by John Egerton
Several major religious bodies in the region, including the Southern Baptist Convention, would endorse the ruling. Many of the largest and most influential daily newspapers across the South—from the Dallas Morning News to the Miami Herald, from the Louisville Courier-Journal to the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot—declared themselves editorially to be at least resigned to, if not positively accepting of, the verdict of the court. (The most extreme counterpoint came from Mississippi’s Frederick Sullens, editor of the Jackson Daily News; in a black-bordered front-page editorial called “Blood on the White Marble Steps,” he declared threateningly, “This is a fight for white supremacy … there will be no room for neutrals or non-combatants … if you are a member of the Caucasian race … You Are For Us Or Against Us.”)
Ralph McGill was traveling in England when he received the news; back home, his Constitution and the Journal told their readers that Georgia was big enough to face this, never mind what Talmadge said. Hodding Carter wrote in the Delta Democrat-Times: “If ever a region asked for such a decree the South did through its shocking, calculated and cynical disobedience to its own state constitutions, which specify that separate school systems must be equal.” In the Raleigh News & Observer, Jonathan Daniels predicted that the decision “will be met in the South with the good sense and the good will of the people of both races in a manner which will serve the children and honor America.”
To W. E. B. Du Bois, the Brown ruling was a giant step toward “complete freedom and equality between black and white Americans.” To Charles S. Johnson, it was “the most important national mandate on civil rights since the Emancipation Proclamation.” Lillian Smith called it “every child’s Magna Carta.” In New York, Walter White was exuberant at an NAACP news conference, and Thurgood Marshall seemed content to let him have the spotlight. (To one reporter, though, Marshall did offer a prediction that school segregation would be eradicated within five years, and in less than ten years Jim Crow would be dead and buried forever.) Judge J. Waties Waring, now retired, gave the press a brief statement in praise of the court, but made no reference to the Charleston conflict or his part in it. That evening, he and his wife invited a few friends for a quiet celebration in their Manhattan apartment.
For the next several days, the Virginia and South Carolina newspapers would report and comment at length on the Supreme Court ruling. The decision itself was printed in full, and the reactions of scores of people were recorded, from governors and senators to school officials and people on the street. Virginius Dabney forecast in his Times-Dispatch editorial that the “truly historic decision” would take years to implement; he called on “men and women of good will in both races” to work it out. In the Richmond News Leader, editor James J. Kilpatrick declared, “We accept the Supreme Court’s ruling. We do not accept it willingly, or cheerfully or philosophically. We accept it because we have to.” In Charleston, News & Courier editor Thomas R. Waring concluded that the court “has cut deeply into the sinews of the Republic,” and driven “another nail in the coffin of States’ rights.” He would keep up a fusillade of outrage and invective against the federal judiciary for months and years to come.
In all of the extended comments recorded by the press, not much was heard from the people whose courageous acts had forced the South and the nation to face up to the segregation issue. Neither L. Francis Griffin nor Barbara Johns was quoted prominently, and neither of them would live to see a fully integrated school system in Prince Edward County, Virginia; most of the whites there would retreat to private schools rather than submit to such a change. Likewise in Clarendon County, South Carolina, school segregation would be perpetuated by the creation of private schools for whites, and black citizens would have little to show for their costly fight against white supremacy.
Most of the public praise and condemnation that Harry Briggs and J. A. DeLaine would get for having the temerity to stand up against racial discrimination had already come and gone when the Supreme Court decision vindicated their belief in the law. Their reward for such transcending faith would never be anything tangible, never much more than the thought, the abstract realization, that in some way they had helped others.
Briggs and DeLaine and most of the other plaintiffs in the school suit didn’t remain long in Summerton, in Clarendon, in South Carolina, or even in the South. Some were driven out by hostility and threats, others by the lack of opportunity or by discouragement with the glacial pace of change. The Reverend DeLaine would continue his ministry in the North for a time, and then turn back toward home, living out his last years in North Carolina.
Harry Briggs finally settled in the Bronx and sent for his family; he and his wife raised their children there. Sometimes on the city’s hard and forbidding streets, Briggs was like the protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—one anonymous immigrant among many, the product of a peasant culture, driven to nostalgic reminiscence and melancholy by the smell of a street vendor’s baked Carolina yams.
Harry Briggs would never outlive his longing for the salt marshes and the sandy loam of the Carolina low country. What is more—and worse—neither he nor his brother in exile, Joseph DeLaine, would ever have the satisfaction of knowing the full measure of their gift to America, and to their native South.
Epilogue: There Comes a Time
When I picked up a Courier-Journal at the student cafeteria that Tuesday morning, I took a quick glance at the banner headline—SUPREME COURT BANS SCHOOL SEGREGATION—and then flipped to the sports section. Practically the entire front page was filled with stories about the court ruling, and I was curious enough to wonder vaguely what it all meant—but I had more important things on my mind. Just a week or so before, a twenty-five-year-old British physician named Roger Bannister had run a mile in less than four minutes. No one else had ever done that. His picture had been on page one, and the sports pages had told and retold the amazing story. I read it all avidly, thrilled by this singular act of athletic achievement.
This was my first and only year at Western Kentucky State College. I went into Harry Truman’s desegregated army that summer, taking with me nothing but pleasant memories of my introduction to campus life—all the pretty girls, the good friends I had made, the great basketball team (and incidentally, one good professor, an English teacher who complimented my writing and encouraged me to think of becoming a journalist).
In that all-white environment, I never gave a moment’s thought, one way or the other, to the matter of skin color. Segregation didn’t restrict me in any way, so it was easy to accept things the way they were, to take my freedom for granted and not worry about anybody else’s. I do remember, though, that when I was thrown together with many different kinds of people in the army, I sometimes felt vaguely defensive and inferior around strange-talking Yankees, who seemed a lot more weird and mystifying—and at times intimidating—than the black guys from Mississippi and Alabama.
Almost forty years later, when I went back to take a closer look at the May 1954 issues of the Courier-Journal, some of the stories I found seemed newly significant to me, like items from a time capsule or long-lost pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. They had been there all along, of course; I just hadn’t paid any attention to them at the time.
For weeks before the Brown story broke, the paper was full of news and comment about Senator McCarthy’s crusade against “subversives,” and the fall of the French in Indochina. I could see in retrospect how tense and agitated people were about the perceived threat of communism, and how that caused them to tolerate and rationalize the most extreme abuses of civil rights and civil liberties. I could also see how fear and ignorance of “the red menace” played into the hands of the South’s racist demagogues.
In the first two weeks of May, the paper virtually ignored the festering controversy over race and the schools; no one in Kentucky seemed all that concerned about it. On Sunday the sixteenth, Tarleton Collier of the C-J editorial staff had a long review of the just-released Harry Ashmore book, The Negro and the Scho
ols. The next day, there was a page-one story about Carl and Anne Braden, a white couple identified as “active in the Progressive Party” (and, incidentally, both employed by the newspaper company); they had bought a house in a Louisville subdivision and transferred the title to a black couple. The all-white neighborhood was up in arms; six shots had been fired into the home, and a cross was burned outside. I hadn’t even seen those stories the first time around.
On Tuesday’s editorial page, the lengthy and favorable comment on Brown was altogether in keeping with the liberal opinions and beliefs long expressed by the Courier-Journal’s president and editor, Barry Bingham, by its publisher, Mark Ethridge, and by Collier and the other opinion writers. The decision had been coming for a long time, they said, so no one should be surprised; besides, the outcome could hardly have been otherwise, given the language and spirit of the Constitution. Those in the Deep South who vowed defiance and threatened to abolish public education were entertaining “a mad and impossible idea.” When they came to their senses, the editorial predicted, they would see that this was not the end of the world but the fulfillment of the democratic promise.
The names were all familiar to me now—Bingham, Ethridge, Collier, Ashmore. I knew who the Bradens were, too; he would be red-baited and railroaded to prison in the climate of hysteria that was then about to begin, and she would become a prime mover of the surviving remnant of radicals in the Southern Conference Educational Fund. These were just a few of the scores of people I had encountered along the road from Roosevelt to Brown.
As I examined this microfilmed artifact, I had a peculiar sensation of something akin to double vision. Through the eyes of a nineteen-year-old college freshman, I got a narrow, nearsighted view of Roger Bannister, the carefree “good old days” of my youth, and not much else—but with the perception of an older traveler in time, I found myself gazing back at a multitude of complex people and a parade of dramatic events spanning an entire generation of twentieth-century American life.
I was coming at last to my intended destination, to the end of my journey of discovery. There would be no definitive moment of finality, no tidy conclusion, nor had I expected one. If only history were that neat and clean. But it’s not—it’s a perpetual story, an unending saga of accidental and deliberate happenings, rolling like a mighty locomotive through time and space. I had climbed aboard the train in November 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt answered the call to save the nation, and with it the South; I was getting off in May 1954, just as the people of the region, white and black, were absorbing the news that Jim Crow, age fifty-eight, had been dealt a potentially fatal blow by the Supreme Court.
There was just enough time for one more look around—a fleeting glance backward, an anxious peek ahead—before we pulled into the station.
Through the remaining days of 1954, public opinion in the South was mixed but cautiously moderate, even quietly hopeful. In only four states—Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia—were bluntly hostile and defiant words spoken by senators and governors in response to the Brown ruling, and even a few of them (for example, Governor Thomas B. Stanley of Virginia) showed some respect for “the edict of the court.”
Two Tennessee writers, Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely, traveled through the region in the wake of the ruling and came home believing—later saying in their book, Neither Black nor White—that people of good will were out there, in every state, willing and ready to “do the right thing.” Robert Penn Warren, once an ally of the reactionary Fugitive-Agrarians at Vanderbilt University and now a famous novelist and a teacher at Yale, made a Southern tour of his own and wrote a book about the journey that candidly explored the peril and promise of desegregation, and its inescapable necessity. Another native Southerner, the historian C. Vann Woodward, presented his revisionist account of “the strange career of Jim Crow” (which would soon be the title of his book on the subject) in a series of lectures at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1954, leaving some in his audience with the comforting thought that you didn’t have to be a segregationist to be a good Southerner.
There were further promising signs. The Catholic bishops of the South issued pastoral letters instructing their churches and schools to eliminate segregation. Jewish organizations and many Protestant groups did likewise. Token desegregation of public universities continued without incident. Many people were saying positive things: This was democratic, it was Christian, it made economic and practical sense, it was good for our image abroad. In Atlanta, the Southern Regional Council, feeling vindicated and invigorated by the court’s action, looked ahead to an era of growth and progress. In Nashville, a grant from the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the Advancement of Education allowed a board of educators and newspaper editors to organize the Southern Education Reporting Service, an independent agency to monitor and document the school desegregation process.
But these tiny shoots of new growth heralded a false spring. The white South could perhaps have been persuaded to obey the law of the land, but it lacked the voices of responsible leadership to ensure that outcome. If its congressmen and senators were momentarily quiescent, they were not to be compliant, and soon they would spark an angry resistance. Governors, legislators, city and county politicians, and state and local school officials fell dutifully, often enthusiastically, in line with the Washington-based advocates of white power. Businessmen sounded the alarm, and labor officials echoed it. The bar associations of almost every Southern state and city failed to speak out in defense of the rule of law, and some even went so far as to condemn the Supreme Court and defy its ruling. With each passing day, more and more ministers and academicians and editors who dared to affirm the integrity of the federal judiciary were ostracized and silenced.
In the emotional years to come, only a relative handful of Southern newspapers—probably fewer than a dozen—would be able to sustain a clear, consistent editorial position in favor of obeying the law of the land, the implication of which was eventual integration and racial equality. By far the greater number would either join in the strident chorus of resistance or make a pretense of objectivity by defending the status quo against militant forces of the right and left. “In truth, all of them were devoted to sustaining the advantage of the upper-class white,” said Johnny Popham of the New York Times in reflection. “Not even once a year, in a sort of lenten confessional, did the papers acknowledge how racially biased they were—and I’m talking about the papers of the North just as much as those in the South.”
The Southern Education Reporting Service was illustrative of the glacial pace of social and cultural adjustment after Brown. In many ways, the SERS was on the leading edge of change in the region, and for almost twenty years it would be an invaluable source of reliable, balanced, ostensibly objective information on desegregation of schools and other institutions. But its board of directors was led in the beginning by Virginius Dabney of Richmond, a genteel segregationist, and Tom Waring of Charleston, a combative white supremacist. The board was biracial, and its leadership in future years was enlightened and progressive, and its professional staff turned out publications that were a model of evenhandedness. But Dabney and Waring saw to it from the start that the staff would be all-white. A research analyst from Fisk University who was slated for a staff position was never assigned an office—and thereafter, no other black professional or clerical employee would work for the SERS for more than a decade.
The vacuum of responsible moral and political leadership at the state and local levels reflected the void in Congress and in the White House, where President Eisenhower steadfastly refused to lend the weight of his office to the action of the Supreme Court. On numerous occasions, moderate and respected Southerners pleaded with the President, as Harold Fleming of the Southern Regional Council put it, “to exert his private and personal influence on the powerful Southern businessmen and politicians who were his close friends and fellow golfers and quail shooters.” Far from doing that, the President told Virginiu
s Dabney at a White House dinner in 1958 that he deplored the court decision and had gone “as far as I could” in trying to persuade the justices not to abandon the separate-but-equal doctrine.
Encouraged by official inaction and unofficial resistance at the highest level, a small group of middle- and upper-class whites in the Mississippi Delta organized the Citizens’ Council in July 1954 to fight desegregation by whatever means they could muster. Within two years the movement had spread into every Southern state and some beyond, with the Black Belt regions of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Virginia being the hotbeds. By 1957 these “country club” or “white collar” Klans (formally known as the Citizens’ Councils of America), together with the more traditional KKK units and various other extremist groups, would boast of having more than a half-million dues-paying members. Whether or not the claim was valid, this much was surely true: The reactionary white South had developed a mass movement bigger by far than anything such liberal groups as the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the Southern Regional Council could ever have imagined for themselves.
The period of adjustment that the Supreme Court had intended to hold out to the anxious South by delaying its implementation order in Brown proved to be more of an advantage for the segregationists than for the reformers. The plaintiffs wanted school desegregation to take place all at once in the 1955–56 school year; the defendant states didn’t want it to happen at all, and didn’t want the court to say specifically how or when they had to act. When the court finally spoke—unanimously once again—on May 31, 1955, it tried to draw a straight and narrow line of action somewhere between now and never. The schools were told to make “a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance”; the lower courts would monitor “good faith implementation”; each system’s performance would be judged on its merits; there would be no fixed deadlines, no timetable—just “all deliberate speed.” At last the court had dropped the other shoe. It was a soft slipper, not a hobnail boot.