James Jackson Kilpatrick

“ The achievements of the colored people of the 1950s merit at least provisional applause: They are fighting their way out of millennial shadows—and more power to them! If an arriving generation of Negro children can sustain this momentum, the race should move ahead, first within itself, as Dr. Conant pleads, and in time—in time—toward equality with the larger and more established community around it. When that hour of equality arrives—whenever that hour arrives—white “prejudices” predictably will dissolve; there no longer would be a basis for them. ”

“ Nothing in the Constitution or in the decision of the Supreme Court takes away from the people the freedom to choose the schools they attend. The Constitution, in other words, does not require integration. It merely forbids discrimination. It does not forbid such segregation as the result of voluntary action. It merely forbids the use of governmental power to enforce segregation. The Fourteenth Amendment is a limitation upon the exercise of power by the state or State agencies, not a limitation upon the freedom of individuals. ”

“ I have an idea that some Negro defenders themselves have ceased to believe in them. And I cherish the further idea that a really massive, significant change in race relations will not come until the Negro people develop leaders who will ask themselves the familiar question, “Why are we treated as second-class citizens?” and return a candid answer to it: “Because all too often that is what we are.”
If the Negro people have the innate capacity that Montagu, Clark, Comas, Boas and the others insist they have, the Negro people in time will overcome every obstacle that fate has put in their way. ”

“ 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 like the skeletons of dinosaurs. This is hard country, burned by the sun and wrinkled by the unceasing wind; this is Texas, and almost everything men say of it is true. Oklahoma, to the north, is a pocket paper-back edition of its brawny southern neighbor. Both States offer moments of surpassing beauty and long stretches of surpassing dullness ”

“ The mystical entity that is the South is held together, in a lovely, helpless, hapless bond, by its consciousness of the Negro, by its abiding conservatism, by its dedication to romanticism, and by its inexorable sense of realities, and whenever one of these threads wears thin, another is redoubled and twice twined together to knit the fabric whole. The defeated South is never wholly defeated; the romantic South cannot be wholly disillusioned; the conservative South can flirt with liberalism and remain as chastely conservative as before ”

“ In other times and other places, sturdy, creative, and self-reliant minorities have carved out their own destiny; they have compelled acceptance on their own merit; they have demonstrated those qualities of leadership and resourcefulness and disciplined ambition that in the end cannot ever be denied. But the Negro race, as a race, has done none of this. “We do not want to be second-class citizens,” cries James Farmer, national director of the Congress for Racial Equality. ”

“ To the devout believers in racial integration, it doubtless appears incredible that Birmingham’s action could have been taken in the first place, or that the wrongness of this decision (in their eyes) should fail to be instantly apparent. These impatient critics simply do not comprehend the depth of Southern feelings; they are as totally unable to accept the viewpoint of the typical white Southerner as the typical white Southerner is totally unable to accept the viewpoint of the Negro. ”

“ Why, then, did the white race alone develop a civilization which is sweeping the whole world, and compared with which all other civilizations appear as feeble beginnings cut short in early childhood, or arrested and petrified at an early stage of development? Is it not, to say the least, probable that the race which attained the highest stage of civilization was the most gifted one, and that those races which have remained at the bottom of the scale were not capable of rising to higher levels? ”

“ This court neither approves nor condemns any legislative policy. Its delicate and difficult office is to ascertain and declare whether the legislation is in accordance with, or in contravention of, the provisions of the Constitution; and, having done that, its duty ends.” Harlan Stone, in the magnificent dissent in which Brandeis and Cardozo joined, expressed the responsibility of the court in this fashion:
The power of courts to declare a statute unconstitutional is subject to two guiding principles of decision which ought never to be absent from judicial consciousness. ”

“ And whatever the wrongs may have been, the white South emphatically refuses to accept all the wrongs as her own. For the South itself has been wronged—cruelly and maliciously wronged, by men in high places whose hypocrisy is exceeded only by their ignorance, men whose trade is to damn the bigotry of the segregated South by day and to sleep in lily-white Westchester County by night. ”

“ American people has imbued this doctrine with a special venerability: We have been reared to believe that law exists metaphysically, above and beyond the mortal men who enforce it. As an institution, the high court commands respect, not for the nine frail vessels beneath the robes, but out of deference to the higher, holier grail they represent. ”

“ And paradoxically, the prospect of defeat in lunch counters, waiting rooms, public schools, places of assembly, is no harbinger of ultimate despair; the prospect is an old friend, the face of defeat, and in the South it is a symbol not of disintegration but of unity. Misery loves company. ”

“ As the migration of the Negro out of the South continues, other parts of the nation, at once benefited and handicapped for want of the South’s experience in coexistence, will grapple in their own fashion with the cultural and economic assimilation of the Negro. They will not find it easy, but they can rely upon this: The South will not intrude its views upon theirs. This is a big country, a great country; it remains the freest country on earth, and the Negro people are a part of it. The law has done what it can for Negroes as a whole ”

“ The term embraces the complete and unrestrained intermingling of races, on terms of social equality, without constraint of any sort; it is color-blindness, voluntarily accepted; it is more than mere joint membership on civic committees or school boards. And it is [43] not something that can be achieved by writ of mandamus. A court can impose a legal condition of desegregation, and thus put an end to segregation; but a court cannot enjoin separation and thus achieve integration. The arm of the law, long as it is, cannot reach into certain areas of the human spirit. ”

“ Here we are told, on the authority of the most eminent court in the world, that if one-hundred Negro pupils are put to study in one building, and one-hundred white pupils are put to study in an identical building, the first group of pupils, who have been segregated solely on the basis of race, will make up a school inherently unequal to the other. ”

“ Some will not; they may never have read the Constitution, line by line and word by word; they know its provisions vaguely, not explicitly, and the trail that led from the creation of States to the formation of a Union is as remote to them as a path through the Pleiades. Hence this hornbook review. And if Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence seems irrelevant to the South’s position in Brown v. Board of Education, it is only because too much emphasis has been put on the Declaration’s first few lines and not enough on its last.
Perhaps in the divine plan, all men are indeed “created equal.” ”

“ Surely there have been evils in the South’s policies of racial separation. Poor as the South was, in the sixty years after Reconstruction that preceded World War II, much more could have been done, and should have been done, to encourage the Negro people closer to a cultural and economic equality. ”

“ It ordains that no State shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, or deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. What is this but declaring that the law in the States shall be the same for the black as for the white; that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the States, and, in regard to the colored race, for whose protection the amendment was primarily designed, that no discrimination shall be made against them by law because of their color? ”

“ It is a way of life that has to be experienced. Children mask their eyes and play at being blind. Even so, some of my Northern friends mask their eyes and play at being Southern; they try to imagine what it must be like to be white in the South, to be Negro in the South. Novelist John Griffin dyed his skin and spent three weeks or so pretending to be Negro, looking for incidents to confirm his prejudices. But a child always knows that he can take his hands from his eyes, and see, that he is not really blind ”

“ We do not like authority, especially needless, lint-picking, petty authority, and a broody pessimism constantly evokes the apprehension that government, if given half a chance, will put a fast one over on the people. In the eternal conflict of man and the state, the South stands in spirit, at least, firmly on man’s side. ”

“ If individual liberty means anything, it must mean that each individual, regardless of color, is at liberty to choose his own personal and business associates, and to choose them for whatever reason. This the Negro must understand. If he is to become a part of this association, on equal terms, he must do what every other race of men has done since time began, and that is to demonstrate his [192] worth to the community he seeks to enter. For more than three-hundred years, the white South by and large has regarded such entry as impossible. ”

“ The earliest history of man reflects an awareness of racial distinctions; in one fashion or another, discrimination has existed through all recorded time, and “prejudice,” if you please, like the poor, has been with us always. It exists among the Negro people themselves. It exists around the world, and may be seen in especially cruel and virulent forms in some of those nations said to be so terribly offended by the manifestations of segregation that remain in the American South. ”

“ In these days, it is doubtful that any child [204] may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.
We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other “tangible” factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does. ”

“ The political climate of a Federal administration anxious to achieve integration, the immense resources of a lavish school budget, the cultural amenities freely available to all children as an adjunct to learning, the absence of racial discrimination in employment, the untypically high incomes and job status of many Negro families. It is entirely reasonable to assume that pupils in the Washington schools, as a group, should not be merely average, or slightly above average; they should in fact lead the entire country. ”

“ But to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment as authority for the judicial abolition of school segregation would be an invasion of the legislative power and an exact reversal of the intent of the framers of the amendment.
Yes, the court has power. Hughes’ cynical remark contains grim truth: Judges are restrained only by the Constitution, and the Constitution is what the judges say it is. But if the ethical tradition of our society teaches us one thing (wholly apart from the judicial tradition) , it is that might and right ought always to be carefully distinguished. ”