Profile in Black and White
Reading edition
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
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
CONTENTS
I
The Development of Race Relationships 1
II
The Case from Clarendon 12
III
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