ten times as high as that for whites each year for several decades. After subducting the maximum influence of all possible sources of error in the statistics, the consistency and magnitude of the differential leaves no doubt that a real and disturbing difference exists.”

The problem cannot be blamed, said Dr. Henderson, on any particular desire to obtain public benefits under the program of Aid to Dependent Children. Moreover, “it is not to any great degree a problem of racial interbreeding—every indication points to a steady decrease in interbreeding since before the dawn of this century.” The problem is “overwhelmingly a problem of illegitimacy with both parents colored.” He added:

“The problem is not the result of innate differences between the races. It would be less painful if it were. If the Negro had innate moral weakness or blindness, if he had an innately inferior intelligence, or in some inborn way either his sex drive or his fertility were somehow different, we could shrug off the problem by saying, ‘God made it that way; there’s nothing to do about it.’ But we are faced with the hard fact that reputable scientists regard as fruitless all efforts to find valid evidence of any innate moral weakness of the Negro or any innate difference in personality, intelligence, or sexual behavior.”

Dr. Henderson went on in his paper to summarize many of the mitigating factors earlier mentioned, including socio-economic status, recreational limitations, inadequate sex education within Negro families and schools, and the tensions generated by discrimination. But he suspected that these various factors together do not account for more than half the problem: “Without a statistically valid basis for it, my opinion is strong that the primary factor is that of motivation. The simple fact is that many Negro boys and girls do not want strongly enough to avoid producing illegitimate children. The rank and file of those who are at the lowest social levels have not changed their attitude to illegitimacy since the days of slavery when sexual laxness in Negroes was tolerated and even encouraged.” [Emphasis supplied.]

A notable comment along that line appeared in the St. Louis Evening Whirl, a Negro newspaper, early in 1960, in an account of a colored woman who complained, after giving birth to her ninth illegitimate child, that her allowance under Aid to Dependent Children had been cut from $185 to $110 a month. She felt “discriminated against.” Said the Whirl editorially:

Mrs. Brown thinks that she is entitled to live a normal life with a boyfriend and not have to waste money running around hotels and rooming houses. They can’t afford it.

Mrs. Brown is young and normal. She is only 29. She cannot stop having a boyfriend and romance now. She believes that poor people are entitled to social pleasures and normal living.

This newspaper agrees with this version of living. The rich have everything they want. Why can’t poor people have a little fun? A lot of our foolish laws need changing. We do not condemn Mrs. Brown. We rather praise her. She is living proof of a good woman—one who is promulgating her race.

When our race increases in number to a much larger extent, we can demand more, get more, and show our power and authority at the polls.

This remarkable attitude, which views the sexual act as casually as a good-night kiss, is reported by school administrators and law-enforcement officials among Negroes across the nation. In Philadelphia, District Attorney Victor H. Blanc in 1958 typically reported confiscation of large quantities of pornographic pictures among Negro pupils in the public schools; much of the material was intended to encourage interracial “Sex Clubs” led by Negro teen-agers who regard fornication, in the Negro newspaper’s phrase, as “social pleasures and normal living.”

Another of Dr. Johnson’s characteristics, in the list that made up his “stereotype” of the typical Negro, was summarized under “law observance” as “relatively high incidence of social disorder; drunkenness, fighting, gambling, petty stealing, etc.” Here, too, some measurable data may be had. Nathaniel Weyl has summed up the picture succinctly:

“For well over a century the Negro has been responsible for an alarmingly disproportionate share of American crime. In 1950 his felony rate was almost three times the national average. Thirty per cent of the two million persons arrested for major crimes in 1957 were colored.

“While his contribution to all types of crime, except political crime, has been excessive, the Negro has gravitated toward the most serious offenses and, above all, toward crimes of violence. In recent years he has accounted for well over half the nation’s murders, non-negligent manslaughters, aggravated assaults and robberies.” [Emphasis supplied.]

As in the case of illegitimacy, Negro crime rates have not tended to decline significantly with the Negro’s rising level of income and opportunity. About 34 per cent of the convicts committed to jail in 1910 were colored; the figure is about 30 per cent for 1960. Historically, Negro crime rates have been higher in the more-or-less-integrated North than in the more-or-less-segregated South. In Philadelphia, where the shockingly brutal murder of a Korean student in 1958 prompted some candid and critical investigations, it was found that Negro teen-agers, representing 30 per cent of the population, were guilty of 75 per cent of juvenile crime. In one nineteen-day period given special study, Negroes were found responsible for forty-five of fifty-three “headings,” in which victims were savagely beaten with clubs and iron pipes; they also were charged with thirty-two of thirty-eight murders and 340 of 437 cases of aggravated assault. Eighty per cent of the inmates of Philadelphia prisons at that time were Negroes. The figures are entirely comparable in New York, where one city magistrate, after hearing an unusually shocking case of Negro violence, asked a rhetorical question that hangs quivering in the air: “What kind of animals do we have in this town?”

But the problem of disproportionate criminality among Negroes is not peculiar to Harlem or South Chicago or Philadelphia, nor is it an especially new problem. Between 1930 and 1959, when Negroes represented about 10 per cent of the population, Negroes made up 54 per cent of those executed for crimes. And in a typical year, substantially similar figures are reported across the nation. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports for 1960 provide these figures on arrests for major crimes in 2446 cities having a population of 73,473,000:

When it is kept in mind that the cities included in the FBI reports constitute a fair random sample, North and South, small towns and large, the sobering nature of these figures becomes apparent.

What can explain this dismaying tendency of the Negro toward disproportionate criminality? The same rationalizations (with a few ludicrous variations) are trotted out that are produced to discredit the figures on illegitimacy. Gunnar Myrdal devoted twelve pages of An American Dilemma to scoffs, sneers, apologies, explanations, highflown fabrications, and wildly speculative generalities, all intended to whitewash the Negro record.

First, says Myrdal, the statistics are no good. Figures on crime are generally inadequate, and statistics on Negro crime are even more so. Such data generally suffer from incomplete and inaccurate reporting, variations among States in definitions and classifications; and in the case of the Negro, the figures are distorted by special weaknesses owing to the caste situation and to certain characteristics of the Negro population. “It happens that Negroes are seldom in a position to commit ... white collar crimes [such as tax evasion, conspiracy to violate antitrust laws, fraud and racketeering]; they commit the crimes which much more frequently result in apprehension and punishment.” This is a chief source of error when attempting to compare statistics on Negro and white crime.

Myrdal then paints a picture of the South no Southerner would recognize. For a jaw-dropping example of the strange fabrications that have made Myrdal’s work notorious, consider the following:

In the South, inequality of justice seems to be the most important factor in making the statistics on Negro crime and white crime not comparable: ... [I]n any crime which remotely affects a white man, Negroes are more likely to be arrested than are whites, more likely to be indicted after arrest, more likely to be convicted in court and punished. Negroes will be arrested on the slightest suspicion, or on no suspicion at all, merely to provide witnesses or to work during a labor shortage in violation of anti-peonage laws. The popular belief that all Negroes are inherently criminal operates to increase arrests, and the Negro’s lack of political power prevents a white policeman from worrying about how many Negro arrests he makes. Some white criminals have made use of these prejudices to divert suspicion away from themselves onto Negroes: for example, there are many documented cases of white robbers blackening their faces when committing crimes. In the Southern court, a Negro will seldom be treated seriously, and his testimony against a white man will be ignored, if he is permitted to express it at all. When sentenced he is usually given a heavier punishment and probation or suspended sentence is seldom allowed him....

Myrdal goes on to remark that when white lawyers, installment collectors, insurance agents, plantation owners, and others cheat the Negroes of the South, they are “never” regarded as criminals. But stealing by Negroes from whites is almost always punished as a crime.

These things occur in the North, Myrdal asserts, although in a much smaller degree. In the North, the trouble is that the Negro has brought certain cultural practices with him from the South. Also, the Negro is poor. He cannot bribe policemen to let him off; he has no influential connections; he does not know the important people who can help him out of trouble.

In brief, Myrdal says, the statistics “do not provide a fair index of Negro crime.” And for a typical example of the fallacies that permeate the statistics, “the Negro rape rate, like other Negro crime rates, is fallaciously high: white women may try to extricate themselves from the consequences of sexual delinquency by blaming or framing Negro men; a white woman who has a Negro lover can get rid of him or avoid social ostracism following detection by accusing him of rape; neurotic white women may hysterically interpret an innocent action as an ‘attack’ by a Negro.”

In addition to the statistical distortions that result (1) from basic discrimination against Negroes and (2) from the Negro’s poverty and ignorance of the law, Myrdal finds a third “group of causes of Negro crime.” This, he says, is “connected with the slavery tradition and the caste situation.” Negroes in the South traditionally have been permitted to pilfer small items from their employers; the practice has imbued them with a general disrespect for property rights. And their feeling that there is nothing wrong with petty stealing “is strengthened by the fact that Negroes know that their white employers are exploiting them.”

Beyond all this, Myrdal says, as a cause of “Negro crime,” is the Negro’s hatred of whites. The revenge motive figures in Negro muggings and headings: “Because the white man regards him as apart from society, it is natural for a Negro to regard himself as apart. He does not participate in making the laws in the South, and he has little chance to enforce them. To the average lower class Negro, at least in the South, the police, the courts, and even the law are arbitrary and hostile to Negroes, and thus are to be avoided or fought against. The ever-present hostility to the law and law-enforcement agencies on the part of all Southern Negroes and many Northern Negroes does not often manifest itself in an outbreak against them because the risks are too great. But occasionally this hostility does express itself, and then there is crime.”

Myrdal concludes by asserting: “We know that Negroes are not biologically more criminal than whites. We do not know definitely that Negroes are culturally more criminal, although we do know that they come up against law-enforcement agencies more often. We suspect that the ‘true’ crime rate—when extraneous influences are held constant—is higher among Negroes. This is true at least for such crimes as involve personal violence, petty robbery, and sexual delinquency—because of the caste system and the slavery tradition....”

Myrdal wrote in 1944. The statistics he struggled so wildly to discredit have not changed significantly in the past eighteen years. In this period, the Negro’s position in American society has improved phenomenally; his political power has significantly increased in most Southern cities and has become decisive in many Northern wards and congressional districts. In both North and South, Negroes sit on juries, appear as counsel, serve as police officers. Myrdal’s specious and shabby rationalizations based upon “discrimination” simply will not hold up in any national view. And of some of his fatuous explanations (that many white criminals blacken their faces to put blame on innocent Negroes, that white women are responsible for a fallaciously high Negro rape rate because they frame Negro men, that all Southern Negroes are seized of an ever-present hostility to law and law enforcement) the less said, the better. Yet Myrdal is so widely touted as the ablest authority on the American Negro that the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Brown case, suggested that his work be “seen generally” as a support for the court’s reasoning!

Well, the palpable truth is that many white men also are poor; they too know frustrations, feel resentments, fear the real world they live in. But studies of arrests by place of residence, correlated against census data on housing, suggest no levels of criminality in poor and underprivileged white neighborhoods that compare with criminality in generally comparable Negro neighborhoods. Crime always may be measured by an index of poverty, and it is true that poverty exists far more widely among Negroes than among whites; but if poverty were the whole explanation, or even a key explanation, surely the remarkable increases in Negro per capita income over the past fifty years should be reflected in some corresponding decrease in rates of crime among the Negro people. No such correspondence exists. The Negroes of America are better off materially, culturally, and politically than any Negroid people in the world, and their lot improves at an incredible speed. Yet there are the facts on trends in illegitimacy; and there are the facts on trends in crime. And the insistent why? will not go away.

Nathaniel Weyl, who started his studies with an environmentalist’s view, concludes his chapter on Negro criminality with a comment that the character patterns disclosed by the facts are “presumably genetic in origin.” Dr. W. C. George, head of the Department of Anatomy at the University of North Carolina, also tends to find an explanation in racial factors: “Whatever other virtues Negroes may have, and they have many, all of the evidence that I know about—and there is a lot of it—indicates that the Caucasian race is superior to the Negro race in the creation and maintenance of what we call civilization.”

A great many white Southerners accept this thesis implicitly and unquestioningly; they infer the innate “inferiority” of the typical Negro, in terms of Western cultural values, simply on the basis of their lifelong observation of the Negro people about them. No other explanation appeals to their common sense, or to their native prejudice, or to both. This is something they know, and they profess to know it not in anthropological terms (the weight of brains, the pigmentation of skins, the length of appendages, the formation of skull and jaw), but in terms of ordinary human observation.

I incline toward this view myself, but I certainly would not assert, as Myrdal asserts the contrary, that I “know” it to be true. I would be agreeable to accepting the temperate and tentative conclusion voiced by Professor G. M. Morant, of England, in a most unlikely place—an essay in UNESCO’s Race and Prejudice (Columbia, 1961). The volume as a whole is almost worthless to the objective student; most of the essays are no more than special pleading by propagandists against racial prejudice. But Morant examines the evidence of intelligence tests and other data with a scientist’s objectivity, and he concludes by saying this:

“There seems to be no reason why the general rule regarding variation within and between groups should not apply to mental as well as to physical characters. If variable characters of the former kind showed identical distributions for all racial populations, that would be a situation unparalleled, as far as is known, as regards any physical character in man or in any other animal. It seems to be impossible to evade the conclusion that some racial differences in mental characters must be expected. Existing evidence may not be extensive and cogent enough to reveal them, but it must be inferred that some exist....”

Morant makes the point, in analyzing intelligence-test scores, that obviously white and Negro scores overlap. Consistently, the most superior Negroes will score higher as a group than the most inferior whites as a group. Moreover, the difference between the average scores of two racial populations may be quite small compared with the range of scores in either group. But even when this is so, says Morant, “there may be a marked difference between the relative frequencies in the population of individuals having extreme values of the measurement.” And this distinction may be important in the case of some mental characteristics: “There may be almost equal proportions of stupid, mediocre, and able people in two populations; even so, exceptional ability may be found with a frequency of 1 in 1,000 in one group, and of 1 in 10,000 in the other. Having a larger proportion of exceptionally able members may be a factor which tells decisively in favor of a population in the course of centuries or millenniums.”

The Liberal social anthropologists, to be sure, have denounced this reasonable hypothesis out of hand; and by effectively dominating the professional field, they have managed to elevate their own opinions to the status of truth, to promote speculation to the level of fact, and to convert surmise deftly into incontrovertible proof. I believe they have overdone it. They have lost their own case by their own disgraceful intemperance and intolerance of dissent; they protest too much; they cover up; they propagandize; they set out not to seek truth, but “to combat racial prejudice.”

At the same time, I would insert a comment that some of the more intemperate protagonists on the segregationist Right have fallen into the same errors of positivism and unqualified statement. They have tended to think too much in blanket terms—in literal blacks and whites—and they have regularly overestimated the factors of heredity and underestimated the factors of environment. Their position would be improved if they simply acknowledged that the question of the Negro’s innate inferiority has not been proved and hence is still open.

In terms of the problem immediately at hand, the question of whether the Negro’s shortcomings are “innate” seems to me largely irrelevant anyhow. The issue is not likely to be proved to the satisfaction of either side any time soon; it may not be susceptible of proof at all. Whether these characteristics are inherited or acquired, they are. And communities North and South (but especially in the South, and more especially still, in the rural South) must cope with conditions as they find them. The ruins of Zimbadwe are a long way from Prince Edward County, Virginia, and the finest analysis of electroencephalic findings among the Zulus is of small importance in teaching a class of Alabama sixth-graders. The arguments of anthropology are of interest to the South, and I would not wish to leave any impression that would minimize their importance; the fear of ultimate racial interbreeding, encouraged by prospective generations of desegregated and integrated school systems, is a very real fear in the South and not an imagined one. If these Negro characteristics are innate, the white Southerner sees nothing but disaster to his race in risking an accelerated intermingling of blood lines. And even if these Negro characteristics are not innate, the white Southerner wants no intimate association with them anyhow. And he is determined not to let his children be guinea pigs for any man’s social experiment.

VII

The second of the South’s principal arguments, related to anthropological considerations but of more immediate application, may be termed the argument of practicality: Even if it be true, as the liberal social anthropologists insist, that there is no innate cultural or intellectual inferiority in the Negro race as such, the plain fact is that here and now, there are immense differences in the educational achievements and apparent aptitudes of the two races; and these differences, especially in small rural communities, make true integration of public schools an impossibility. Beyond this, the educational needs of white and Negro children in the South, in terms of the lives they will lead and the employment they predictably will find, are quite different; and these differences, especially in the small counties, create formidable problems of curriculum. Finally, the temper, and prejudices, and feelings of the white taxpayers, who overwhelmingly bear the bulk of public school costs, simply cannot be discounted altogether; political realities have to be considered, and grave thought must be given, as a practical matter, to the social upheaval that inevitably would accompany massive desegregation of public schools in those areas of the South where Negro populations are greatest and traditions of racial separation are most deeply ingrained.

As Otto Klineberg points out in Characteristics of the American Negro, efforts to test the intelligence or the educational aptitude of Negro children go back a long way. In 1897, G. R. Stetson gave memory tests to fourth- and fifth-graders in the District of Columbia; the Negro pupils, who averaged a year and a half older than the whites, proved superior in memorizing three out of four stanzas of poetry. Truly is it said that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, for Stetson’s findings of 1897 represent one of the very few such inquiries in which Negroes have scored higher than whites. Since then, an exhaustive series of tests almost invariably have produced data pointing just the other way.

In 1913, A. C. Strong studied white and Negro school children of Columbia, S. C., and found the colored children mentally younger. The following year, B. A. Phillips reported on an analysis of twenty-nine white and twenty-nine Negro children who had been equated in terms of home environment, and found such a difference in mentality between the two groups that he wondered if they should be instructed under the same curriculum. In 1916, G. O. Ferguson tested white and Negro pupils of Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Newport News, Va., and found the superiority of the white group indubitable. In this same study he attempted further to classify the Negro subjects according to skin color (pure Negro, three-fourths Negro, mulatto, and quadroon), and found a plain correlation between higher scores and lighter skins.

Intelligence testing by racial groups was launched on a large scale with World War I. As an aid to military authorities, three separate tests were devised. The first, known as Army A, never was very widely used; it contained some four hundred items and featured two tests, of immediate memory and cancellation, which proved to be impracticable. Analyses of findings were made, however, by Ferguson and by Robert M. Yerkes, of 10,276 Negro soldiers and 38,628 white soldiers tested on Army A at Camp Lee and Camp Dix. The median score among Negro recruits ranged from 14.8 at Lee to 53 at Dix, the white recruits from 116 at Lee to 171 at Dix.

In an effort to devise a more useful test, a committee of five psychologists, led by Yerkes, was appointed by the American Psychological Association in April 1917. They put together tests that came to be known as Army Alpha and Army Beta. The tests, which brought together the most advanced psychological knowledge of their day, still are widely respected by psychologists forty-five years later. Henry E. Garrett, professor emeritus of psychology at Columbia University, has said of them that “owing to the size of the groups and the lack of special selection, the army test data yield probably the fairest and most unbiased comparison of Negro and white intelligence which we possess.”

The Alpha test was divided into eight sections, testing the examinee’s ability in following directions, arithmetic problems, practical judgment, synonyms and antonyms, disarranged sentences, completion of number series, analogies, and general information. The psychologists’ committee realized, however, that because of its heavy reliance upon literacy and cultural factors, the Alpha test would tell Army examiners little about the intelligence and capacity of recruits whose schooling was limited and whose cultural background was poor. Hence the Beta test was devised, as a nonlanguage test on which all illiterates could compete equally.

The average score of the white soldier on the Alpha test was 59, that of the Northern Negro 39, and that of the Southern Negro 12. The better educational equipment of the whites presumably might account for some of this astonishing difference, without considering any questions of innate ability at all. But this superior equipment did not figure on the Beta test. And on Beta, the whites averaged 43, the Northern Negro 33, and the Southern Negro 20. Analyzing these Beta findings in one study of men tested at Camp Grant, M. R. Trabue concluded that the average Northern Negro recruit had an ability to learn new things about equivalent to that of the average eleven-year-old white boy, and the average Southern Negro recruit a mental capacity at the nine-year-old level.

Notably, the figures on Negro “overlapping” were not significantly different for the two tests. It was found that only 27 per cent of the Negroes exceeded the white average score on Alpha. On Beta, the figure was 29 per cent. As Dr. McGurk has pointed out, if the Negroes’ comparatively poor scores were entirely a consequence of social and economic differences, a lessening of these differences should have produced, in the Beta test, a corresponding increase in the Negro overlap. Put another way: “An improvement in cultural opportunities should result in an improvement in the capacity for education. If cultural opportunities are not important in determining capacity for education, improving the cultural opportunities will have no effect on capacity for education.” And Dr. McGurk, it should be remembered, is a Villanova social scientist who has devoted a lifetime to research in this field.

The massive statistics of the World War I tests have served as grist for the mills of a hundred psychologists and social anthropologists. Those of the equalitarian school have done some curious things with the figures, in a strained effort to prove that significant differences in racial scores are related solely to environment and not at all to heredity. The student who inquires into the literature scarcely can pick up an equalitarian book that does not offer the following table:

Klineberg, who used this table in his 1944 work, says the comparison shows that Northern Negroes “are superior to the white groups from a number of Southern States.”

Taken at face value, that is certainly one conclusion that might be drawn, at least as to four Southern States, but the figures merit a closer look. What Klineberg did, as Garrett has shown, was to take the four Southern States where the white medians were lowest and compare them with the four Northern States where the Negro medians were highest. Beyond demonstrating that Negroes in some Northern States scored higher than whites in some Southern States, this widely reproduced table tells us little. Moreover, Klineberg—and Montagu, and Benedict, and others who are so fond of this data—do not present the figures from the four Northern States that might truly have significance in terms of local problems of public education. Garrett, whose computations of medians differ slightly from Klineberg’s, puts the data together in this fashion:

Garrett then makes the self-evident point that Negroes in these four States scored as far below white soldiers from the same States as they scored below whites in the country as a whole. The student who wants to dig more deeply into these World War I findings will find them fully reported in professional literature. Audrey Shuey’s The Testing of Negro Intelligence summarizes the data and provides an extensive bibliography of work done on the figures.

It is curious that so much labor has been spent on the World War I figures, and relatively so little on the more up-to-date data from World War II and Korea. Yet from one point of view this is not so curious either: In the thirty-six years between 1917 and 1943, the American Negro experienced prodigious gains in educational, cultural, economic, and social opportunities. Surely, it might be thought, these gains would have been reflected in some significant improvement in his military test scores. No such improvement can be detected. Nathaniel Weyl has summed up the facts:

“A comparison of Army General Classification Test (AGCT) scores of white and Negro enlisted men in military service in March, 1945, shows that 6.3 per cent of the whites, but only 1.0 per cent of the Negroes, were in Group I (very superior) and that 39.7 per cent of the whites, but only 7.4 per cent of the Negroes, were in the first two (better than average) categories. On the other hand, only 26.9 per cent of the whites, as contrasted with 77.7 per cent of the Negroes (more than three-fourths of them), were in the two bottom (inferior and very inferior) groups.”

In World War I, Weyl continues, the Negro overlap on the combined tests was 13.5 per cent—that is, 13½ Negroes in 100 scored as well as the average white man. By the time of World War II, the overlap had dropped to 12 per cent, and if the scores of mental rejects are included for both races, to only 10 per cent. Still more embarrassing to the equalitarians, their precious comparisons of World War I between Northern Negroes and Southern whites tend to dissolve in the findings of World War II. Weyl summarizes a comparison between Negroes examined in the First Command Area (New England), where Negroes had the highest median, with white recruits examined in the Fourth Command Area (Southern), where white medians were lowest. Some 34 per cent of the Southern whites made scores of superior or very superior; only 9 per cent of the Northern Negroes were in these brackets.

Finally, on the matter of AGCT scores, mention may be made of an unpublished master’s thesis by B. E. Fulk of the University of Illinois; the paper is cited by Shuey in her encompassing survey of the field. Fulk obtained data on 2174 white and 2010 Negro enlisted men examined by the Army Air Force Service Command. He then correlated their AGCT scores in terms of the years of education they had experienced. It may well be true that the Negroes here tested had attended poorer schools than the whites; but to persons interested in understanding some of the real and practical problems of school desegregation, Fulk’s tabulations will be rewarding (see page 78).

If the formidable gaps shown by those figures do not persuade the South’s critics of the difficult problems implicit in welding together two country high schools, one white, the other Negro, perhaps no evidence would persuade them. Yet abundant other evidence is widely available.

Dr. Shuey has put the facts together in a book that cannot be overlooked by serious students of the desegregation problem. She is head of the Department of Psychology at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Virginia. Her massive labors have had a stunning impact upon the more idealistic advocates of immediate integration. Here in cold statistical tables, unwarmed by subjective opinion, she has summarized more than forty years of investigation into Negro intelligence. These are not her findings; they are the findings of scholars who have done original or independent research. No matter how these findings may be explained away (and the NAACP has retained a committee of psychologists now seeking desperately to explain them away), the figures speak tellingly of the problems that educators must face in mixing the two races massively in the same classrooms.

The literature discloses that at the preschool level, there is a marked but not unmanageable difference between white and Negro aptitudes. A typical Stanford-Binet test of five-year-olds, for example, may turn up a median of 112 for white children, 95.8 for Negro children. The gap is dismayingly wide, but it can be coped with.

Thereafter, as the children move into upper grades, the tendency is for the gap to grow steadily greater. Dr. Shuey made an analysis of 101 tests given to Negro elementary-school children from one end of the country to the other. Some of these tests were given by Negro psychologists, in an effort to improve the rapport between examiner and subject. In other investigations, careful efforts were made to equate the home backgrounds of white and Negro subjects. All told, the 101 investigations cover findings on 51,000 colored children, and provide 310 comparisons for relative standing of colored and white. “In 297 of the comparisons,” Dr. Shuey notes, “the colored children scored the lower; in 144 they were lower than the white norms.”

Dr. McGurk’s analysis of the professional literature in this field closely parallels Dr. Shuey’s report. Between 1935 and 1950, he has stated, sixty-three articles appeared in professional journals of psychology dealing with Negro-white test-score differences. In all sixty-three of them, the average test score of the Negro subjects was found to be lower than the average test score of the white subjects with whom they were compared. Six of these investigations are regarded by McGurk as especially significant:

1. A study of a group of Canadian Negroes and whites in 1939 by H. A. Tanser. The Negro children tested were the descendants of slaves who had escaped from the South prior to and during the Civil War. Their social and economic opportunities had been generally equal to those of whites in the area. Yet the findings of three standard psychological tests administered to children in grades 1-8 found the Negro averages far below the white averages at every age and every grade. For the total groups, only 13 to 20 per cent of the Negroes overlapped the white average, and in no case did the overlap exceed 20 per cent.

2. A study of white and Negro children in a poor section of rural Virginia, done by M. Bruce in 1940. In order to eliminate the factor of social and economic differences, the author first administered a test of socio-economic status, and then paired off her subjects so that each member of a pair, one Negro child and one white child, had the same socio-economic score. Negro overlapping on three separate tests ranged between 15 per cent and 20 per cent.

3. A study by Dr. Shuey of white and Negro college students in New York, in 1942. Again, the Negro and white students were first given socio-economic tests in order to pair them off. The Negro overlap amounted to 18 per cent. Of this investigation, Dr. McGurk says: “Considering that this was a highly selected group of college students, such low overlapping is surprising. It does not lend credence to the belief that socio-economic factors are responsible for the Negro-white differences in psychological test performance.”

4. A study of white and Negro kindergarten children in Minneapolis, 1944, done by F. Brown. The test scores found a 31 per cent overlapping. (At very early ages, overlap always is greater because tests deal more with performance and with sensory-motor responses, and less with verbal skills).

5. A study by T. F. Rhoads and associates of white and Negro children at the age of three. This was a very detailed study, in which each of the subjects was clinically examined from birth until the time he was administered a psychological test. Socio-economic factors were reported to be generally equal for the entire group of subjects. The overlapping amounted to 30 per cent.

6. A study by McGurk himself of Negro and white high school seniors in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Again, Negroes and whites were matched for social and economic status by pairing a white subject with each Negro subject so that both members of a pair were identical or equivalent for fourteen different socio-economic factors. These students then took a test composed half of “cultural questions,” and half of “non-cultural questions.” McGurk’s finding: “In spite of the equivalence of socio-economic factors, 29 per cent of the Negro subjects overlapped the average total score of the white subjects. This is almost identical with the overlapping reported in the Alpha and Beta tests of World War I. There is hardly any question about the socio-economic superiority of this 1951 group of Negroes when compared with the Negroes of World War I. Yet, relative to white subjects, the intervening improvements in social and economic opportunities of the Negroes had not improved their psychological test performance at all.”

In 1953, Dr. McGurk published an additional study in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, “On White and Negro Test Performance and Socio-Economic Factors.” Here he reclassified the subjects of his 1951 study, in order to compare the 25 per cent of each race who might be regarded as a “high group” and as a “low group” in terms of socio-economic factors. Rearrangement of the data made no difference. It became apparent that socio-economic factors had not made the two groups equally proficient in psychological tests. “The average score of the high Negro group was very much lower than the average score of the whites of equivalent socio-economic status. In terms of Negro overlap, only 18 per cent of these Negro children of excellent socio-economic background obtained test scores that equalled or exceeded the average white score.”

Assuming that the liberal social anthropologists are right in what they say, that social and economic forces are of paramount importance, McGurk comments, “There should have been no differences between Negroes and whites in any of these comparisons. As it actually turned out, the difference between Negroes and whites is much greater when both groups are of high socio-economic status than when the racial groups are of deprived socio-economic status.”

Further analysis of McGurk’s 1951 study in terms of the “cultural questions” and the “noncultural” questions totally disproved the notion that cultural questions on these intelligence tests unduly hold back the Negro in his performance. Taking the cultural questions alone, it was found that 24 per cent of the high Negro group overlapped the average scores of the high white group. On the noncultural questions, where it might have been expected that the Negroes would do better, they did worse: Barely one out of five of the high Negro group overlapped the high white group. Comparing the two low groups, McGurk found that the low Negro group actually had an insignificantly higher average score than the low white group on the cultural questions, with an overlap of about 55 per cent. On the noncultural questions, the average of the low white group was significantly greater than that of the low Negro group. There was an overlap of about 29 per cent.

McGurk has summed up his conclusions in this fashion:

Regardless of our emotional attachment to the school desegregation problem, certain facts must be faced. First, as far as psychological test performance is a measure of capacity for education, Negroes as a group do not possess as much of it as whites as a group. This has been demonstrated over and over.

Next, we must realize that, since 1918, the vast improvements in the social and economic status of the Negro have not changed his relationship to the whites regarding capacity for education. This is not to say that this relationship cannot be changed; it says merely that it has not been changed....

Thirdly, as far as our knowledge of the problem goes, the improvements in the social and economic opportunities have only increased the differences between Negroes and whites. This is because such improvements have been given to both racial groups—not only to the Negro—and the whites have profited the more from them. This serves to emphasize the former statement that a fruitful approach to racial equality cannot follow the lines of social and economic manipulation. There is something more important, more basic, to the race problem than differences in external opportunity.

Dr. McGurk’s conclusions, it should be said in fairness (even in this partisan brief), have been widely denounced by his equalitarian colleagues. Following publication of his 1956 statement in U. S. News & World Report, eighteen social scientists united in a rebuttal assertion that “given similar degrees of cultural opportunity to realize their potentialities, the average achievement of the members of each ethnic group is about the same.” And in the Spring 1958, issue of Harvard Educational Review, William M. McCord, an assistant professor of sociology at Stanford University, and Nicholas J. Demerath, III, of Harvard, a senior student, returned to the attack on McGurk.

In my own view, the rejoinders of McCord and Demerath are remarkably feeble. The investigations they cite, in an effort to refute McGurk’s conclusions, provide no refutation at all. Their own study of “predelinquent” and normal boys in Cambridge-Somerville, Mass., is so affected by subjective evaluations that it contributes little to an objective appraisal of conditions that confront school administrators elsewhere. (They attempted to establish a correlation between the boys’ intelligence and their social class, parental education, “home atmosphere,” and “personality of the boys’ fathers”; other factors dealt with the subjects’ homes—cohesive, quarrelsome, quarrelsome-neglecting, or broken—and whether the boys’ fathers were loving, passive, cruel, neglecting, or absent.) In any event, most of their elaborately tabulated findings tend merely to support McGurk’s own conclusion that at the lowest social levels, white and Negro test scores are not significantly different.

The evidence put together by Shuey and McGurk is solid, dispassionate, unbiased, overwhelming; it cannot be disregarded—not, that is, if one wishes to gain any real understanding of the problems that confront local school boards over much of the South. To pull the general figures down to a single, specific case study, consider the findings of some tests administered in Dallas in 1954-55. There more than 1600 Negro pupils and almost 5700 white pupils were tested in the first grade on their general readiness for learning—on their ability to pay attention, follow directions, handle crayons and pencils, understand and use language, and so on. These were the findings:

In sum, 37 per cent of the white first-graders scored in the “high normal” and “superior” groups, against only 7 per cent of the Negro first-graders. At the other end of the scale, 31 per cent of the white pupils scored in the “low normal” and “poor risk” groups, against 74 per cent of the Negro pupils.

For another specific example, consider the findings in Virginia among pupils of an older age group. Over a period of five successive years, between 1949-50 and 1953-54, the State Department of Education administered the Iowa Silent Reading Test to all eighth-graders in the Virginia public school system. This is a standardized achievement test in reading, employed by school systems throughout the country to discover certain facts of immediate, practical importance to classroom teachers: How well do the children read? How well do they understand? The tests in Virginia were given in May of each year, when all of the children had a grade placement of 8.8 (eighth year, eighth month). Scores on the Iowa test are calibrated to match the grade placement, so that a pupil who scores a reading-grade equivalent of 8.7 would be one month retarded in achievement, and a pupil who scores a reading-grade equivalent of 8.9 would be one month advanced in achievement.

This is what the Virginia tests found in May 1954, the month of the Brown decision (findings were not significantly different in the four preceding years): The median white child in the county schools was about half a year behind the achievement level he should have reached; he was reading at a level of 8.3 (eighth grade, third month). But the median Negro child in the county schools was reading at a level of 6.2 (sixth grade, second month). The top one-fourth of the white children (75th percentile) were reading at a level of the tenth grade, third month, or better; but the top one-fourth of the Negro children were not even at the 8.8 level—the 75th percentile among the Negro pupils was found at 7.5.

Scores on the Virginia tests were higher in the city schools, but among the Negro pupils, not much higher. In the cities, the median white eighth-grader was found to be reading at a level of the ninth grade, second month; the median Negro eighth-grader scored 6.5. In less statistical language, this means simply that in terms of reading skills, which are the foundation of all other academic skills, Virginia’s white eighth-graders as a group were found in 1954 to be from two years to nearly three full years ahead of the Negro eighth-graders as a group. Subsequent tests, administered on a more limited scale since 1954, have shown no material change.

Now, how is one to organize a viable public school—a completely desegregated school—under such conditions as these? If one is the superintendent of schools in the District of Columbia, one can cope with what Dr. Carl F. Hansen has described as “the enormous educational problem of upgrading large numbers of educationally handicapped children” by a variety of devices: Squads of psychiatrists, platoons of remedial-reading instructors, a “four-track” system, and the like. And if one spends enough money, and has enough pupils and buildings to permit some shuffling around among schools, and pays salaries high enough to keep some of the most competent teachers in the country, one can accomplish a good deal. But how many rural counties in the South, where the total school population may number only 2000 or 2500, can possibly apply the drastic remedies found necessary in Washington?

Consider the schools of Washington, D. C. The capital is the showcase of the nation in terms of desegregation. If genuinely “mixed” schools are to work anywhere, they should work best in the District of Columbia, where every factor combines to produce the most favorable opportunity: The political climate of a Federal administration anxious to achieve integration, the immense resources of a lavish school budget, the cultural amenities freely available to all children as an adjunct to learning, the absence of racial discrimination in employment, the untypically high incomes and job status of many Negro families. It is entirely reasonable to assume that pupils in the Washington schools, as a group, should not be merely average, or slightly above average; they should in fact lead the entire country. Moreover, it seems a fair assumption that the exodus of white families from the District has tended to leave behind those white children who in general are less able mentally and more nearly on the Negro’s cultural level. If Negro pupils are to show up well anywhere, they should show up well here. The facts indicate nothing of the kind.

The District of Columbia desegregated its schools in September 1954, following the Supreme Court’s opinion the preceding May. In October 1955, after a year of experience with desegregation, the Stanford Advanced Reading and Arithmetic Tests were given to some 4600 eighth-grade pupils in the Washington public schools—1600 white pupils and 3000 Negro pupils. The findings in Washington almost exactly paralleled the findings in Virginia: Two-thirds of the Negro children were found to be reading at the sixth-grade level or below (21 per cent of the Negro eighth-graders, indeed, were reading at the fifth-grade level, and 22 per cent were reading at the fourth-grade level). Only 12 per cent of the white eighth-graders were at the sixth-grade level or below, and 54 per cent of the white pupils were at the tenth-grade level or above.

Shocked officials of the District of Columbia plunged headlong into remedial programs. Their herculean labors have been reported widely and sympathetically. At once, the four-track system was devised, and pupils systematically were assigned to (1) an honors program, (2) a general college-preparatory program, (3) a program for pupils not planning to go to college, and (4) a remedial basic curriculum for slow-learning pupils. One effect was to achieve a very substantial resegregation, for the great bulk of those on tracks 1 and 2 turned out to be white pupils, and the great bulk of those on tracks 3 and 4 turned out to be Negro pupils. The resegregation process was helped along materially by Washington’s younger white families, who fled the District by the thousands. In 1950, Washington’s schools were almost evenly balanced, 50-50, in white and colored enrollment; ten years later, white pupils constituted 20 per cent, Negro pupils 80 per cent, of the enrollment. Remedial classes for slow learners, in which teaching specialists work with groups averaging no more than eighteen per class, have been swiftly stepped up; there were seventy-four such classes in 1954; the number grew to 225 in the 1959-60 session. The reading-clinic staff increased from twelve to thirty-two in that period of time, and a special Division of Pupil Appraisal more than doubled with the addition of a dozen school psychologists, clinical psychologists, and psychiatric social workers. New batteries of achievement tests were administered every year.

At the close of the school year in 1959, five full years after racial discrimination had been obliterated from the Washington schools, Dr. Hansen released some figures on how things were going. To the integrationist Washington Post, reporting happily on the data, things were going marvelously well: “District pupils’ performance on standardized tests this year topped last year’s scores in 15 of the 27 subjects tested, School Superintendent Carl F. Hansen reported yesterday.” The cheery tone of the Post’s story was somewhat belied by the glum figures themselves. Washington’s sixth-graders had managed to achieve median scores in spelling, language, and arithmetical computation exactly matching—no more—the national norms for these three sixth-grade tests. Medians on the other twenty-four tests were below national norms, in some instances by as much as a full year. Ninth-graders who should have scored a median of 9.4 (ninth year, fourth month) in computation and paragraph meaning scored 8.3 and 8.4 respectively. Dr. Hansen’s report on tests at the third-grade and fifth-grade levels has special interest:

It should not escape notice that the Washington children whose median scores are shown in the foregoing table never had known a day of legally segregated schooling. The Negro pupils here tested never had suffered the school discrimination likely to affect their hearts and minds in a fashion never to be undone. These pupils, on the contrary, had had the benefit of all the special attention that could be given them by a school administration frantically eager to demonstrate the glories of integration. No resource of guidance and special teaching, no visual aid or teaching technique had been denied them. Yet there are the scores: Not a single test in Washington’s third and fifth grades produced a median equal to the national norm. The fifth-graders, backsliding, did not even equal fifth-grade scores the preceding year.

It is perhaps needless to dwell further upon the findings of intelligence and achievement tests beyond commenting briefly upon some of the flimsy efforts the equalitarians make to discredit them. One objection is that the Negro child has no “motivation” to do well on them; but at the younger age levels especially, this is pure conjecture. It also is complained that frequently the tests are administered to Negro children by white examiners, and that an essential rapport thereby is denied them; but this was not true of the tests in Washington, and it has not been true of many other investigations. The most frequent objection is that tests tend to compare white and colored children of unequal social and economic background; but abundant evidence is available of investigations in which subjects have been “paired” by every imaginable criterion, and almost without exception these tests show the same lamentable contrasts in white and Negro scores.

Otto Klineberg has attempted to dismiss all the findings: “Until and unless the same education is given to both races, comparisons will be unfair.” But it manifestly is impossible to give the same education to any two groups. All that one can do is to provide the same textbooks, the same teaching aids, teachers with the same degree of education, and physical facilities generally comparable—but even then, identity of total educational opportunity could not possibly be achieved. The various tests now being administered in school systems across the country are as fair and objective as competent psychologists and educators can make them; and the bleak, undeniable fact, confirmed repeatedly in school districts both North and South, is that colored children regularly score at lower levels than the white children of their communities. Thoughtful students of the difficult problem before the South will comprehend what the evidence means in terms of the real and practical obstacles to welding together white and Negro schools in rural areas below the Potomac.

Other very real difficulties merit reflection also. The disputations of social scientists cannot be considered in a vacuum, nor the findings of achievement tests treated as so many punched cards for an IBM machine. These are children we are concerned with, white and Negro alike, and the fact is (I do not argue the goodness or badness of the fact; I merely cite its existence) that white and Negro children in the South have many quite different educational requirements. The essentially dual and separate society of the South cannot be dissolved overnight by court decree. For years to come in the South, the practice of law and medicine, the handling of banking and finance, the sale of stocks and bonds, the management of large retail and wholesale enterprises, and the administration of commerce and government will continue to be overwhelmingly restricted to white persons. This is not to say that many able Negroes are not engaged in these fields now; they are, and their number is increasing, but they are conspicuous exceptions. In rural areas especially, where professional and business opportunities naturally are severely limited, the realities of adult opportunity are even more striking.

All this has to be considered practically in terms of curriculum planning, guidance, teaching emphasis, and the like. Nothing very significant is accomplished, really, in offering physics or calculus to rural Negro boys who intend to drop out at the ninth-grade level and go to work farming or cutting pulpwood. Negro girls who realistically expect to find employment in a tobacco stemmery, a laundry, a bakery, or in domestic service have educational requirements materially different from those of their white counterparts. The impatient theoretician, unwilling even to attempt to understand a social order he so thoroughly disapproves, doubtless will be repelled by this line of reasoning. But the reasoning has a way of making sense in rural county seats.

A point is made of the exceptional Negro students. What of them? Why should a brilliant and ambitious colored youngster be held back by the relative ineptitude of his typical colored classmates? My answer is that he should not be held back, and I believe that in the course of time, this will be the answer of the South as a whole. When colored students appear who demonstrate the intellectual ability to compete at top levels with their white counterparts, I am wholly agreeable to any plan that would bring them, by transfer, to the finest high schools for miles around. Virginia has just such a program slowly formulating in its plan of “Freedom of Choice.” But I would suggest that one consequence of such transfers of exceptional children, in the foreseeable future, would be to deny the slower Negro pupils the example and stimulation of superior students of their own race. The tendency would be further to reduce the achievement levels of the colored schools as such. But I would leave such decisions to the pupils and their parents themselves.

I have attempted to set forth two practical objections to school desegregation in the South, and especially in the rural South—first, the demonstrably lower levels of aptitude and achievement on the Negro’s part, and second, the demonstrably different opportunities and occupations for which most colored pupils realistically must prepare themselves. A third difficulty involves the teaching staffs. The massive desegregation of Southern schools predictably would have a catastrophic effect upon the thousands of Negro men and women who now enjoy, within their race, relatively high status and relatively good incomes as public school teachers. In many areas of the South, as I have said, attitudes are changing and softening, as white parents discover there is a level of token desegregation that is not intolerable to them. This tendency, I feel certain, will increase year by year. But I cannot yet foresee the day, in the greatest part of the South, when white parents by and large will accept Negro teachers and Negro principals over their children. This would demand one more subtle and unwelcome shifting of gears; it would carry the social revolution beyond the point of an uneasy “equality” of pupils in a classroom, and would make the white child subject to Negro masters. The efforts of a Federal court to compel employment of Negro teachers who would preside over heavily “mixed” classrooms would be bitterly resented, and the resentment would manifest itself in wholesale withdrawals and school abandonments. I venture the flat prediction, on the basis of personal conversations with white families who have moved out of Washington, that this difficulty would be seen as a last-straw condition. But the alternative to the employment of Negro teachers in massively desegregated schools is to discharge the Negro teachers and to replace them with white teachers. This would be cruelly unfair; but in any unhappy election between preserving the jobs of some Negro schoolteachers and preserving a local school system itself (which involves preservation of the good will of white parents and taxpayers), the jobs will go.

This line of discussion brings us to a fourth practical difficulty that would accompany massive desegregation in the South: the predictable difficulty in employing white teachers for racially mixed classrooms. New York, Philadelphia, and Washington have run into this constantly. Dr. Hansen has disclosed in the Teachers’ College Record (October 1960) that Washington’s school system employed 579 temporary teachers in 1954-55. By 1959-60, this number had grown to 1250. “It is difficult,” he concedes, “to find white teachers psychologically prepared to take jobs in predominantly Negro schools, with the result that the source of applicants tends to become more and more restricted.” And if Washington has this problem, with the high salaries and fringe benefits and physical facilities and cultural amenities it can offer a prospective teacher, what may we reasonably expect at the branch-heads?

One of the problems in this area, acknowledged even by Otto Klineberg, is the language barrier that so often baffles a white teacher in attempting to communicate effectively with a Negro child. “Obviously the Southern Negro speaks English,” says Klineberg in Characteristics of the American Negro, “but equally obviously, his English is not similar to, or the equal of, the English spoken by the average white.” Many other observers have made the same point. The Negro inflection, pronunciation, word-choice, and accent are quite different; and in the case of the South Carolina gullah, these characteristics make speech almost incomprehensible. White teachers, with jobs widely available to them, simply would rather not get involved in this.

These teachers have other objections, too. As the record of hearings before a House subcommittee in 1956 makes vividly clear, many white teachers are simply appalled by the sexual mores and the violent attitudes of some of the Negro pupils in desegregated schools. One witness after another appeared before the committee to testify to the inordinate amount of time that had to be spent simply in maintaining discipline. Adolescent sex urges, volatile enough under any circumstances, are further complicated by the novelties and tensions of intimate interracial association in halls and classrooms and toilets. Philadelphians still recall grimly the incident at Shaw Junior High School in 1956, when a Negro gang gathered outside the school to insult and annoy pupils as they left the building. Three teachers who came out to remonstrate were attacked and severely beaten. The white principal of another Philadelphia school, who had watched the deterioration of his school from an “honors” institution of high scholarship into a second-rate vocational factory, was quoted in U. S. News in 1958: “Many of these youngsters are not adequately motivated for learning. They have no home to speak of, nothing to encourage them once they leave the school grounds. They’re here simply to occupy their time until they’re old enough to go out and get a job—if they can find a job.”

These are among the arguments of practicality the Southerner would advance against compulsory desegregation of his public schools. He is not prepared to chop logic, or to engage in casuistic debate on the why of the world that he lives in. He knows that with the best will in the world—and in his fashion, he more often than not has great good will for the Negroes of his community—he cannot quickly elevate the Negro’s home environment appreciably. Overnight he cannot put books and magazines in Negro living rooms; he cannot inject generations of cultural background with some magic hypodermic needle; he cannot deliver to the Negro, as he would loan him a hoe or give him an overcoat, the social graces, the community of experience, the heritage of generations, the accumulation of business, professional, and civic understanding that necessarily must figure in the educative process. Time presses, and the school bell rings, and on April mornings the honk of the school bus, like the voice of the turtle, is abroad in the land. He has to do what he conceives to be best for his child now, to prepare that child for the society he predictably will live in tomorrow. And he does not accept the idea that racially mixed classrooms, over a long period of years, in the context of the only society he knows, will provide a workable, desirable, or pleasant experience for sons and daughters who are dear to him. Maybe, he says doubtfully, maybe some time in the future....

IX

If there ever is to be in the South any significant degree of desegregation in public institutions, let alone any significant degree of integration in society as a whole, it can come effectively in one way only: slowly, cautiously, voluntarily, “some time in the future.” This is the doctrine of “gradualism,” and the Negro’s professional leaders despise it. They insist, with some plausibility, that constitutional rights are personal and immediate rights, capable of being lost irretrievably if they are not exercised at once; and now that new constitutional rights have been created and defined, they ask, why is the realization of these rights coming so slowly? “How long do you expect us to wait?” they demand. “It is almost a hundred years since slavery now.” They do not want to be gradual; they want to be integrated.

To these impatient appeals, the South makes a number of responses, none of them pleasing to the militant Negro leadership. But the responses make sense nonetheless. The answers add up to this: The Negro is plunging forward now in a movement that is at once both revolutionary and evolutionary. All of man’s history suggests that while revolutionary changes may be hurried and pushed along by processes of forced growth, the changes that result from evolution can never be hurried at all. They will come at their own speed, and their own speed is glacial.

In many areas, the revolution proceeds apace. William G. Carleton, of the University of Florida at Gainesville, acknowledges “great strides” by the Southern Negro since World War II. In 1944, Negroes were virtually barred from participation in Southern politics. In 1960, when he reported in the Teachers’ College Record that Negro rights were making haste slowly, 1,100,000 Negroes were registered to vote in Southern primaries and general elections. The number is considerably higher in 1962, and the United States Civil Rights Commission has conceded that except in a relatively few Black Belt localities in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, Negroes now are not prevented from registering or voting over most of the South. In most areas, it is no longer the intimidation of the white man, but far more often the indolence, indifference, and incapacity of the Negro himself that keeps him from the polls. In some Southern States, Negro registration has climbed to 35 or 40 per cent of the adult Negro population; white registration, in many communities, is seldom much more than half or two-thirds of the adult population. In Florida, Negro registration increased from 8000 in 1944 to 160,000 in 1960. North Carolina and Virginia have witnessed gains almost as notable. To Carleton, a “veritable revolution” is seen in the South: “Had the mass of Southerners in 1950 been told that by 1960 there would be considerable token desegregation in the schools of Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas; even more desegregation on city bus lines; and that segregation at lunch counters and eating places would be here and there giving way in the South, they would have refused flatly to believe it. From the point of view of social justice, the changes have been painfully slow and spotty; but from the point of view of white Southern cultural attitudes, the changes have been unbelievably swift.”

Note that the unbelievable changes of which Carleton speaks are changes from “segregation” to “desegregation,” in his own careful choice of nouns, and not changes from “segregation” to “integration.” It takes no great powers of prophecy to envision a great many other such changes, as the South cautiously explores the possibilities of retaining its segregation while abandoning it too. I write in a period of transition. Ten years hence, in 1972, the perfect clarity of hindsight will perceive much that is now obscure; but my impression is that some sort of peak has been reached by the white South with the crisis over the parks of Birmingham. In the winter of 1961-62, a decision was reached by officials to close the Birmingham parks rather than to accept a policy of permitting their joint use by the two races, but the decision brought the first audible rumblings of misgiving and disagreement in a city that previously had been united in opposition to the slightest retreat from policies of total municipal segregation. A great many persons in Birmingham, sincerely convinced of the wisdom of essential racial separation, also were sincerely convinced of the desirability of retaining the parks on a functioning basis. They were aware that other Southern cities of comparable urbanity and custom had adjusted to a system of open parks. They did not like the idea of a parkless city; and they began actively to think about all this.

To the devout believers in racial integration, it doubtless appears incredible that Birmingham’s action could have been taken in the first place, or that the wrongness of this decision (in their eyes) should fail to be instantly apparent. These impatient critics simply do not comprehend the depth of Southern feelings; they are as totally unable to accept the viewpoint of the typical white Southerner as the typical white Southerner is totally unable to accept the viewpoint of the Negro. In the course of time, each of these conflicting viewpoints will be seen more clearly; and once seen, may be understood and dealt with. But the process demands time, time, and more time. The death of racial segregation, which the integrationists see as a necessary end, will follow Caesar’s prescription: It will come when it will come.

To any objective observer, it should be manifest that such a time is not yet—not in the early 1960s. In one city after another, North as well as South, the plain and palpable fact is that where “integration” is pushed too rapidly—more rapidly, that is, than the Negro community is prepared to sustain it or the white community is prepared to accept it—a reverse action has set in. The District of Columbia offers a textbook example: Its public schools passed in eight years from segregation to desegregation to a virtual resegregation, as white families fled from mixed neighborhoods and mixed schools. St. Louis has acknowledged the same experience: William A. Kottmeyer, deputy superintendent of instruction in St. Louis, told the National Conference of Editorial Writers in October 1961 that St. Louis then had more actual segregation in its schools than had existed prior to the Brown decision. Of 130 elementary schools in St. Louis at the time, only 36 were classified as mixed; 46 were all white, and 48 all Negro. Nowhere in the South has school desegregation been attempted under more favorable auspices than in Louisville, yet in 1961-62 the trend back toward resegregation was appearing there, too. Between 1950 and 1960, Baltimore experienced a net out-migration of 175,000 white persons, and a net in-migration of 41,000 nonwhite persons. Dr. Houston R. Jackson, a Negro assistant superintendent of Baltimore schools, said in the summer of 1961 that Baltimore had more all-Negro schools at that time than it had before desegregation began in the fall of 1954: “When the Negroes in a school reach 50 per cent,” he added, “that’s when the white teachers begin to ask for transfers.” And to judge from accounts of school litigation in such Northern localities as New Rochelle, N. Y., and Englewood, N. J., the antipathy of white persons to intimate and personal relationships with Negro persons is not a wholly Southern phenomenon. One satirical lexicographer, observing conditions in Chicago, has defined integration as “the period which elapses between the arrival of the first Negro and the departure of the last white.” Manifestly, the resistance to a coerced racial “equality” is wide and deep.

Why is this so? The answer, in blunt speech, is that the Negro race, as a race, has not earned equality. And as I have attempted to argue earlier, it is a feeble and evasive response to accuse the white critic, in making that flat statement, of emulating the child who shot his parents and then pleaded for mercy as an orphan. The failure of the Negro race, as a race, to achieve equality cannot be blamed wholly on white oppression. This is the excuse, the crutch, the piteous and finally pathetic defense of Negrophiles unable or unwilling to face reality. In other times and other places, sturdy, creative, and self-reliant minorities have carved out their own destiny; they have compelled acceptance on their own merit; they have demonstrated those qualities of leadership and resourcefulness and disciplined ambition that in the end cannot ever be denied. But the Negro race, as a race, has done none of this. “We do not want to be second-class citizens,” cries James Farmer, national director of the Congress for Racial Equality. But “wanting” is not enough. It is a beginning; but it is no more than a beginning.

How is the Negro race, as a race, to earn the respect of the white race as a race? I should imagine that a cultivation of self-respect would offer an excellent starting place; and I do not see much of this now. With a few notable exceptions, most Negro spokesmen appear to spend their time condoning and minimizing the characteristics that deprive their race of a “first-class” reputation. Are Negro neighborhoods filthy? The Negro, it is said, has no incentive to clean them up. Why does this appalling rate of illegitimacy persist? The Negro, it is said, must relieve the frustrations brought on by segregation. Are Negro incomes generally low? It is all the fault of the white man: He deprives the Negro of job opportunities.

After so long a time, these repeated alibis grow stale. I have an idea that some Negro defenders themselves have ceased to believe in them. And I cherish the further idea that a really massive, significant change in race relations will not come until the Negro people develop leaders who will ask themselves the familiar question, “Why are we treated as second-class citizens?” and return a candid answer to it: “Because all too often that is what we are.”

If the Negro people have the innate capacity that Montagu, Clark, Comas, Boas and the others insist they have, the Negro people in time will overcome every obstacle that fate has put in their way. On their own initiative, as a product of their own industry and skill, they will develop the talents that command respect in the market place. They will provide their own capital, build their own enterprises, sell their own wares, compete among themselves until they have learned to compete in the whole wide world. They will exert, within their own community, the moral leadership necessary to reduce crime and illegitimacy. By participation first in their own constructive public affairs they will prove themselves capable of contributing actively to the civic, social, and economic life of their counties, towns, and cities. They will stop trying simply to imitate the white man; they will discover themselves first, and if this inner self is all that the liberal anthropologists assert it to be, the discovery should lead to wondrous exploitation. Ebony magazine made this same point editorially in 1959, when it urged its readers to stop complaining about being referred to as “Negro” or as “colored”: “The real problem is the man called Negro. If he would spend as much time dignifying his race as he does decrying its designation, if he would quit worrying about the label and concentrate upon improving the product, the stuff inside, the name would take care of itself.”

This was sound advice, and one of the hopeful aspects of the South in the early 1960s (there are not many) is that a new generation of young Negroes may even act upon it. Carleton remarks in his essay upon the increasing nationalization of the Southern Negro, who now, more often than not, has some Northern connections; and he says this:

“Not only has the Southern Negro been nationalized, he has also developed his own propertied and business classes, his own wealthy and middle classes. Every Southern city of any size has a group of economically comfortable and relatively independent lawyers, doctors, teachers, morticians, contractors, insurance agents, and owners of small businesses—garages and filling stations, restaurants, taverns, barber shops, beauty parlors, stores, and so forth. These people have education or considerable economic independence, or both.”

In my own observation, this is quite true; the notable fact, as yet unrecognized by many staunch Southern segregationists, is that a new Negro is in fact emerging—the bright young high school senior, the serious college student, the impatient middle-class Negro couple, struggling for respectability and status. Their impact is yet to be wholly felt within their own race, but it is being felt increasingly upon white institutions; and as a consequence, as Carleton observes, racial attitudes among white persons in certain parts of the South are subtly changing. He terms this a “softening.” It is sometimes a hardening, too, as white families, having long cherished an affection for “their” Negroes, discover that their charges prefer not to be known as Uncle Toms or Aunt Jemimas; the disillusioned reaction, out of chagrin and embarrassment, is to let them bail themselves out of trouble, if that’s the way they want it. The relationship changes. But if the Southern Negro is to find salvation at all, he must find it in this trend to independence and maturity. “The most important immediate force at work to emancipate the Negro of the South,” says Carleton, “is the Southern Negro himself. A great change has come over him. He is no longer an Uncle Tom, or even the kind of Negro approved of by Booker T. Washington. He now talks back. He has a new self-respect, a new confidence, a new independence. Increasingly he is depending less on Northern Negro initiative and leadership and is supplying his own.” To the extent that this prophecy is fulfilled—for all the bitter incidents, severances, and failures that may be expected—the upward and forward motion of the Negro will be recorded.

“The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” The brooding, introspective advice of Cassius ought not to be spurned; it ought rather to be put to thoughtful use by those genuinely (as distinguished from merely politically) concerned with the Negroes’ movement out of an underling’s status. James B. Conant has recognized this, however belatedly, in his Slums and Suburbs. Here Dr. Conant paints a grimly realistic picture of a Negro child’s life in the urban slums of the North, where the child may live six flights up in a tenement offering “one filthy room with a bed, a light bulb, and a stink.” It is after visiting such tenements, and inspecting the schools attended by slum children, that he grows impatient “with both critics and defenders of public education who ignore the realities of school situations to engage in fruitless debate about educational philosophy, purposes, and the like: These situations call for action, not for hair-splitting arguments.”

Dr. Conant is a distinguished spokesman for liberalism, but unlike most of his fastidious brethren, he came to the slums, and smelled them, and began to see realities fair and clear. What he has to say about Negro education merits a sober hearing. He is convinced that it is wrong to insist upon a curriculum completely unsuited to the needs of the children required to take it: “Foreign languages in Grade 7 or algebra in Grade 8 ... have little place in a school in which half the pupils in that grade read at the fourth-grade level or below. Homework has little relevance in a situation where home is a filthy, noisy tenement.” By the same token, it may be suggested that in the rural South, school offerings ought to be adapted to real life also; and though Dr. Conant is a staunch opponent of school segregation as such—that is, to the assignment of pupils to schools solely by reason of their race—he sees no reason why satisfactory education cannot be provided in all Negro schools. Arbitrarily to shift children around, simply to satisfy sociological theories of an ideal race-mixture, impressed Dr. Conant as wrong. This approach treats children “as though they were pawns on a chessboard.”

But these children, white and black, are not mere pawns on a chessboard, and whatever the sins or submissions of their great-grandfathers may have been, they merit consideration in their own right. In the South, this consideration steadily is being extended. If we of the South cannot turn the clock back to 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, at least we can strive to turn the clock back to 1896, when the doctrine of separate but equal school facilities received a sort of casual endorsement from a Supreme Court concerned primarily with a question of public transportation. True, the apostles of the Brave New World will denounce the idea of applying the constitutional principles of 1896 to problems of the early 1960s, but there have been entirely too many such denunciations from thoughtless and ill-informed pedagogues. The Negro (precisely as the white) is entitled, so far as a system of education is concerned, to the same educational opportunities afforded his white counterpart, and neither more nor less. What he does with these educational opportunities thereafter is his question to answer.

I do not profess to know what the future holds for the Southern Negro, or for that matter, for the Northern Negro. The achievements of the colored people of the 1950s merit at least provisional applause: They are fighting their way out of millennial shadows—and more power to them! If an arriving generation of Negro children can sustain this momentum, the race should move ahead, first within itself, as Dr. Conant pleads, and in time—in time—toward equality with the larger and more established community around it. When that hour of equality arrives—whenever that hour arrives—white “prejudices” predictably will dissolve; there no longer would be a basis for them. What comes thereafter I cannot suggest, but it is reasonable to surmise that barriers once lowered will not thereafter be raised capriciously again. When the Negro race proves itself, in terms of Western values of maturity and achievement, it will be time enough to talk of complete social and economic integration. Until then, it is pointless to argue sociology; it is more useful, in every way, to meditate upon the transcendent issues of the law.

Part II
The Law

I think the proper course is to recognize that a State legislature can do whatever it sees fit to do unless it is restrained by some express prohibition in the Constitution of the United States or of the State, and that courts should be careful not to extend such prohibitions beyond their obvious meaning by reading into them conceptions of public policy that the particular court may happen to entertain.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes.

I

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its unanimous decision in the School Segregation Cases. By general agreement, this decision is regarded as the court’s most momentous opinion of this century; indeed, only the court’s opinion of 1856 in the Dred Scott case is thought to have had greater impact upon the American people or upon the course of historic events. Because of its destructive effect upon the stability of law and the permanence of long-established institutions, the school decision, in my own view, surpassed Scott v. Sanford in the area of jurisprudence gone mad. In one stroke, the Warren court violated those precepts of judicial restraint and constitutional interpretation which it most frequently has insisted on in the past; it transformed itself into a super-legislature—more, it usurped the functions of constitutional amendment that lie with not fewer than three-fourths of the States. Abandoning law, the court wedded sociology; discarding eighty years of unbroken precedent, members of the court substituted their own notions of psychology and moral fitness for the plain and palpable meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment in terms of racially separate public schools. And having prohibited unto the States the exercise of a power the States had been exercising with judicial approval since 1868, the court capped its day’s work by decreeing an end to segregation in schools of the District of Columbia. This latter stroke was achieved by judicial coup de main that left even the court’s best friends embarrassed; what happened, Ralph Catterall has remarked, is that the court declared “unthinkable” that which had been universally thought for 166 years.