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

May it please the court : When this book was conceived, it was intended to be titled “U.S. v. the South: A Brief for the Defense,” but it seemed a cumbersome title and the finished work is not, of course, a brief for the South in any lawyer’s sense of the word. It is no more than an extended personal essay, presented in this form because the relationship that exists between the rest of the country and the South, in the area of race relations, often has the aspect of an adversary proceeding. We o

At the time of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education , on Monday, May 17, 1954, seventeen Southern and border States maintained racially separate schools. These included, in addition to the thirteen States to be treated here as “the South,” the States of Maryland, Delaware, Kansas, and Missouri, plus the District of Columbia. Each of the five speedily abandoned segregation—Kansas willingly, Missouri stoically, Maryland cheerlessly, Delaware grudgingly. The District abandoned

The foregoing figures tell little enough, to be sure, about the South; you learn nothing much about a sonnet by a footnote on its rhyme scheme. For it is a truism that there is not one South; there are, it is said, many Souths. Eighteen hundred miles separate the Rio Grande at El Paso from the James at Hampton Roads. The intervening land is immensely varied. The South begins, at its western rim, in canyon country, red-walled, black-hilled; the bare and bony mountains stretch across the prairie l

How, in 1962, does one begin to discuss this awareness? Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa? No, perhaps, the best observation to make at the outset is that the South, in general, feels no sharp sense of sin at its “treatment of the Negro.” The guilt hypothesis is vastly overdrawn. If wrong has been done (and doubtless wrong has been done), we reflect that within the human relationship wrong always has been done, by one people upon another, since tribal cavemen quarreled with club and stone.

The consciousness of the Negro, I have said, is one common thread in the fabric of the South. There are others, identified by countless observers who have looked upon this tapestry, that merit some discussion also. Let me expand for a few moments on three themes: The Southerner as Conservative, the Southerner as Romantic, the Southerner as Realist. Russell Kirk, in The Conservative Mind , examined the philosophy that generally is identified as “Southern conservatism” and found it rooted in four

Let me move on, may it please the court, with fewer digressions and random interpolations, to the South’s case against “integration.” The quotation marks are intended to suggest that the noun has a distinctive meaning. This is as good a place as any for a definition of terms. Increasingly, in the Southern lexicon, words that are used interchangeably elsewhere in the country have come to take on a special and well-understood meaning. By “segregation,” for example, we now mean the body of practice

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

The second of the South’s principal arguments, related to anthropological considerations but of more immediate application, may be termed the argument of practicality: Even if it be true, as the liberal social anthropologists insist, that there is no innate cultural or intellectual inferiority in the Negro race as such, the plain fact is that here and now, there are immense differences in the educational achievements and apparent aptitudes of the two races; and these differences, especially in s

If there ever is to be in the South any significant degree of desegregation in public institutions, let alone any significant degree of integration in society as a whole, it can come effectively in one way only: slowly, cautiously, voluntarily, “some time in the future.” This is the doctrine of “gradualism,” and the Negro’s professional leaders despise it. They insist, with some plausibility, that constitutional rights are personal and immediate rights, capable of being lost irretrievably if the

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its unanimous decision in the School Segregation Cases . By general agreement, this decision is regarded as the court’s most momentous opinion of this century; indeed, only the court’s opinion of 1856 in the Dred Scott case is thought to have had greater impact upon the American people or upon the course of historic events. Because of its destructive effect upon the stability of law and the permanence of long-established institu

The South’s legal position in the school controversy is essentially a constitutional position; it cannot be fully understood without some understanding of how the Southerner views the Constitution. He views it through the eyes of the States. These are to him, as Oliver Wolcott of Connecticut called them, “the pillars which uphold the general system.” Most readers of this essay, it may be assumed, have a good working knowledge of the Constitution. Some will not; they may never have read the Const

The four cases that were to coalesce as Brown v. Board of Education had their beginnings in four widely separated proceedings. In the first of the suits, Harry Briggs, Jr., and forty-five other Negro children of Clarendon County, S. C., brought an action on December 22, 1950, against R. W. Elliott and other members of the county’s School District 22. The following March, in Kansas, Oliver Brown and other colored children filed suit against Topeka’s board of education. In May 1951, Dorothy E. Dav

The Supreme Court of the United States then was headed by Fred M. Vinson of Kentucky, as Chief Justice. Others who heard the ten hours of argument that December were Hugo L. Black of Alabama, Felix Frankfurter of Massachusetts, William O. Douglas of Connecticut, Robert H. Jackson of New York, Harold H. Burton of Ohio, Tom C. Clark of Texas, Sherman Minton of Indiana, and Stanley Reed of Kentucky. It is difficult—impossible might be a better word—to guess at the outcome of a Supreme Court case by

The School Segregation Cases came up for reargument before the Supreme Court on December 8, 1953. By this time, the Kansas case was moot (it is one of the many ironies of the story that the school cases should be styled as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , taking their name from a controversy that had been settled by the time the opinion came down), but the cases from Virginia, South Carolina, and Delaware were still hotly at issue. The cast of lawyers was the same, and again, questions fr

I had not intended to write a “Part III” for this book. The object was to put forth a brief for the South in the single narrow field of racially separate public schools; my thought was to summarize and argue the law and the evidence of Brown v. Board of Education as the South views them, and to leave such issues as “sit-ins,” and voting rights, and the Negro’s future for another day. Yet a familiar part of the pleading in almost any case is the prayer of the petitioner, and there is something mo

Appendix BROWN et al. v. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA et al. [347 U. S. 483] Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Kansas [1] Argued December 9, 1952.—Reargued December 8, 1953.—Decided May 17, 1954. Mr. Chief Justice Warren delivered the opinion of the Court. These cases come to us from the States of Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. They are premised on different facts and different local conditions, but a common legal question justifies their considera

There stands in the Grove of Academe, or so I have often imagined, a certain idolatrous image. It is a crane-like creature with italic wings, the great god Ibid. , and before it, strutting on their tiny six-point feet, the pedant peacocks daily make obeisance. They look up, supra , and down infra , and spreading their tails with asterisk eyes, they march with robed scholars to lay garlands of op. cit. upon the ritual shrine. When I launched into this book, I swore a blasphemous oath upon such ph