mixed-blood as the true Negro. Plays, moving pictures and TV shows
preaching racial equality are built around actors like Harry Belafonte
who had two white grandparents and is consequently half white himself.
The equalitarian press is constantly putting forward Ralph Bunche
whose deal in genes has been such that he looks like a white man with
a light tan. William Faulkner speaks in magazine articles of the
achievements of Booker T. Washington whose father was white. George
Washington Carver is held up as the ideal Negro scientist but his white
genes showed in his blue eyes. Seldom is the true Negro type picked to
represent the race in equalitarian propaganda. The North is being spoon
fed on a concept of the Negro which is sheer fantasy. Color of skin,
of course, is no sure criterion of the degree of white blood. A man
may be as black as the ace of spades and still be a mixed-blood with
pronounced Caucasoid facial features, relatively high intelligence, and
other white attributes.[16]
It must indeed be conceded that the problem of the mixed-blood well
over on the white side of the spectrum is one of the most serious in
the country today. These creatures who, through no fault of their
own, often carry in their veins the sinful blood of white men, as one
Southerner has put it, are the chief agitators for Negro equality, and
who can blame them? May God in his mercy help them to find private
solutions to their problems, but let us not mold public policy upon a
line which would increase their numbers.
* * * * *
_I have dealt recently with representatives of the new African states
and found them very sharp. How can these men be considered inferior?_
A pure-blooded Negro may surpass a white man in a given situation for
one of two reasons. He may belong in what the intelligence testers
call the “overlap”--that is, he may be one of the few Negroes who
exceed the performance of the average white, although there will be
many more whites who exceed this average than there are Negroes. Or he
may surpass the white man because the specific intelligence required
does not involve the higher centers of self-control, judgment and
abstraction. Even a complete savage can be canny in dealings of the
latter sort.
But in any case, we must remember that we cannot make a self-sustaining
democracy out of a few sharp leaders--it is the average of the
electorate that matters. At the risk of monotonous repetition, I must
emphasize that the self-control and judgment (the capacity to sacrifice
an immediate desire for a greater good tomorrow) of the rank and file,
including their willingness to contribute to, rather than to drain,
the common treasury, are the qualities which produce a stable, free
civilization. These were the qualities which built the great Western
democracies. There are few signs of them in Africa.
* * * * *
_Ralph McGill, the Atlanta editor, says that the Supreme Court has
ordered desegregation but not integration; in other words, it has
forbidden the whites to hold the blacks in black schools, but has not
ordered the blacks to go to white schools. Isn’t this an important
distinction?_
Not as a practical, long-range matter. It is perhaps true that a large
number of Southern Negroes, if left to themselves, would tend for a
time to continue in their own schools from inertia and force of habit.
But the objectives of the present Negro leadership can be judged by
its actions in all the large cities of the United States where it is
pressing for more and more Negro attendance in white schools, and
challenging token integration wherever it has occurred.
The real meaning of the desegregation movement should be transparent,
even to Mr. McGill. It is a main sector of the equalitarian
front--piecemeal surrender suits these people perfectly for they
understand the truth of what I have said earlier, once a principle is
gone, the rest is just a mopping-up operation.
* * * * *
_How can we justify second class citizens in the United States?_
There have always been first, second, third and various other classes
of citizens in the United States, white as well as black, and there
always will be, here and in every country, including Russia. But this
has nothing to do with segregation. Segregation does not make a second
class citizen. If the Negro government of a Negro country decides to
segregate all whites in white schools, does this make the whites second
class citizens? It is what he is that makes the average Negro a second
class citizen, not segregation. And as I have said on page 58, when the
day comes that the average Negro is no longer a second class citizen,
he may prefer segregation.
* * * * *
_Do you not believe in the dignity of man?_
I believe in the potential dignity of man, and in its actual existence
as the individual acquires it through merit. It is in no way related
to segregation. Would white men who had dignity lose it through
segregation in a Negro country?
* * * * *
_Is not our Society founded on the idea of equal human rights?_
All rights have to be limited by the rights of others. My right to do
as I please must be limited by your right not to be assaulted by me.
The greatest of all human rights is the right of a race to protect
itself against genocide, and its culture against deterioration.
* * * * *
_How can we condemn a man because of the color of his skin?_
Skin color has no bearing on the matter. The Negro’s limitations are
in the realms of character and intelligence, and the fact they are
associated with a black skin is irrelevant. Many Indians of India are
blacker by far than many Negroes, yet their culture differs from that
of the Negro, and they shun social contact with the Negro.
* * * * *
_Are not pride and self-respect essential to the development of
personality, and does not segregation deprive the Negro of both?_
Did it deprive Booker T. Washington or George Washington Carver of
either? Where certain handicaps exist, pride and self-respect grow
in overcoming them. They also grow in service and achievement to and
within one’s own race.
They most emphatically do not grow in forcing one’s self where one
is not wanted. The latter course is the surest road to loss of
self-respect.
* * * * *
_Is not discrimination an evil in itself?_
No word has been more tarnished by the equalitarian than the word
discriminate. Its dictionary definition is “to perceive a difference,
to mark a difference”. Is that man unjustified who marks a difference
between right and wrong, between better and worse? It has become the
vogue to condemn discrimination without asking what the reasons for the
discrimination may be. Discrimination does not develop in a vacuum.
There are always reasons back of it. If the reasons be unsound, then
the discrimination ought indeed to be condemned. But if the reasons be
sound, then discrimination is a most precious right.
The issue here resembles that raised on page 91. Before a man complains
about discrimination or prejudice it would be wise if he asked himself
why he is the victim of either.
* * * * *
_Should not Americans be tolerant?_
Tolerance is a virtue or a vice depending on the situation in which
it is exercised. Most certainly we should be tolerant of customs, or
ways of life, or opinions that differ from our own provided we believe
them to be sincerely followed by men of wisdom and good will. But to be
tolerant of evil is either laziness or cowardice.
* * * * *
_Are not Southerners racial bigots?_
First let us define what we mean by bigot. One of my dictionaries
defines it as “One obstinately and irrationally, often intolerantly,
devoted to his own church, party, belief or opinion.” Another says:
“One who is unreasonably and blindly attached to a particular creed,
church, or party; one who is intolerant of opinions which differ from
his own; a fanatic; one illiberal or hypocritically stubborn in creed.”
We have discussed tolerance in the last question. This leaves us with
irrationality, blindness and hypocrisy to examine, since obstinacy
and fanaticism in a good cause can hardly be considered vices. I have
already indicated why I believe the Southern position on race more
reasonable by far than that of the North. The North is proving itself
both irrational and blind. Lastly, it goes without saying there is no
hypocrisy more blatant and vicious than that which forces the children
of others into schools with large numbers of Negroes while making sure
its own children are well ensconced in schools predominantly of its own
race.
* * * * *
_Is not the segregationist preaching hate instead of love?_
I would say the shoe is on the other foot. It is those who are forcing
the Negro into an unnatural relationship with the white race that are
guilty of hostile aggression.
Any man or woman who approaches this subject in the spirit of love
will find ample ways to help the Negro help himself--which is the
only possible road to real betterment--in his own schools and in his
own individual and community life. For the North to force him on the
white South is as blunt an act of hostility--of hate, if you prefer
the word--as can be imagined. It has already damaged the Negro, indeed
it is damaging the whole country. The spirit of those back of the
integration movement is not love.
* * * * *
_Why are Southerners being so emotional?_
Here again I would say the shoe is on the other foot. Outside the
inner Marxist core, there are very few hard-headed realists among the
equalitarians. But there are many sentimentalists, and this has led
to the perhaps unfairly sarcastic designation “bleeding heart.” The
amateur integrationist has been taught to throw the accusation of
emotionalism in the face of his opponents to conceal the fact that it
is he, himself, whose case lacks reason.
* * * * *
_Don’t you believe in human progress?_
Because I do believe in human progress I protest the gullibility of
the Northerner and the Southern “moderate” who are beguiled by the
word rather than by the substance of progress, who miss the underlying
issue in the integration controversy, and let themselves be ensnared by
the old equalitarian technique of gradualism.
The equalitarians have softened us to the point already where many of
us think that because something is new it is better. We forget that
there are two ways to go forward. One is to go forward up. The other
is to go forward down. Humanity will not have progressed by turning
the United States a hundred years from now into a nation of octoroons
or by making the South mulatto. Nor is any moral victory achieved by
submitting the white children of the South to slow cultural poisoning.
These are results the Russians devoutly desire, because it will mean
that we will no longer need to be reckoned with.
* * * * *
_Why try to turn the clock back?_
In the first place we aren’t dealing with a clock. We are dealing with
a pendulum which has swung dangerously far to the left.
In the second place, if it were a clock, I would think it essential to
turn it back, if it marked a progression toward disaster. Many a man
who has had a bad automobile accident wishes he could turn the clock
back to the moment before he made his mistake.
+The Constitutional Issue+
_Does not the spirit of the 14th Amendment require integration?_
It is hard to say what the “spirit” of the 14th Amendment is. It can
be argued that morally the 14th Amendment is not in the Constitution.
All but one of the Southern States rejected it when it was presented
to them immediately after the Civil War, and it was only ratified by
them when, under a law passed by a Congress from which the South had
been excluded, they were given no choice save to accept it or submit
to military rule. The President vetoed this law, saying that its
whole character, scope and object were without precedent and without
authority and in palpable conflict with the plainest provisions of the
Constitution. The rump Congress overrode the veto.
The chief proponent of the Amendment, and of the law, was Thaddeus
Stevens, a choleric and vindictive man, egged on by a mulatto mistress
who was not unnaturally embittered by her own divided nature. I think
historians would agree that if Lincoln had lived, there would have been
no 14th Amendment.
Assuming, what many are not willing to assume, that the Amendment has
become valid through a sort of unwritten Statute of Limitations, the
method of its adoption should clearly have some bearing on the “spirit”
in which it ought to be interpreted. Lord Bryce, the great English
scholar, in another part of the passage which I quote in my letter to
the President, refers to the whole program of the North under this
Amendment in Reconstruction days as “monstrous”, and modern research
has done nothing to change the verdict. Lynching is an abominable
crime, but it would be well for the North to remember the conditions
which spawned the custom. There were no lynchings until the North drove
the white South to the wall by such an orgy of Negro barbarism as had
best be forgotten.
More specifically, there was never the slightest suggestion on the part
of Congress or anybody else that the Amendment was intended to apply to
schools. Congress, having direct control of this matter in the District
of Columbia, maintained segregated schools there from the beginning,
which is sufficient indication of the intent of the body which proposed
the Amendment.
* * * * *
_Do not Southerners oppose equality for the Negro largely because they
fear their own ascendancy will be challenged?_
Yes, and justly so. If your grandparents, as eyewitnesses, had told
you of conditions in the South during Reconstruction--of what happens
to large aggregations of Negroes under such conditions--or if you had
lived awhile in native Negro cultures in Haiti or Africa, you would be
afraid, too.
It goes without saying that some progress has been made in the
development of the Negro race since the Civil War, but to suppose that
it has reached the point where an infusion of color in government
amounting to policy control, or to a balance of power, is an acceptable
or healthy thing for a previously white society, will be absurd on its
face to anyone who has read the answers to the preceding questions.
The inclination of Negroes in the mass to be primarily interested in
spending rather than conserving their own or other people’s money, is
but one of many aspects to this problem.
Lord Bryce not only called Northern policy under the Reconstruction
Acts monstrous, he noted that no country in the world has ever
made such sacrifices of common sense to abstract principle. The
South, nevertheless, has managed a workable adjustment within our
constitutional frame-work, an adjustment heretofore acceptable to
courts wise enough to see the true problem.
I assume you will agree that Lincoln was one of the great exponents
of our national democratic principles. Please read the quotation from
Lincoln in my letter to the President.
* * * * *
_The Dean of the Harvard Law School has said that the trend of previous
decisions made the integration decision inevitable. Do you dispute
this?_
A trend which made the integration decision inevitable was a trend in
the wrong direction. But I question whether any trend makes any wrong
decision inevitable. If the trend be wrong, it should be stopped. If it
be right up to a point, it should be stopped at that point.
I may add in passing that it would be an understatement to remark that
the Harvard faculty is not distinguished by the number of conservatives
among its members. In fact, the FBI only recently arrested one of
them, a man named Zborowski, on a charge of perjury growing out of the
Bureau’s investigation of a Soviet spy ring. Significantly enough, he
had been a research associate in social anthropology.
I may also add that Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick has fallen a victim to
the same illusion as the Dean. He has recently said that “by 1954
the court had dealt with many kinds of separate facilities and found
each of them denied equality.... The court had no choice, in view of
the then numerous precedents, but to find that ‘separate educational
facilities are inherently unequal’.”
Both the Dean and Dr. Fosdick have failed to probe down to the
underlying issue. _Desegregation in a non-social situation is one
thing. Integration in a social situation is quite another._ A trend in
one might be justified while in the other it should never be allowed to
start. The line, of course, is sometimes hard to draw and is a matter
which, under our federal form of government, should be left to local
decision. Busses, theaters and restaurants in some communities may
readily be distinguished from recreation facilities and schools as
regards their social implications; in other communities the distinction
may not be as clear.
* * * * *
_Is not the decision of the Supreme Court the law, and is it not the
duty of every citizen to obey the law?_
Unlike the Constitution which is the law of the land, a decision of
the Supreme Court is “the law of the case,” reversible at will by the
members who handed it down, or by other members of the same court at
any future date.
My position is that the law in this case ought to be changed, which is
a position every citizen is entitled to take.
Some people have asked me how I dare challenge the views of our highest
court, and how I can fail to see that loyalty to American ideals
requires me to support integration. In all humility I must point to the
status of the present court in the opinion of the rest of the judiciary
and of the bar. Most certainly the members of this court are honorable
men, doing their best, but they cannot be compared with many courts of
the past, either in judicial experience or detachment from political
considerations.
I question whether any Supreme Court in our history has been the object
of a similar indictment at the hands of three-quarters of the State
Chief Justices or has stood where this one does in the opinion of the
most distinguished members of the bar. If American ideals did not
require integration under courts with a superior membership, I fail to
see why they require it under the present court.
* * * * *
_Isn’t opposition really hopeless and isn’t it wiser simply to accept
integration and make the best of it?_
Quite the contrary. The NAACP and the equalitarian press are trying
hard to convince the public that the fight is over, but it has just
begun. A few figures on where the integration movement stands at the
moment may be of interest. The latest statistics I have show that:
In the state of North Carolina, which is being cited throughout the
country for taking a creditably moderate course, 39 Negro pupils are
enrolled in white schools in seven communities. These 39 are swallowed
up among 12,234 white pupils.
Of the 10 other Southern states besides North Carolina, five have
some degree of integration and five have none. Among the partially
integrated states, Texas has the greatest number of Negro children
in white schools--a total of 3,600 colored among 300,000 white in
“integrated situations,” or about one in a hundred.
Of 1,600 school districts in Texas, only 125--fewer than one in a
hundred--have desegregated. It is my understanding that desegregation
is mainly in the western part of Texas, which is not typically Southern.
In the other four partially integrated states, here is the score:
Virginia--5 communities, 86 Negroes, 20,327 whites.
Arkansas--8 communities, 94 Negroes, 8,133 whites.
Tennessee--4 communities, 50 Negroes, white total unknown.
Florida--1 community (2 schools), 435 Negroes, 746 whites.
In one of the two Florida schools, token integration has worked in
reverse. Five white children are attending Orchard Villa school with
414 Negroes.
For the purpose of comparison then, by omitting Texas and Orchard Villa
School in Florida, which are not typical Southern situations, we find
that in ten Southern states fewer than 300 Negro children have been
admitted to white schools at the present time.
Five states--South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and
Louisiana--have yet to mix the first school.
+Summation And Outlook+
_You seem to be very sure of your position. Do you see no good among
the integrationists, nor any evil on your side?_
There is a lunatic fringe to every large controversy. I also believe
that many Southerners have allowed their exasperation to drive them to
a wildness of expression and action which does harm to their cause.
Others trim too much for political and economic reasons. Still others
fail to realize that the best answer to the humanitarian integrationist
is the even more humanitarian segregationist--more of the Albert
Schweitzer spirit toward the Negro.
What I say concerning some Southerners applies equally to many
Northern conservatives, and old-fashioned liberals, in the broader
fight against equalitarianism. Too many are embittered men, not without
cause, yet unwisely. The younger generations cannot be led back to the
great principles by embittered teachers.
There has been a failure of leadership. In his _Revolt of the
Masses_, Jose Ortega y Gasset speaks of the current “sovereignty
of the unqualified” and I would ask, how far has this been due to
the abdication of the qualified, how much of our soft surrender to
equalitarianism has derived from a lack of confidence in the old ideals
on the part of those who ought to assert and exemplify them?
Near the close of his contemplative autobiography, Lord Tweedsmuir, who
knew both the English and the American scenes well, puts this paragraph:
“Something has happened. A civilization bemused by an opulent
materialism has been met by a rude challenge. The free peoples have
been challenged by the serfs. The gutters have exuded a poison which
bids fair to infect the world. The beggar on horseback rides more
roughshod over the helpless than the cavalier. A combination of
multitudes who have lost their nerve and a junta of arrogant demagogues
has shattered the comity of nations. The European tradition has been
confronted with an Asiatic revolt, with its historic accompaniment
of janissaries and assassins. There is in it all, too, an ugly
pathological savour, as if a mature society were being assailed by
diseased and vicious children.”
These lines, written at the onset of the last World War, would seem
to hold fully as true today. The free peoples are still challenged,
but the challenge for the moment is more from within than without, the
diseased and vicious children have insinuated themselves into our midst
and have taken on the trappings of respectability. Some even sit on our
university faculties.
As a part of the process, the attack on Christianity, which Gladstone
perceived ninety years ago, has continued. “I am convinced,” wrote
Gladstone, “that the welfare of mankind does not now depend on the
State and the world of politics; the real battle is being fought in the
world of thought, where a deadly attack is made with great tenacity of
purpose and over a wide field upon the greatest treasure of mankind,
the belief in God and the Gospel of Christ.”
This attack has had a two-fold Asiatic aspect. On the one hand,
there has been the open aggression of Japan, Russia, China, and
the Middle East, and on the other the indirect impact behind our
lines of devious Oriental thinking and the pervasive mood of
appeasement, of resignation under evil, and of expediency, so
characteristic of the Eastern mind. The it’s-too-late attitude--the
if-we-must-choose-between-surrender-and-extinction-we’ll-choose-surrender
spirit--were not the attitude or spirit of our American forefathers,
they were not the creed of Patrick Henry.
Part of all this, as I have said, is undoubtedly the fault of an abuse
by its votaries of the earlier American gospel. The abuse opened the
way, first for a discrediting of freedom and individualism, and then
for the substitution of equalitarianism as a new gospel. We cannot
afford to make that mistake again. Christianity is the religion of
freedom and individualism--it is also the gospel of compassion.