A Sociologist Looks at Racial Desegregation in the South

Abstract

JN THE barber shop the other day a countryman in the chair opposite me said, Professor, I see where the Supreme Court is going to pass a new law sayin' that the white and the colored will have to go to school together. It makes me sort of uneasy. There are indeed a lot of uneasy people in the South today, because the institution of compulsory racial segregation is under attack and may soon be dealt a knock-out blow. In 1952 five test cases, sponsored by the N.A.A.C.P. on behalf of the parents of Negro children in public schools, went up to the United States Supreme Court on appeal. The cases, which came from South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, District of Columbia, and Kansas, were consolidated for the purpose of the hearing by the Court. The N.A.A.C.P. believed that the time was ripe to demand that the Court decide the cases on the issue of segregation itself. It argued that even if the Negro schools were equal to the white schools in all measurable respects they would still impose an inevitable social and psychological stigma upon the Negro child, and it asked the Court to declare compulsory segregation on grounds of race an act of discrimination and therefore contrary to the Constitution of the United States. The defense argued, of course, that there is nothing inherently discriminatory in segregation, that school facilities can be and are being equalized, and it asked the Court to reaffirm its traditional philosophy, namely, that segregation is lawful if facilities are equal. In December 1952, the Supreme Court held hearings on these cases, and the South waited with much trepidation a decision during the spring of 1953. But there was no decision. Instead, last fall the Court announced a rehearing on a series of searching questions which it laid before the legal counsel on both sides. This hearing took place last December, and again we wait for a decision. If the South is on the spot, so is the Supreme Court! It must decide whether its previous decisions on segregation are all right, which it would probably be ashamed to do, or whether its previous decisions were all wrong, which it is probably afraid of doing. The former would be like setting off a harmless firecracker, the latter like dropping a legal atom bomb on the South. Of course, there are certain intermediate positions possible, but in a matter like segregation there is an all-or-none quality which makes any middle ground hard to find. For reasons which I cannot undertake to explain here, I continue to believe, as I did a year ago, that the Supreme Court will hold against compulsory segregation. At least we would do well here in the South to think in terms of that possibility and to be prepared to meet intelligently whatever crisis might be precipitated by the decision of the Court. There is a very special relationship between the Constitution, the Supreme Court, the South, and the status of the Negro. This has been true especially since the emancipation of the slaves. After the Civil War three important constitutional amendments were submitted to the states. With the help of the southern states, most of which were then under the control of Republican carpetbag governments, these amendments were ratified. The Thirteenth Amendment simply forbade slavery. The Fourteenth, among other * Presidential address delivered at the seventeenth annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta, Georgia, March 26, 1954.