Profile in black and white

CHAPTER VII

THE NEW NULLIFICATION

In the final analysis, the sound and fury of professional hate groups, white supremacy organizations, “legal” resistance movements, and “voluntary” segregation advocates would signify nothing without active leadership and cooperation from the state government. Consequently, organizations and individuals supporting segregation have made doubly sure that there is no wavering on the part of public officials. Toward this end, for example, the Lamar Citizens Council resolved that “the powers of legislative decision and administrative responsibility must remain in the exclusive control” of men who supported “constitutional government, states rights ... individual liberty,” and “the separation of races in the schools and colleges and social institutions of this state.”[297] Segregationists have had no difficulty whatsoever in achieving this objective if for no other than the simple reason that political leaders are of one and the same opinion. Amongst the politicians there has not been a single instance of deviation from accepted attitudes of complete racial segregation. With such unanimity of opinion, extremists inevitably would be able to set the pace in the state legislature. That is precisely what has happened.

Immediately following the Court decision, much advice, largely unsolicited, was given to state policy makers. The News and Courier called “for moderation, for calm and wise decisions” in meeting the crisis. It offered no specific policies for immediate consideration by state officials but it did suggest for the time being a delaying action, “a masterly retreat, in the Robert Edward Lee tradition of rear-guard actions, including flank attacks.” Lest there be any doubt, the Charleston paper reaffirmed its opposition to “de-segregation, or integration, or amalgamation or any other tricky method of mixing the races in public schools.”[298] The Florence Morning News, too, called for “calm, reasonable and foresighted” leadership by “statesmen” not “politicians.” Statesmen, it declared, “are not people who can shout ‘nigger’ and they are not people who can prove—with words—that the Negro is an inferior animal.” Solution of the problem would result not from speeches that “inflame groups and excite the passions of extremists,” but rather from “good sense, calm action and kind reason.”[299]

W. D. Workman, Jr., the News and Courier correspondent in Columbia, thought South Carolina could take any one of five actions: acceptance of the Court decision; “nullification” of the decision; abolition of public schools; “evasive action,” such as the establishment of a private school system to circumvent the Court decision; or “passive resistance” which he deftly defined as “non-compliance rather than open defiance.”[300]

The legislature was not in session at the time of the original ruling. Therefore immediate policy decisions had to be made by Governor James F. Byrnes. The latter decided that since the Supreme Court had failed to implement its decree, it was unnecessary to call a special session of the legislature. On May 20, 1954, however, he ordered a halt to all school construction under the state’s equalization program. In July the Gressette Committee recommended resumption of construction and the ban was lifted on August 31.[301]

The new school building program represents the state’s one real constructive reaction to Negro integration efforts. The purpose may have been less an altruistic desire to improve Negro education than to furnish the state with another arguing point in the preservation of segregation. Whatever the motive, an immediate result has been to provide Negroes with greatly improved, though still segregated, educational facilities.

Early in 1956 Dr. E. Ryan Crow, the able director of the “equalization” program, announced that despite “a fatal indifference to equalizing facilities for Negroes” in some areas, the program had been approximately 85 percent completed. The program’s magnitude demonstrates that South Carolina whites, when pushed far enough, will make efforts to equalize the Negro schools—at least from a physical standpoint. Expenditures in Clarendon County are indicative: between 1951 and 1956 the state spent $770,576 on white school construction as against $2,166,895 on Negro school construction. In the Summerton school district which was directly involved in the case, $102,596 was spent on white school construction as compared to $892,114 for Negro school construction.[302]

In the gubernatorial election of 1954, George Bell Timmerman, Jr., who had been lieutenant governor for eight years, was chosen to succeed Governor Byrnes. Taking office in January, 1955, Governor Timmerman, son of the Federal District Judge who had ruled against the Negro plaintiffs in the Clarendon County case, became the key figure in the state’s official opposition to any and all desegregation. For this reason his public statements are of special significance. The new Governor, a forty-five year old lawyer from Lexington County, is a humorless and fanatical segregationist. On one occasion he told a national television audience that segregation in the state would not end “in a thousand years.”[303] Considering the problem in its more immediate implications, he said on another occasion: “If you let one [Negro] child come in ... you’ve opened the door. There can’t be any compromise—you can’t compromise right with wrong.” In still another instance he declared: “With the knowledge that right, justice and truth are our allies, we shall not fail. There shall be no compulsory racial mixing in our state.”[304]

Timmerman insisted that segregation did not involve discrimination. Equality went “hand in hand” with separation. In developing this theme the Governor added:

Timmerman asserted that the positive “benefits” of segregation were realized by the state’s Negro population. He claimed that “many Negro parents living in Washington and other cities to the North of us are leaving their children with relatives in our State so that their children can enjoy the benefit of a Southern climate in segregated public schools.”[306] The Governor did not say whether he was referring to climate in its physical aspects or in the realm of opinion and mores.

In his inaugural address, Timmerman criticized even the suggestion of a moderate consideration of the segregation issue. “The cowardly approach of gradualism,” he described as “the essence of discrimination,” “a creeping evil” that had no place in “the government of a free people.”[307] Constantly reiterating that “white parents” and “most Negro parents” opposed integration, he applauded “the calm attitude” in which white South Carolinians had approached the issue. Since the latter were determined to resist integration, “the sensible choice of the Negro” was to accept and support separate but equal schools. “Our common task is one of patience, understanding and unyielding determination,” said the Governor. “In this way we can minimize some of the tragedy which the Supreme Court would impose upon us all. There will be no compulsory racial mixing in our state.”[308]

Also indicative was Timmerman’s criticism of President Eisenhower’s appeal that every American be “judged and measured by what he is, rather than by his color, race or religion.” He complained that “never before has a national administration proclaimed as unimportant a person’s race and religion.” How better, he asked, could a person be “judged and measured” as to what he is? “A man’s most priceless possession is his heritage. A man’s most priceless achievement is his religious faith.”[309]

Whatever one may think of it, Timmerman’s attitude is in no sense hypocritical; it is in complete consonance with his political credo. He is a conservative in the peculiarly Southern sense of the word, a racist, a states righter, an advocate of decentralized government. In referring to federal aid to education, he declared: “As far as I am concerned, if I must be taxed and controlled, I would rather be taxed by laws enacted sensibly by local representatives of my own state in whose election I have some choice, than to be taxed ill-advisedly by representatives of the other states, in whose selection I have no choice.”[310] The full measure of his political conservatism is reflected in a speech delivered before the Southern regional conference of the Association of State Governments at Charleston in the spring of 1956. George Washington, he said, gave “to posterity prophetic advice of strikingly current significance” when he cautioned against a “spirit of innovation” upon the principles embodied in the Constitution. Such a “spirit,” warned the Governor, was “prevalent and growing.”[311]

The state legislature and the special school segregation committee, headed by Senator L. Marion Gressette of Calhoun County, also have played leading roles in the official opposition to integration. The Gressette Committee, consisting of 15 members appointed by the Governor, Lieutenant Governor E. F. Hollings and Speaker of the State House of Representatives Solomon Blatt, one of that rare variety of Jewish segregationists, had been formed in 1951 as a result of the Clarendon County school case. Shortly after the 1954 ruling, the committee embarked in earnest on its task of determining the best course to be followed in circumventing the integration drive. Beginning in July the committee held a series of closed hearings which sounded out the attitudes of leading individuals and groups. It heard from such diverse individuals as the presidents of all state supported colleges, including Dr. Benner C. Turner of the state Negro college; former Governor Byrnes; E. H. Agnew, president of the state Farm Bureau Federation; G. L. Ivey, president of the Florence National Association for the Advancement of White People; representatives from the Charleston NAACP and the Negro teachers association.

The initial efforts of the committee were generally applauded. The News and Courier praised its “statesmanlike and cautious approach.”[312] The Morning News was somewhat more reserved. In addition to criticizing the closed hearings, Editor O’Dowd suggested that the scope of the committee’s responsibility be widened to include a study of the price South Carolina was willing to pay for segregated schools. The same paper made the ingenious proposal that a “devil’s advocate,” an “open and declared advocate of integration,” be placed on the committee. Such a person, it was pointed out, could expose the flaws in the various plans for continuing segregation.[313]

In justifying the closed hearings, the committee’s first interim report explained that this was done “to avoid hasty action and public misunderstanding, which could cause inflammation and friction.”[314] In at least one instance what transpired behind committee doors was revealed to the press. In a letter to the News and Courier, A. J. Clement, Jr., the Charleston NAACP president, stated that when appearing before the committee, he had urged “that South Carolina accept the Supreme Court decision” and begin steps toward desegregation “forthwith.” Clement acknowledged the magnitude of the problem involved. “Molds and patterns of living, customs and habits in daily activities” could not be altered overnight. The state of New Jersey provided an example of gradual desegregation such as Clement envisaged for South Carolina. In New Jersey the Negro had “all of the educational, civic, political opportunities” he was fighting for in South Carolina. Yet “the mark, the impression, the influence, the stunting effects of former discriminatory practices and racial segregations” were still present. He appealed to the Gressette Committee to take the initial step toward desegregation in South Carolina.[315]

The attitude of the Gressette Committee has been revealed in its reports to the state legislature and in speeches by its chairman. The latter, like the Governor, holds that a majority of Negroes desire segregation. On one occasion he asserted that 98 percent of the state’s Negroes were uninterested in forcibly integrating the races. (Significantly, he neglected to say whether these same Negroes would be opposed to integration if the question of force was not involved.) To buttress his opinion, Gressette cited the NAACP’s “failure to obtain more petitions” for integration in the public schools, despite its alleged use of “fraud, deceit and misrepresentation.” Similar ideas have been expressed in committee reports. In January, 1955, the committee found no reason to alter its view “that the consensus of public opinion in the State favors better educational opportunity for children—in separate schools.” Such a view is in all probability substantially true but the matter is academic since the Supreme Court has ruled otherwise. The following December, the committee revealed there were “many indications, and few if any to the contrary, that sentiment in favor of separate schools and against integrated schools” had crystallized during 1956. It further expressed agreement “with those who maintain that the decision of the United States Supreme Court was improper,” representing a usurpation of executive and legislative functions by the Supreme Court. And it proposed “to employ every legal means” to maintain a segregated school system which it “in good conscience” believed to be “in the best interests” of the children of both races. With some real basis in fact the Committee held that events were proving “that the Court did not intend to force integration on an unwilling people.”[316]

The public school system is, of course, the key factor in the segregation-integration controversy. The one great trump card, though a miserable joker for the children of the state, is the threat to close down the public school system if integration is ordered. It has been spelled out to leave no doubts. If a Negro pupil is admitted to a white school by court order, both the white and Negro schools which are involved are to be closed. This threat takes in not only primary and secondary public schools but also state supported institutions of higher education, including graduate and professional schools.

Reactions have varied to the possibility of closing the public schools. Lieutenant Governor E. F. Hollings, opposing such action, asserted that “it’s foolish to even consider for a moment that abolishing public education is the solution.” On another occasion he insisted: “We can never abandon our public school system.”[317] Yet he reassured the people that schools were “intended for education and not integration.”[318] And since segregation was a “natural thing,” it followed that “a majority of Negroes” was no more enthusiastic about integration than whites. The Lieutenant Governor took the realistic position that any private school plan “might be tossed out by the court as a ‘trick’ designed to circumvent the decree.”[319] He advocated a system that would be premised on local control. Pupils would be assigned to schools by the local superintendent or trustees on a basis other than race—“sex, aptitude, proximity of school to home and available classroom space.” Such a plan, he thought, would meet the requirements of the court.[320]

W. D. Workman, Jr., in evaluating public opinion on the abolition of the public schools, considered it “extremely doubtful” that a majority of South Carolinians was prepared to do away with the system altogether. None the less he reported that “in some parts of the state,” white parents considered segregation more important than education. The News and Courier editorially agreed. “Compulsory mingling of the races in public schools,” it announced, would be “a worse thing than closing them.” The Charleston paper attacked the public school system per se:

Others expressed like sentiments. Henry E. Davis, a Florence attorney, told the local Citizens Council: “Close your schools if it comes to that.... Closing public schools is not such a calamity and private schools get the best results anyway.” Another Citizens Council speaker, state representative O. L. Warr of Lamar, advised a Beaufort rally that rather than accept integration, public schools should be abandoned “reluctantly but inflexibly without flinch or falter.”[322] The letter of T. H. McFaddin of Gable to the News and Courier is revealing:

A few outspoken champions of the public school system have come forward to be heard. Morning News Editor O’Dowd declared that “our educational system is of more importance than mores, political opposition, state-wide resentment or mass disappointment.”[324] Likewise Mrs. C. B. Busbee, head of the education department of the South Carolina Federation of Women’s Clubs, said that “the abandonment of a system of public schools would set back the cause of education for all our people 100 years.”[325]

In view of the role of the schoolhouse in the segregation controversy, the attitude of education groups is significant. The Council of Delegates of the South Carolina Education Association, an organization of white classroom teachers and administrators, in October, 1954, approved a resolution which held segregated schools “the best form of organization for meeting the needs of children of both races,” and urged “an adequate system of free public schools in South Carolina be maintained.”[326] Other education groups have been more hesitant to state their positions. Not until August, 1955, more than a year after the court decision, did the Association of School Administrators and the School Boards Association, an organization of school trustees, take their stand. The School Administrators pledged themselves “to the preservation, continuation, and improvement of the public school system of South Carolina.” The school trustees adopted a resolution which observed that “as long as the State of South Carolina, through its legislative authority, continues its policy of withholding funds for the operation of integrated schools, our schools must continue to be segregated if they are to remain open.” The trustees pledged themselves to keep the public schools open “so that responsibility for closing them must be assumed by other authorities.”[327] A sad commentary is that no one administratively connected with any state supported institution of higher learning publicly has opposed the state’s threat to close those institutions if a Negro were admitted. To summarize, the threatened abolition of the public school system would indicate lack of appreciation by white South Carolinians of the fundamental role of a system of free education in a democratic society.

The question of federal aid to education naturally has intruded itself into the school integration controversy. So intense is the feeling on this subject that it has become another of the articles of faith upon which orthodoxy is demanded of all public spokesmen. Without doubt a large majority of white South Carolinians agreed with the News and Courier when it referred to federal aid to education as “bribery” to be used by integrationists. Governor Timmerman characterized federal aid as “sugar-coated federal taxation.” He told the 1956 General Assembly that propaganda for federal aid to education fostered upon the people “a big political hoax, the claim of an acute shortage of school buildings.” That contention, said the Governor, was “simply untrue.”[328] Some South Carolina school administrators might have been disposed to disagree were it discreet to do so.

Public officials and other leaders in the state have spoken out against federal aid, especially if it suggests any inkling of federal control. That South Carolina’s schools are already receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars of federal money for educational purposes has been conveniently overlooked. Most spokesmen oppose federal aid per se. Occasionally, however, proposals have been made which are designed to give the states federal money with no strings attached. For example, University of South Carolina President Donald Russell who resigned in October, 1957, to run for governor, suggested that the federal government return to the states on a per capita basis ten percent of all federal income taxes collected. This plan, declared Russell, would involve no federal control and thus would test the sincerity of “those who would pervert the matter of federal aid into a coercive weapon to promote some alien or sociological goal.”[329]

The state legislature expressed itself on the subject in March, 1957. The House of Representatives adopted a resolution, introduced by Rep. P. Eugene Brabham of Bamberg, which noted that South Carolinians “are now, always have been and shall always be unequivocally, incontrovertibly and unalterably opposed to any federal invasion, encroachment or infringement of the fundamental right, obligation and duty of the people and their local authority to provide, supervise and control the education of the children of this state or the educational processes concomitant thereon.”[330]

A central theme of the opponents of federal aid to education is the contention that South Carolina does not need any more money for operation of its schools. They point with pride to the large scale school building program which the state has undertaken in response to the demands by Negroes for racial integration. The South Carolina Conference of Education, a group appointed by Governor Byrnes to study education in the state, reported in late 1955 that in regard to federal aid to education “no funds are sought or desired, except in those areas like North Charleston or Aiken where federal installations have caused increases in school population out of all proportion to normal growth and development.”[331]

Opponents of federal aid usually overlook all factors in the school program except classroom construction. They disregard the pitifully low salaries of classroom teachers and the resultant insufficient training of many teachers. They also tend to ignore the results of tests conducted by the American Council of Education. South Carolina students, according to results announced early in 1956, ranked nationally as follows:

• 34th in English correctness and effectiveness of expression
• 36th in general mathematical ability
• 42nd in interpretation of literary material
• 46th in interpretation of reading material on the natural sciences
• 47th in interpretation of reading material in social studies

According to a 1958 report of the National Education Association, South Carolina ranks at the very bottom of the nation in its record of public school education. Among the states it is 48th in the number of median school years completed by persons 25 years of age and older. It is 47th in the per cent of adult (25 years and older) population with less than five years of schooling (27.4 per cent of its adults have less than five years of formal education) and it is 48th in the percentage of its adult population who have completed four years of high school. It occupies 47th position in the percentage of selective service registrants disqualified by mental tests. In the percentage of its eighth grade enrollment going on to finish high school the Palmetto State is 46th. With regard to teacher pay, South Carolina ranks 45th; the average salary of its classroom teachers is $3,250.

Statistics such as these hardly give credence to Rep. Ashmore’s statement that “what South Carolina has done with its schools is evidence in itself any state in the union can take care of its own school needs.”[332]

The press of the state generally denounces federal aid for education. The News and Courier went so far as to condemn federally subsidized school lunches. If school children should get such lunches, it argued, they should also receive suppers and breakfasts. “The difference between government-sponsored school lunches and the welfare state is only a matter of degree.” Similarly, the Record thought that federal aid could destroy “freedom and inventiveness in the schools” while the Morning News suggested it would in reality make less funds available for education because of the bureaucratic costs of collecting the taxes and sending the money back to the states.[333]

On occasion, however, a newspaper editorialist has questioned the arguments used against federal aid. The Independent, rarely missing a chance to lash out against former Governor Byrnes, wondered how the Palmetto State’s elder statesman could oppose federal taxation of South Carolinians for building schools in other states and not oppose taxation of citizens of other states to build defense and military installations in South Carolina. Driving this point home, the Anderson newspaper then stated that in the past both South Carolina and Byrnes had received far more money through federal channels than they had paid out in federal taxes. Likewise the Morning News objected to arguments that federal aid was socialism. Socialism, said the Florence newspaper, depended on whether South Carolina got anything from it. “Our politicians say they will not accept federal aid to education because it is socialistic.... The truth is that they do not need this particular aid, so they can refuse it with indignation.”[334]

A concrete instance of the federal aid to education question came to light in mid-August of 1957 when Clemson College, the state’s agricultural and engineering school for whites, rejected a grant of $350,000 from the Atomic Energy Commission. According to the provisions of the grant, of which the college’s board of trustees had accepted an initial payment of $99,050, “the grantee agrees that no person shall be barred from participation in the educational and training program involved or be the subject of other unfavorable discrimination on the basis of race, color, creed, or religion.” Inasmuch as racial discrimination undeniably existed at Clemson, the trustees belatedly decided to withdraw from the agreement with the AEC and to return to it the $99,050. Clemson president R. E. Poole stressed, however, that the college’s nuclear testing and experimental program would continue.

Governor Timmerman, choosing to ignore the obvious racial discrimination at Clemson, defended the college’s action on the far less realistic grounds that the inclusion of the word “creed” in the conditions of the grant would prohibit Clemson authorities from denying participation in the atomic energy program to a Communist. This lawyer’s trick in semantics was applauded by the Columbia State which ironically at this very time was leading a last-ditch fight to prevent the closing of nearby Fort Jackson, a federal military installation on which not a small part of Columbia’s economic well being directly depends. “This affair,” pontificated the State, “is an affirmation of the principle that federal aid means federal control.” The News and Courier also praised Clemson’s action, though recognizing that its atomic energy program would have to be reduced in scope to the detriment of the state. “So far as we know,” said the Charleston paper, “Clemson is the first Southern college to make such a forthright choice between freedom and government handouts. Other colleges sooner or later will have to make the same decision. We hope they will be guided by the example of the Clemson trustees. We do not know how many federal dollars the choice of freedom will cost Southern colleges. Freedom is an expensive commodity. It is worth every cent.”[335]

Though the state legislature did not reach the zenith of its anti-integration zeal until 1956, its 1955 session provided an informative prelude. Legislators in 1955 were more hesitant than a year later, perhaps because the Supreme Court had not yet implemented the original decision. Nevertheless a number of important measures were adopted. The Gressette committee recommended and the legislature adopted proposals that repealed the state’s compulsory attendance law, gave local school trustees authority to sell or lease school property, and prohibited automatic renewal of teacher contracts.[336]

Only the repeal of the state’s compulsory school attendance law evoked any considerable opposition. In the Senate Lewis Wallace of York County alone opposed repeal and then on the curious grounds that the measure was an “abject surrender” to the Court decision. Greater objection developed in the House. The House Education Committee approved the measure thirteen to eight but on the floor Representative Richard L. Breeland of Richland County, a high school teacher and lawyer, led the opposition. He urged that repeal be postponed until after the Supreme Court had given its final ruling. “In clearing the decks,” he said, “let’s be careful we don’t sink the ship.” His chief adversary in debate was John Calhoun Hart, an impulsive school teacher from Union County. “Our very way of life is at stake,” he exclaimed. “Our ethnological makeup may be swept away. If we falter, we shall go down into the sewer of mongrelism.”[337] The repeal of this law was generally accepted as an unpleasant but imperative move.

The Independent regarded the repeal measure, along with other laws which undermined the public school system, as a tactical action necessary “to realize the overall strategy of maintaining segregated schools.”[338] In abrogating the law the legislature was simply reflecting the will of the people, thought the News and Courier. In thus functioning “as a truly representative body in a Republic,” the legislature was observing a principle “more important than the compulsory attendance law, or even public education itself.”[339] By analogy, then, if the people of South Carolina were bent upon intellectual suicide, the logic of the Charleston paper would have the legislature legally send them to their destruction.

In several other particulars, the 1955 legislature sought to hold the segregation line. Most important was a provision in the general state appropriation bill which stated that: “Appropriations of state aid for teachers, salaries, and all other school district, county and state appropriations for the operation of the public school system shall cease and become inoperative for any school from which, and for any school to which, any pupil may transfer pursuant to, or in consequence of, any order of any court, for the time that the pupil shall attend a school other than the school to which he was assigned before the issuance of such court order.”[340]

The legislators also called upon Congress “to enact legislation limiting the appellate jurisdiction of the United States Supreme Court and the jurisdiction of the other Federal Courts so that the fields of government of the executive and legislative branches and that of the several states shall not be invaded, but shall remain separate and distinct.” Later the legislators, in urging the Supreme Court not to implement its earlier decision, declared that integration in South Carolina would result in “hatred, strife, chaos and confusion,” and the “possible wrecking of the educational program.” Consequently, “at no time in the foreseeable future” would it be possible to desegregate the public schools of South Carolina. Reflecting a blindness to the realities of the twentieth century, the resolution concluded on a note of perverse logic that the continuation of segregation would weld and unite America and thus enable the country to present “a solid front of democracy” to the world.[341]

In 1956 the state legislature enacted anti-integration and anti-NAACP proposals at almost a mass production rate. If no pertinent law could be enacted, the legislators adopted, usually unanimously, resolutions to express their opinion on a particular phase of the integration controversy. Altogether more than a dozen important measures were passed. These included a resolution of interposition; a law requiring white colleges and the Negro college to close if integration were ordered by the courts; a law barring NAACP members from state, county or local government employment; a resolution ordering an investigation of NAACP activities at the state Negro college; a resolution requesting the federal government to place the NAACP on the attorney general’s subversive list; a provision limiting all appropriations for state schools and parks to segregated schools and parks only; a law closing Edisto Beach State Park because Negroes had filed a court suit seeking admission; a resolution requesting the State Library Board to remove current, and screen future, books “inimical and antagonistic” to the segregation customs of the state; a resolution commending the Citizens Councils; a resolution requesting President Eisenhower to restore segregation in the nation’s armed forces to rebuild morale and esprit de corps; the establishment of the Gressette Committee as a permanent legislative committee; a measure giving local law enforcement officers the power to transfer pupils from one school to another to avoid “civil commotion;” an enactment giving local school boards the power to make enrollment rules and regulations having the force and effect of law, appeals from such rules to be channeled through state courts; and finally a resolution stating the legislators’ support of continued bus segregation.[342]

Of all these actions the interposition resolution received the most publicity. Revived during the period by Editor James J. Kilpatrick of the Richmond, Virginia, News Leader, interposition has become the shopworn answer of the states righters and “constitutionalists” to the integration controversy. It is designed to please those elements which have rationalized their prejudices and objections to racial integration on constitutional grounds. Their contention, rightly held to be sure, is that the founding fathers had not contemplated integration in 1787 when they wrote the Constitution. Also appealing is the long and hoary history of interposition and its companion nullification. It had begun in 1798 and 1799 with the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of Jefferson and Madison and subsequently had run through the Hartford Convention of 1814, Calhoun’s nullification attempts in 1832 and Wisconsin’s refusal to accept the Fugitive Slave Law in 1859. The Virginia resolution and the Hartford Convention both used the term “interpose.” Illustrating that the use of interposition or nullification was more a weapon of the political outs than of a geographic section, the Hartford Convention, in terms worthy of the best states righters of the 1950’s, had declared that “in cases of deliberate, dangerous and palpable infractions of the Constitution, affecting the sovereignty of a state and the liberties of the people, it is not only the right but the duty of such state to interpose its authority for their protection.”

The historically outmoded theory behind interposition is the core of the states rights argument: the federal government is a creature of the states, which had united to establish a central authority. The Constitution set the rules and regulations which governed that central authority. Ultimate sovereignty, however, continued to rest with the states. If the people of the states felt that the federal government had exceeded its authority, then they—acting through the states—had the power to challenge the action of the federal government.[343] In theory the challenge would take the form of a suspensive veto which would hold the particular act of the federal government to be null and void until approved by ¾ of the states by a constitutional amendment. The theory resolved itself into a basic question: Is the federal government or are the state governments the final judge of the authority of the federal government? Historically, the political outs have answered the states, though the Civil War, certainly if it meant anything constitutionally speaking, proved the contrary to be true. In the 1950’s the South represented the political outs in the segregation controversy.

The interposition doctrine connoted different things to different people; consequently, it produced varied reactions. Governor Timmerman, who considered interposition a form of protest, believed it “fundamentally sound.” Representative James L. Richards, dean of the state’s congressional delegation and Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, praised interposition as a means of protest but balked at talk of nullification. Interposition he defined as “an assertion, a protest, and a declaration of opinion of illegality.” He urged South Carolinians to “avoid the passion and hysteria that will lead men to ‘ride at night,’ take the law into their own hands, or insult the United States flag.”[344] On the other hand, the silver-maned Congressman L. Mendel Rivers of Charleston declared that “interposition is worthless unless it carries with it the corresponding power of nullification.” Indicating that at least one later day Charlestonian had learned nothing from the nullification crisis of 1832, Rivers asserted that “interposition without nullification is a knife without an edge, a gun without bullets, a plane without an engine or a head without a body.”[345] Similarly, S. Emory Rogers, the Summerton attorney and Citizens Council leader, agreed that there could be “no effective interposition without nullification.”[346]

Newspaper opinion also varied. The Record considered interposition “sound” when viewed “as a device for formalizing the states’ protest against amendment of the Constitution by judicial decision.” But like Representative Richards, the Record looked upon any nullification proposal as “counsel of confusion” which could be supported “only by ... outdated law and pre-Confederate War logic.”[347] The Morning News endorsed interposition as “in all probability, the only proper answer” to the segregation controversy. However, it cautioned interposition advocates to be prepared to accept the possible consequences. Should the nation admit the challenge of the interposition theory and in fact approve the integration decision by constitutional amendment, the South would be bound by its own doctrine to adopt integration.[348] Such an eventuality would test the sincerity of the constitutional objections to integration. The Independent, while considering interposition “worthy of the test,” also realized this danger. In the main, however, the Anderson paper was wary of the whole doctrine because of its support by economic conservatives. “Is there thought in some quarters,” asked the Independent, “that the doctrine might be used to combat not racial decisions alone, but also decisions and legislation dealing with such matters as wages and hours, old age pensions, health insurance, right to work laws and other issues that might arise in the future?”[349]

The News and Courier gave unqualified assent to interposition but never definitely identified the doctrine with outright nullification. That this paper was willing to carry the issue to an extreme, however, was demonstrated on several occasions. Southerners, it declared,