Profile
                                   in
                                 Black
                                  and
                                 White

                            A FRANK PORTRAIT
                           OF SOUTH CAROLINA

                           By Howard H. Quint

                PUBLIC AFFAIRS PRESS, WASHINGTON, D. C.

                            ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

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

                              INTRODUCTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                              BROADUS MITCHELL

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

                                PREFACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other sources, notably periodical literature, the proceedings of the
General Assembly of South Carolina, and the Columbia _State_ have been
used to a limited extent. For the sake of brevity the newspapers are
referred to throughout the text simply as the _News and Courier_, the
_Record_, the _Morning News_ and the _Independent_.

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

                                               HOWARD H. QUINT

  _University of South Carolina
   Columbia, South Carolina_

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

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

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

                                CONTENTS

     The Development of Race Relationships                      1

                                   II
     The Case from Clarendon                                   12

     The Emergence of Patterns                                 21

                                   IV
     The White Folks Fight Back                                38

                                   V
     The Brotherhood of Segregated Men                         55

                                   VI
     A Place in the Shade                                      71

                                  VII
     The New Nullification                                     92

                                  VIII
     Politics and Segregation                                 128

                                   IX
     Another War of Yankee Aggression                         145

                                   X
     Collaborators, Eggheads, Do-Gooders, and Appeasers       167

                                   XI
     The Lost Cause Relost                                    181

     References                                               187

     Appendix (Text of Supreme Court decision on
          desegregation, May 17, 1954)                        206

     Index                                                    210

                               CHAPTER I

                 THE DEVELOPMENT OF RACE RELATIONSHIPS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                   II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                   IV

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

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

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

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

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

                                          1940              1952
                                     White    Negro    White     Negro
 Expenditure per pupil              $50.81   $15.16   $159.34   $95.65
 Capital outlay per pupil             6.25      .66     24.70    11.45
 Average length of school year (days)  175      147       180      178
 Average annual salary of
    classroom teachers                $938     $388    $2,644   $1,985
 Average years of college
    of classroom teachers                                 3.7      3.4
 Books in school libraries per pupil   2.3      0.7       3.0      0.9

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

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

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

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

                               CHAPTER II

                        THE CASE FROM CLARENDON

          When the social needs demand one settlement
          rather than another, there are times when we
          must bend symmetry, ignore history and sacrifice
          custom in the pursuit of other and larger
          ends. From history and philosophy and custom,
          we pass, therefore, to the force which in our
          day and generation is becoming the greatest of
          them all, the power of social justice which
          finds its outlet and expression in the method
          of sociology.... The final cause of law is
          the welfare of society.--_Justice Benjamin N.
          Cardozo._

Culmination of the effort of the Negroes of South Carolina to win
legal recognition of their rights to first class citizenship came
in 1954 in the Clarendon County school case. This was the key case
in the NAACP’s nationwide campaign to break down racial segregation
in public schools. Negro leaders purposely singled out Clarendon
County because it presented racially segregated schools in the worst
possible light. Located in the state’s black belt, the county in
1951 had approximately 23,000 Negroes and 8,000 whites. Enrolled in
its public schools were 6,531 Negro students as compared to 2,375
whites. Yet school expenditures totaled $395,329 for whites as against
$282,950 for Negroes.[49] In School District No. 22 (Summerton), the
district directly involved in the suit, there were 298 white pupils
and 2,259 Negro pupils.[50] In facilities such as libraries, lighting
fixtures, desks, play grounds, classroom space, lavatories, lunchrooms,
auditoriums and teacher ratio to pupil, the Negro schools were
decidedly inferior to those provided for whites. For example, the NAACP
pointed out in the hearing of the case before the federal court that
one of the Negro schools with 600 pupils had only two toilets, both
outdoors. Another school lacked drinking faucets and water had to be
brought in a bucket from the home of a neighboring minister.[51]

Clarendon is a typical South Carolina low country rural county and most
of its people, especially Negroes, are agricultural workers. In 1955
the _Nation_ described the county as a place where the people

     talk of Citizens’ Councils and the “economic squeeze,”
     where the Ku Klux Klan met with Bryant Bowles, head of the
     National Association for the Advancement of White People,
     as a featured speaker, where integration is freely referred
     to as a “Communist-Catholic-Jewish plot,” where a place of
     business displays the latest newspaper clippings showing
     crimes of Negro against white, where private citizens
     discuss the hated Ford Foundation along with the price of
     tobacco, where the NAACP has only a small chapter and where
     you hunt long and hard for a defender of the Negro.[52]

The Clarendon case, technically known as Harry Briggs, Jr., _et al._,
appellants, versus R. W. Elliott, _et al._, appellees, had its origins
in 1948 when a group of Negro citizens brought suit in federal court to
require state and county officials to provide school buses for Negro
pupils. Federal District Judge J. Waties Waring dismissed this suit on
the ground that the state as a governmental unit did not supply school
buses for any students. The following year Negro parents in Clarendon
petitioned authorities to bring Negro school facilities up to the
standards of the county’s white schools. The petition threatened legal
action if equality were not provided. In May, 1950, citing failure
of local officials to equalize school facilities, a suit was filed
asking that school authorities be compelled to provide equality. In
December, 1950, this suit was dropped and another, filed by forty Negro
parents, attacked segregation _per se_ as a violation of the Fourteenth
Amendment and asked the abolition of all segregation in public schools
based on race.[53] The suit was filed under NAACP auspices.

In May, 1951, the case was heard by a special three-judge court
presided over by Federal Circuit Judge John J. Parker of North Carolina
and District Judges George Bell Timmerman, Sr., of Columbia and J.
Waties Waring of Charleston. The suit represented the first all-out
legal attack in the deep South on the system of racial segregation
on the public school level. It was clearly a test case; the ruling
would provide a basis for future court decisions in similar cases. The
appellants were represented by Thurgood Marshall, chief counsel for the
NAACP; the appellees by attorneys Robert McC. Figg of Charleston and
S. Emory Rogers of Summerton. Figg is an able Charleston corporation
lawyer; Rogers, a determined defender of white supremacy at any price,
was attorney for the Summerton school board.

In the arguments before the court, Marshall sought to prove first that
the separate school facilities provided Negroes in District 22 were
in fact physically unequal and second that segregation _per se_ was
discriminatory and therefore a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Inasmuch as school officials readily admitted that the facilities
then offered Negroes in Clarendon were unequal, Marshall concentrated
on sociological and psychological arguments to support his second
contention. He argued that segregation invariably resulted in the
development of “psychological roadblocks” which prevented Negro pupils
from achieving “full absorption” of the educational process.[54]

To buttress this position, Marshall introduced what the late Walter
White, then executive secretary of the NAACP, thought “the most
impressive array of authorities ever assembled to testify as experts on
the unreasonableness of segregation.” Their arguments, he said, were
“irrefutable.”[55] The “experts” were half a dozen social scientists
from such universities as Harvard, Columbia, Vassar and Howard. They
held that segregation resulted in “discordant” education that caused
“moral confusion” for both whites and Negroes. Amongst Negroes it
resulted in “a lowering of self-esteem, a strengthening of resentment
and hostility” and a personality development that emphasized “a desire
to escape or withdraw from social participation.” Amongst white
children segregation developed a feeling of guilt caused by their being
taught simultaneously both the doctrine of brotherly love and the
practice of unbrotherly racial segregation.[56] Segregation was said to
be building into the Negro “the very characteristics” which were then
used to justify prejudice.

The counter case presented by Clarendon school officials contained
three basic points. First, they maintained that segregation _per
se_ was not violative of the Fourteenth Amendment as it had been
recognized as legal by the courts, Congress and the governments of
seventeen states. The only condition that could be legally demanded
was that the segregated facilities be substantially equal. Attorney
Figg readily admitted that school facilities then being offered Negroes
in the county were unequal but asked that the court allow the state a
“reasonable” time in which to equalize them. South Carolina, he pointed
out, was in the midst of a statewide equalization program. The second
argument held that school segregation statutes were “a valid exercise
of legislative power,” a matter of state legislative policy rather than
of constitutional right. No legal compulsion could oblige a state to
accept “scientific opinion” that its school program “must be geared
to personality development.” The third contention of appellees was
that to disturb drastically the racial _status quo_ in the deep South
would produce “dangerous tensions and unrest.” Racially segregated
school facilities, Figg insisted, were the “normal” result of a racial
conflict heritage in the state of South Carolina.[57]

The court ruled two to one against the appellants. Judges Parker
and Timmerman held that segregation _per se_ was not a violation of
the Fourteenth Amendment. They said, however, that “the educational
facilities and opportunities” provided both races “must be equal.”
Equality had to be provided “promptly” and “in good faith.”
Consequently school officials were directed to report to the court
after six months as to what actions were being taken to provide
equality. In rejecting Marshall’s line of argumentation the court
asserted that judges had “no more right to read their ideas of
sociology into the Constitution than their ideas of economics.”

Judge Waring dissented vigorously. The majority opinion, he wrote, was
“unreasonable, unscientific, and based on unadulterated prejudice.”
He condemned the “sadistic insistence of the ‘white supremacists’ in
declaring that their will must be imposed irrespective of rights of
other citizens.”[58]

Governor James F. Byrnes hailed the majority ruling upholding school
segregation as “unanswerable.” The court’s “well-reasoned opinion,” he
maintained, completely vindicated the separate-but-equal doctrine.[59]

                                   II

Only slowly had white South Carolina awakened to the threat to legal
school segregation contained in the repeated petitions and suits of
Clarendon Negroes. By the time the state legislature convened in
January, 1951, the menace was fully realized. A definite fear had
developed that the courts might rule in favor of the Negro petitioners.
Basis for this fear was a long line of recent United States Supreme
Court rulings outlawing segregation in state university graduate and
professional schools even when facilities provided Negroes were in fact
substantially equal to those for whites. The legislators and other
state officials clearly recognized that by no criteria were white and
Negro schools even remotely equal, not only in Clarendon but over the
entire state. White South Carolina’s only hope, they reasoned, lay in
an immediate and far reaching program to provide equal facilities for
each race. At the same time certain precautionary measures had to be
taken against the possibility that the courts might hold segregation
_per se_ illegal.

Leadership in this program fell to Governor James F. Byrnes, who, after
a long career in the federal government, including a short period of
service on the Supreme Court, had broken with President Truman and the
national Democratic Party and had returned to South Carolina to vent
his frustration against the national government and the Democratic
Party. Elected governor in 1950, he was inaugurated in January, 1951.
Almost immediately Byrnes began a long range program which was to
provide a basis for the state’s defense of the racial _status quo_ and
the doctrine of separate-but-equal schools. The program subsequently
was enacted by the 1951 state legislature. The position of Byrnes,
as well as that of many of the state’s other leaders, was summarized
in a series of the governor’s speeches in early 1951. South Carolina,
he announced, would not then “nor for some years to come mix white
and colored children” in public schools. To prevent this situation
the state would, if necessary, “reluctantly” abandon its public
school system. “A lawful way” would be found to educate all children
“and at the same time provide separate schools for the races.” While
conceding the inferiority of Negro schools, Byrnes insisted that the
educational crisis facing the state was caused by “the politicians
in Washington and the Negro agitators in South Carolina” seeking to
alter the “Southern way of life.” But they would find that “what a
Carpetbag government could not do in the Reconstruction period” was
likewise impossible in 1951. The governor would protect the “innocent
Colored children,” the victims of those elements which sought to end
segregation. With a prescience characteristic of white spokesmen
for racial separation, he insisted that “the overwhelming majority
of colored people in this state” did not want integrated schools.
Byrnes denied that new school policies were based on the expediency
of necessity rather than on high principle. He righteously observed
shortly after the district court ruling that “had there been no suit
... I would have urged this school program to help the white and
colored children” of the state.[60]

The most important undertaking in the Byrnes educational approach was
the beginning of a tremendous school construction program. The cost
was estimated at $75,000,000 though the amount actually spent on the
project by 1957 was more than double the original figure. To finance
new school construction, Byrnes secured legislative passage of a three
percent sales tax.[61] This program, in which more than half the funds
were spent for Negro schools, had the result of giving the Negroes
better physical school facilities in some localities than those of the
whites.

In addition to these constructive measures, the state legislature,
upon Byrnes’s recommendation, enacted several “preparedness measures”
for use in the event the federal courts outlawed segregation. Local
school officials were given authority to sell or lease school property.
Churches or other private groups thus would be enabled to maintain
schools under some sort of private school plan. Another strategem
provided that pupils could be transferred from one school to another
only with the approval of the superintendents of both schools
affected.[62]

A measure that caused understandable hesitation on the part of many
public officials and civic groups was the repeal of the constitutional
provision requiring a state supported public school system. The NAACP
and other Negro groups vigorously opposed repeal, but in February,
1952, the legislature approved a referendum on the proposal. In the
referendum, held the following November, 68 percent of those voting
favored repeal. Opponents of the measure considered the 32 percent
against repeal something of a moral victory for their side.[63]

To coordinate state policy on the segregation issue, the legislature
created a special 15-member committee. This group came to be known as
the Gressette Committee, after its chairman, State Senator L. Marion
Gressette, a fifty-three year old Phi Beta Kappa, farmer-lawyer from
the low country Calhoun County. The committee had a double function.
First, it was directed to study the conditions that would confront the
state should the federal courts direct an end to segregation in public
schools. Second, it was to recommend to the legislature a course of
action which would “alleviate the serious condition which would result”
from such an eventuality.[64] This committee, after assisting Byrnes in
developing his program in 1951, was inactive from that time until the
Supreme Court ruling of May 17, 1954.

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

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

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

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

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

                                   IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

                       THE EMERGENCE OF PATTERNS

          So strongly drawn is the line between the two
          races ... and so strengthened by the form of
          habit and education, that ... no power on earth
          can overcome the difficulty.--_John C. Calhoun._

The May 17, 1954, decision of the Supreme Court in the school
segregation cases issued in a new era in race relations in the South.
From this point onward the race issue centered on public school
integration. Reaction to the ruling tended to vary in proportion to
the percentage of Negroes in the local population. Some border areas
began preparations for compliance; the deep South was defiant. South
Carolina, with a high percentage of Negro population (between 35 and
40 percent) and with a strong master-servant tradition governing its
race relations, was among the most intransigent of the deep South
states. Few white South Carolinians were willing even to consider
compliance with the decision as being among the possible solutions to
the segregation problem.

The Clarendon verdict momentarily stunned the white citizenry of
South Carolina. Though politicians and their allies in the “power
structure” of the state quickly warmed to their traditional thespian
role of championing white supremacy and competed in lambasting the
Court and the decision, the general public was slow in grasping its
full implications. It was this seeming state of indecision that misled
those moderates who were willing to go ahead and at least try school
integration. The majesty of a Supreme Court decision lent conviction
that little needed to be done and in any event there was no sense in
antagonizing one’s neighbors. As a consequence the moderates rested on
their oars and did virtually nothing to help prepare the way for the
implementation of the Court’s ruling. This was a tragic error. But in
retrospect and admittedly with the benefit of historical hindsight, it
was no more an error than the Court’s allowing the Clarendon County
officials an unspecified length of time to achieve integration. Had
the Court ordered immediate integration, compliance might well have
been forthcoming since at the time there was no alternative course
of action. As was, the Court allowed the Clarendon officials time to
develop stalling tactics and the state to adopt a public policy which
together have been successful in preventing even one Negro child from
entering a white public school in South Carolina.

Official reaction to the decision was universally condemnatory.
Governor James F. Byrnes was “shocked” to learn that the Court had
overthrown the Plessy doctrine. The late Senator Burnet R. Maybank
labeled the ruling “a shameful political edict rather than a judicial
decision.” The Court made the ruling, he asserted, only “under the
duress” of Chief Justice Earl Warren and Attorney General Herbert
Brownell. Had the Democrats been in power, the decision would never
have been made. Senator Olin D. Johnston, too, saw the fine Venetian
hands of Warren and Brownell in the decision which he described as “a
flagrant, direct appeal for the political favor of minority groups.”
He deplored the Court’s “radical departure from the well-reasoned”
separate-but-equal doctrine as being written largely by “subversive
groups.”[74]

Senator J. Strom Thurmond was, if anything, even more critical. Blaming
the decision on “pressure and power politics,” he termed it “one of
the worst ever handed down by any court ... in this country.” Most
of the authorities cited by the Court, he said, “were either members
of Communist-front organizations” or their loyalty was “in serious
question.” Broadening his attack, Thurmond declared that integration
was “impractical, illogical, and unconstitutional” and undesired by
white people or “good Negro people” of the South. The trouble came from
“outside agitators” who were stirring up Negroes with discrimination
charges.[75]

Similarly, Attorney General T. C. Callison saw “no constitutional
authority, no statutory authority, no judicial precedent, no reason and
no justice in that decision.” Callison, a small town lawyer, described
Gunnar Myrdal, “the principal authority” used by the Court, as “a
foreign Socialist, with no first hand knowledge of conditions in the
South.” Many of Myrdal’s “collaborators” in the writing of _An American
Dilemma_ were allegedly “members of Communist front organizations.”[76]

In sharp contrast to the comments of the state’s leading political
figures was the reaction of James M. Hinton, state NAACP president.
Hinton believed that there was “no place in a democracy, and certainly
not in the Christian church, for segregation.” Both whites and Negroes
of South Carolina, he thought, would accept “any decision from the U.
S. Supreme Court.”[77]

The press was no less critical than the politicians. The Charleston
_News and Courier_ was especially outspoken. This paper attacked the
decision on several grounds. It gave new meaning to the Constitution;
“drove another nail into the coffin of states rights;” consisted of a
“sociological finding, as contrasted with an affirmation of the law;”
constituted an abridgement of “the freedom of white people;” repealed
and outlawed laws and customs that were “older than the Republic;” and
was the result of packing the Supreme Court “to represent the New-Fair
Deal viewpoint” to the exclusion of the “States Rights viewpoint.”
Noting the embarrassingly favorable reaction to the decision throughout
the non-Southern part of the country and the world, the _News and
Courier_ asserted that the only ones “unhappy” with the ruling were
“white Southerners ... and the rank and file of self-respecting
Negroes,” who were “not interested in being compelled to associate with
one another.” While Editor Thomas R. Waring’s paper urged “wisdom and
tolerance,” it opposed “cowardice” on the part of Southerners.[78]

The Columbia _Record_ was more realistic. Southerners should not have
been surprised by the Supreme Court’s “bouleversement on segregation,”
said Editor Buchanan, because such a decision was the logical result of
previous cases affecting graduate and professional levels of education.
It was based “not upon law but upon sociology and psychology, so-called
social sciences which true scientists agree today are not scientific.”
The opinion was “a sociological interpretation of the Constitution”
and segregation was “sociologically, not legally ... unconstitutional,
null and void.” The Court was guilty of getting “too far ahead too fast
of public opinion in the South.” The Justices might have held that
segregation _per se_ was inequality, suggested the _Record_, but then
concluded that because of “the cultural, health, and other differences
between children of the two races and in the preponderance of Negroes
in its school population” the Clarendon district had problems which
would make integration “harmful, psychologically and sociologically.”
The capital city paper, a strong supporter of President Eisenhower,
took issue with those who blamed or credited the decision on the
Republican administration. Buchanan insisted that the decision was a
Democratic ruling eight to one, since Eisenhower had appointed only one
justice to the Court. In seeking to absolve Chief Justice Warren of
responsibility, the _Record_ declared with a good deal of truth that
there were “some indications” that the case had been decided before
Warren’s appointment.[79] The editor of the _Record_ refused to concede
that what was involved was an “American” decision rather than either a
Republican or a Democratic one.

The Anderson _Independent_ likewise stressed the non-legal nature of
the Court’s action. Taking exactly the opposite direction from the
_Record_, the upcountry paper said that the decision, which combined
“a bit of law along with large doses of psychology and sociology,”
was not unexpected in view of the pro-integration policies of the
Republican administration. It conveniently ignored the attitude of the
national Democratic Party toward the segregation issue. Decision or
no decision, said the _Independent_, the races would “not be mixed in
South Carolina schools today, tomorrow, next year or in the years to
come.”[80]

Only the Florence _Morning News_ admitted the end of school segregation
in South Carolina a probability. On the day following the decision,
Editor Jack H. O’Dowd announced, prematurely to be sure, that
“segregation is ended in Southern schools.” He then added, “It can
be assumed that South Carolina, in the immediate future, is to have
integrated schools, or no public schools.... The question is no longer
whether or not segregation is proper, the present question is what the
state is to do in the face of the Court’s decision.” Within a year,
however, the Florence editor saw the South Carolina light, or felt the
intolerably hot breath of the white population on his neck, and became
more critical of the decision. In April, 1955, he chastised the Court
for having “swapped law and legal tradition for ... warped ideas of
sociology” which only endangered the “medium through which the Negro
has made his greatest gains--public education.”[81]

White South Carolinians generally were no less antagonistic toward the
decision than their political leaders and newspapers. W. D. Workman,
Jr., the _News and Courier_ correspondent in Columbia, thought the
Court was more concerned with the Southern Negro than his white
neighbor. And this in spite of the fact that the latter had always
relied upon the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution
“rather than upon the changing social and political standards of a
polyglot nation.” Southerners, boasted this young apostle of the old
order, “have been and still are, closer by blood, by belief, and by
behavior to the framers of those two documents than are persons of any
other section of the country.”[82] L. B. McCord, the Clarendon County
school superintendent and former Presbyterian minister, thought the
decision “one of the worst things that has happened in this century,”
endangering as it did “_the splendid relation_” which had previously
existed between the races “in this good old Southland.”[83]

Stanley F. Morse, president of the Charleston Grass Roots League, a
white supremacy organization, viewed the decision as “just another
successful step in the Red Revolution against the United States,”
marking “the attainment of one of the objectives of the Communist
drive among U. S. Negroes started in 1920.” The fact that the decision
was unanimous was “indicative of powerful pressure on the Court by
‘liberal’ politicians and Marxian Socialist conspirators.” In a similar
manner another Charleston man, Huger Sinkler, attorney and former state
legislator, considered the decision to be “but another aftermath to
Appomattox.” He believed that

     ... the authors of this latest outrage are as deeply imbued
     with hatred for our Southern customs as was Thaddeus
     Stevens. And, unfortunately, in both periods, we find as
     President a man whose decisions are obviously made for him
     by others.

     In the case of Grant, it was the man with the mulatto
     mistress, Thaddeus Stevens, and the small corps of
     abolitionists. In the instance of Eisenhower, it would
     appear to be Dewey, Brownell and Dulles, men whose
     political ambitions lead them to pose as friends of the
     underprivileged, and, in the case of Dewey, a man with an
     open hatred for the South....

     Reconstruction days were harsh, but, notwithstanding the
     scalawags, the carpetbaggers and the federal bayonet,
     the basic principles for which the South fought were not
     destroyed.

     Today, we face a similar challenge. Perhaps, if we have
     the strength of character, exhibited by the generation
     preceding, the dawn of a new 1876 will arrive.[84]

The reaction of the white people of Clarendon County to the decision,
according to _Record_ reporter Carlton Truax, a former missionary,
ranged from “resignation to bitterness and violent rebellion.” A
minority “fringe group” openly expressed the opinion that blood would
flow if Negroes sought admission in white Clarendon schools. Truax
found “much bitterness, some deep frustration and often a sense of
helplessness.” At a meeting held in June, 1955, approximately 350 white
residents of the Summerton school district agreed that the schools
should be kept open only until the courts ordered the admission of a
Negro pupil to the white school.[85] The white Clarendon community had
decided that segregation was more important than education.

Reaction to the implementing decision of May 31, 1955, was less
critical than that of the earlier ruling. The Columbia _Record_
considered the Court’s plan to remand the cases to lower courts a
partial Southern victory even though the justices failed to change
their original decision. Similarly the Florence _Morning News_ saw
“some small comfort” for the South in the Court’s failure to establish
a deadline for compliance. In a more critical mood, the Anderson
_Independent_ declared that “the poison prescribed when the Supreme
Court wrote new law into the Constitution last year is no less deadly
offered in the small doses as now directed.” The Charleston _News and
Courier_ believed that the Court’s “as soon as practicable” meant
“never at all.”[86]

Attorney General T. C. Callison, speaking for the state leaders,
termed the implementing decision “quite unsatisfactory.” He asserted
once again that integration in South Carolina would “bring about every
condition which will create a breeding bed for communism.”[87]

An outgrowth of the Supreme Court’s invalidation of segregation in the
public schools was increased criticism of the Court itself. Extremists
expressed scorn for the Court as an instrument of government; others
urged the Court’s powers be curbed by Congress. Senator Thurmond
maintained that the members of the Court were “not worthy to wear the
robes of their high office.” James H. Hammond, former state senator
and direct lineal descendant of the ante-bellum United States senator
of “Cotton is King” fame, called the justices “a bunch of skunks.” At
a rally at Laurens, E. L. Edwards, the Grand Dragon of the national
Ku Klux Klan, referred to the “nine buzzards on the Supreme Court.”
State Representative George Harrell of Florence County introduced into
the state legislature a resolution which urged Congress to investigate
the Court for “attempting to enact and enforce as law the sociological
concepts of its members.”[88]

According to the _News and Courier_ the Court had become “an
instrument to uphold the right of Big Government to slap down state
and individual rights.” It was more concerned with “the rights of
leftist labor officials and Communist editors” than “the rights of
white Southerners.” And it had degenerated into a mere political arm
of the Eisenhower administration. Indirectly accusing the President of
court-packing in the appointment of John Marshall Harlan, the _News
and Courier_ peevishly declared that “a suitable man could have been
found whose grandfather had not been the only dissenter to the basic
(Plessy-Ferguson) decision in the 1896 issue.”[89] The need of the
country, said the _Record_, was “a Supreme Court in the pre-New Deal
tradition, one of integrity, stability, learning and judicial outlook.”
Unfortunately neither national party offered hope in this area. Warren
was “a political appointment” and on the Court he had been a “political
Chief Justice.”[90] No less critical of the Court, the _Independent_
suggested that the justices would be less subject to “political
pressures” and “radical departures” if they were appointed not for life
but for specified terms.[91] The Columbia _State_, not to be undone,
opined that the popularity of the Supreme Court among “sound thinking
people seems to resemble that of measles.” It asserted on another
occasion that the Court had rather “meander through Myrdalism than
precedents.”[92]

Congressman Robert J. Ashmore, a member of the House Judiciary
Committee, criticized the Court for a long line of “foolish,
unconstitutional and un-American” decisions. Sooner or later, he
asserted, Congress would realize that the real aim of the justices
was “to set up their socialistic ideas as supreme.” In like manner
Representative William Jennings Bryan Dorn accused the Court
of degenerating into a mere “rubber stamp” for the Eisenhower
administration.[93]

Former Justice James F. Byrnes spoke for states righters who would curb
the powers of the Court as a means of halting “creeping centralism.”
Holding the desegregation decision an amendment to rather than an
interpretation of the Constitution, Byrnes criticized the Court for
impairing “progress and ... freedom,” undoing the South’s “steadily
advancing racial amity,” and undermining the Constitution. He blamed
the decision on political factors and attempted to discredit the
sources cited in the Court’s opinion. The one-time New Dealer quoted
Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi as authority for the statement
that the files of the House Un-American Activities Committee were
“replete with citations and information” concerning Theodore Brameld
and E. Franklin Frazier, whose studies were considered by the Court.
Allegedly, the files contained “18 citations of Frazier’s connections
with Communist causes in the United States.” Byrnes was especially
critical of the use of Myrdal’s _An American Dilemma_. He branded as
obviously false Myrdal’s statement that “in the South the Negro’s
person and property are practically subject to the whim of any white
person who wishes to take advantage of him or to punish him for any
real or fancied wrongdoing or insult.” Removed from the bench and no
longer the wearer of the judicial ermine, Byrnes stated flatly that
the only solution to such a situation was to limit the authority
of the Court. The trend toward centralization of government powers
in Washington, said the ex-War Mobilizer, was bringing “joy to the
Communists and their fellow travelers, for they could more easily
influence one government” than forty-eight.[94]

Illustrative of the widespread opposition to the Court and its
anti-segregation decisions was a resolution signed by 52 prominent
white South Carolinians and circulated throughout the state for
signature by other Carolinians. All the original signers of this
resolution could be included in the State’s “power structure.” The more
outstanding included E. H. Agnew, Eugene S. Blease, Robert R. Coker,
Rev. Edward B. Guerry, R. Beverly Herbert, Col. Wyndham M. Manning,
Thomas H. Pope, Herbert Ravenel Sass, Ellison D. Smith, Jr., Farley
Smith, the Rt. Rev. Albert S. Thomas, Ransome J. Williams and William
D. Workman, Jr. These people, said the _News and Courier_, “are not
crackpots, extremists, Klansmen, rightists or leftists. They are
largely middle-of-the-roaders. They are intelligent white men. They are
leaders in law, clergy, business, farming, education, and politics of
our state. In other words, they are a cross section of the better-class
moderate, white people of South Carolina.”[95]

The “Committee of 52” resolved that the Supreme Court relied “not upon
the body of established American law, but upon the dubious conclusions
of sociologists and psychologists whose number includes persons tainted
with Communism;” that pressure from the NAACP and other “self-serving
organizations” had “lowered the will of politicians and the public
generally to resist encroachments upon the sovereign rights of states;”
and that such pressure was endangering both “the public school system
of South Carolina and the harmonious relationship between the white and
Negro races.” Therefore, the resolution urged the state legislature
to take such steps as “may be necessary or desirable to interpose the
sovereignty of the State of South Carolina between Federal courts and
local school officials.”[96] The petitioners had some initial success
and within a week 7,000 persons had reportedly signed the resolution.
However, this movement soon lost its drive and produced no tangible
results.

As already observed, one of the tactics most widely used by the
segregationists was ridicule and disparagement of the Court’s use of
sociological and psychological authority. W. D. Workman, Jr., some
fifty years behind the times, spoke of the “new school of sociological
jurisprudence.” If Negro children required the company of white
children “to fully develop personality and education,” he wrote, then
South Carolina needed help because in some areas there weren’t “enough
white folks to go around.” In a heavy handed attempt at facetiousness,
he suggested that the Supreme Court set up the number of white and
colored children necessary to form an acceptable classroom situation.
In like vein, the _Record_ complained that “nobody knows what the law
is today or what it will be tomorrow with a Supreme Court making its
decisions on whim, fancy or pseudo sociology.”[97]

The _News and Courier_, which shudders at all innovations, was
critical of the Court’s emphasis on “psychiatry.” The injection of
psychiatry into the controversy brought a letter to the editor from
Dr. Norton Williams, a Charleston psychiatrist, who felt that the
Supreme Court had “used unwise judgment” and accepted “bad advice”
from the psychiatrists who testified in the Clarendon case. “False
interpretations” of psychiatry “in the hands of some psychiatrists with
misguided motivations” would lead to “unhappy situations” such as the
anti-segregation riots in Delaware and Tennessee. Many psychiatrists,
according to Williams, “using good, profound psychiatric principles,”
realized the need for maintaining segregation. The Negro, a member of
a culturally inferior race, was not yet ready for integration. Until
he had developed his own culture he would remain unready. To force
integration suddenly would make the Negro feel “inferior, hostile, or
defiantly competitive.”[98]

Only on the rarest of occasions did a white South Carolinian speak out
in favor of the decision of the Supreme Court. On one such occasion
H. B. Clark of Charleston, in a letter to the _News and Courier_,
criticized the white man’s “conception of the Negro as something
slightly subhuman, a sort of beast of burden for the exploitation of
the white man.” He declared that

     All the restrictions upon economic and educational
     opportunity, all the degrading Jim Crow laws which we
     impose upon the Negro say, in effect, “We no longer own
     you as slaves, but we are determined to keep you in a
     subordinate position in our society, and to impress upon
     you in a thousand small ways every day that you are an
     inferior race.” Now the justices of the Supreme Court are
     not black-hearted villains who have sold their souls to the
     devil of political expediency; on the contrary, they are
     simply nine Americans honest enough to face inescapable
     conflict between these undemocratic values of the South
     and the principles of equality and freedom on which the
     Constitution is based, and courageous enough to proclaim
     the necessity of eliminating this paradoxical state of
     affairs no matter what the cost in terms of readjustment of
     traditional thinking.[99]

                                   II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The course of race relations in the state during the period following
the court decision was indicative of the moves and counter moves by
the proponents and opponents of integration. Segregationists were
unanimous in asserting that race relations had been harmonious in the
state in the days before the “agitation” began. Historically, said the
_News and Courier_, “whites and Negroes have got along with a minimum
of friction in the South.” Likewise, “the South was making rapid
progress toward elimination of racial prejudice,” claimed the _Record_.
“There was sympathy and understanding among whites for Negroes in the
South.” This era of good will allegedly had been overturned by those
who would force integration on an unwilling South. For the “cold war”
between the races, full responsibility rested with the “titular Negro
leadership.”[110]

During the year between the original ruling and the implementation
decree there was little outward evidence that relations between the
races had changed appreciably. Each side appeared to be awaiting final
action by the Court before digging in and taking its stand. Abruptly
in the summer of 1955 the situation changed. The implementing ruling
came on the last day of May. Almost at once there followed such “overt
actions as the filing of NAACP-sponsored integration petitions.” In
response, the whites organized the Citizens Councils which employed
or threatened to employ the economic boycott as a means of ending
the attempts by Negroes to secure school integration. The most
notable example of the economic boycott in action came in the city
of Orangeburg in 1955-56. Orangeburg Negroes retaliated in kind and
relations between the races deteriorated generally, remaining at their
lowest between the summers of 1955 and 1956. The _New York Times_, in
surveying race relations in early 1956, noted this retrogradation.
So did the _News and Courier’s_ W. D. Workman, Jr., who reported “a
massive deterioration of the racial amity which had been developing
and increasing between whites and Negroes.” “Distrust, suspicion
and growing bitterness” had supplanted good will. By the following
December, when the full implications of the boycott were felt and
realized by both whites and Negroes, Workman noted that relations
between the races seemed “considerably more tranquil” than a year
earlier. He observed that while neither side had compromised “its
adamant position,” each was attempting to soft-pedal the issue.[111]

A few whites, by indirection, conceded that the “mutual respect
and affection” which allegedly had traditionally characterized the
relations between the races in South Carolina resulted from the
Negro’s submission, in the face of overpowering odds, to a _modus
vivendi_ dictated by the white man. Dr. E. E. Colvin, pastor of the
Immanuel Baptist Church of Orangeburg, thought segregation had been
a success even if the South “used to have an occasional lynching.
Almost invariably the Negro who was lynched had committed some terrible
crime.” By contrast, “up North where they don’t have segregation they
have a race riot every once in a while.” Similarly, Dr. J. G. McMaster
of Kingstree wrote that “whites have sometimes taken advantage of
colored but that can be expected and on the other hand, Negroes are
less honest with each other than are whites with them.”[112]

                                   IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                               CHAPTER IV

                       THE WHITE FOLKS FIGHT BACK

          We are surrounded by invisible dangers, against
          which nothing can protect us, but our foresight
          and energy.--_John C. Calhoun_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Florence chapter was headed by G. L. Ivey, a restaurant owner, who
fired all of his Negro employees immediately after the Supreme Court
decision of May 17, 1954. The pronouncements of Ivey and Bowles were
similar to those made by some of the more outspoken members of the
Klan. What the Negro really wanted, Ivey told white Carolinians, was