Where Equality Leads

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by OSCAR HANDLIN

THE public debate on desegregation has dealt largely with the shadow of the issue rather than with its substance. Not states’ rights or federalism or the control of education, but some other, gnawing fear — rarely expressed — lies behind the violence of the protest against the Supreme Court’s decision. The dread lest desegregation open the way to a contaminating race mixture is the fundamental anxiety that troubles many white Southerners; it is the nightmare that drives men to disregard the law in Tennessee and Texas and Alabama.

It is fruitless to argue details with the victim in the grip of a nightmare. He will not be convinced that his views of race are false, or that his understanding of his own history is faulty. The images that rouse his anxiety, illusory though they be, have their own reality and will not disappear through the simple demonstration of their irrationality. It may help, however, to expose the nightmare for what it is: a figment of the mind needlessly frightened of the future.

The haunting specter of racial amalgamation corresponds to nothing in the world of actuality. It is rather the product of three profound misconceptions. The men frightened by it mistake the meaning of the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954. They misjudge the probable consequences of desegregation on both whites and blacks. And, most important, their conjectures as to what results will follow upon more intimate contact between Negroes and other Americans in the schools run counter to all the available evidence.

The significance of the Court’s decision will become clear only when it is viewed in the light of the history of segregation since the end of the Civil War. Conscious of the complexity of the problem of emancipation, the men who carried through the Reconstruction programs were anxious not only to free the slave but also to safeguard his future civic rights. That was the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment, which made the Negroes citizens and which forbade the states to abridge their privileges and immunities or to deny them the equal protection of the law. To prevent any discrimination on the ground of race or previous condition of servitude, Congress enacted a series of civil rights acts, designed to guarantee that equality. As a result, there was a slow but perceptible improvement in the status of the Negro in the first two decades after the peace. That was true in education as in other matters.

Only in the 1880s did segregation emerge as a defined pattern of social behavior. Segregation was not directed simply at the schools; it aimed to create a mode of life that would establish the distinct inferiority of the Negro by setting him apart in every important activity — in the school as elsewhere.

In the face of the new departure the courts were cautious. The mandate of the Fourteenth Amendment was clear, but the supporters of segregation argued that they had no intention of negating it. It was possible, they insisted, to provide separate but equal facilities in education as in transportation and in the other spheres where the two races had contact. In 1896, in the famous case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court accepted that contention, assuming that the privileges guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment would still be assured under a segregated regime. The decision affirmed the right of the Negroes to equality, but it accepted the argument that equality could be attained through separateness.

When the Supreme Court reviewed this issue in 1954, it had almost sixty years of experience on the basis of which to test the validity of that argument. Its unanimous decision was that the pattern of separate treatment, as it had developed, had not brought equality of treatment to the Negro. This was a question of fact and not of law. No serious observer of the Southern scene has denied that the educational facilities supplied to the black citizens of the Southern states were markedly inferior to those of the whites. Indeed, in many vital respects the Negro’s relative situation had actually deteriorated since 1896. Those who had affirmed the compatibility of segregation and equality had not in those decades of opportunity made it work.

The Court was therefore compelled to review the findings of Plessy v. Ferguson. If separateness did not bring the equality guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, then the laws establishing the segregated system were unconstitutional, for they fixed the Negro in an inferior place and thus deprived him of the rights guaranteed by the Amendment.

But that was all the Court said. Its findings were purely negative. It did not go on to any positive injunction laying down a line of action to be followed. Instead, it left the various states free gradually to develop a variety of adjustments that would meet the clear constitutional obligation to provide equal treatment for all citizens regardless of race.

Whether the Southern states are to proceed in good conscience to do so is the only question now at issue. Were it considered with entire good will by all Southerners as it is by the majority, a variety of conceivable answers might emerge. For the Supreme Court by no means affirmed, as the extremists sometimes imply, that total, immediate integration was the only acceptable alternative. Men freed of violence and of the emotional hatreds of the past ought to be able to develop a number of different solutions to a problem that varies widely from place to place.

The Court did not hold thus that only a single unified school system would meet the requirements of equal treatment. It did not, for instance, intend to limit or bar private schools, or forms of separation that are purely voluntary. Catholics who choose to attend parochial schools are still free to do so; and any groups of whites or Negroes who wish to withdraw to educational systems of their own are not depriving themselves or others of constitutional rights, so long as that withdrawal is purely voluntary.

By the same token, the Court did not rule against selection genuinely based on criteria other than race. It will still be possible to send boys to one school, girls to another, to set apart students specially interested in music or science, and to single out the retarded for special treatment. Indeed, the Court’s decision insisted only that the element of racial compulsion be removed, and it left a considerable range of alternatives available to those who wish to adapt themselves to the conditions it created. In the years to come, good sense and tolerance will undoubtedly encourage the majority of Americans to explore these alternatives. The results will vary widely according to the local conditions of each community.

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DESEGREGATION therefor does not necessarily involve the emergence of a single, all-inclusive, integrated type of school, unless the students and their parents choose to have it do so. The question then arises: what will the parents choose?

On this point, many opponents of desegregation fall into an ingenious contradiction. They are prone to argue that the Southern Negro is content with the situation as it is; only the outside agitator seeks a change. Yet they are violently hostile to the suggestion that the colored man be given freedom of choice, for in their innermost hearts they fear he would demand to be taken into the white school. They thus maintain that the Negro desires no change but would change if he could!

They are wrong on both counts. The truth is that the Negro’s attitude is not abstract, but a concomitant of the surrounding circumstances. He is totally committed neither to segregation nor to integration. He prefers one or the other as it forms a favorable part of his whole life.

Any parent — white or black — who confronts the choice of a school for his child thinks not in terms of slogans or even of general principles. He thinks rather in terms of very concrete considerations. Which institution will best equip the boy or girl for a desirable career? Where will he be most likely to be happy, to find friends, to acquire an understanding of himself and of his culture? The ultimate answers will vary greatly, for they depend not upon theory, but upon the background of the parents and their situation in the communities in which they live.

Under conditions of genuine equality, Negroes have thus shown the inclination to continue to attend schools preponderantly made up of members of their own race. In 1949, for instance, an Indiana state law prohibited the segregation which theretofore prevailed in some schools, including those of the city of Evansville. The result was not the mass rush to the white schools that some Hoosiers had anticipated. The overwhelming majority of Evansville Negroes — over 90 per cent — continued to attend their own schools. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the colored people of Clinton, Tennessee, or Clay, Kentucky, who braved obloquy, boycott, and the danger of violence to do so, preferred to send their children to integrated schools.

Integration is not an end in itself but a means to an end. Black parents, like white, hope that education will give their boys and girls the best possible preparation for life. They resent the compulsion to attend Negro schools, unequal to the white, that will forever burden their children with handicaps and label them indelibly with the stigma of inferiority. They will not resent schools that are genuinely equal and that bear no imputation of inferiority, no matter what their racial composition. Indeed, under some circumstances, they may actually find their children more comfortable in such schools with those who share a common cultural and social background.

There will necessarily be substantial regional and communal differences in adjustment. In the great metropolitan cities, residential and housing patterns already separate the population along ethnic, social, and economic, as well as racial, lines. The schools which draw their students from the homogeneous neighborhoods in which they are situated reflect the composition of the area as a matter of course. Classes in Bronzeville and Harlem are predominantly Negro, just as those in East Boston are Italian and those in Hamtramck are Polish. Only in rare instances are such schools likely to contain a completely mixed and heterogeneous student body. In smaller cities there is less scope for such adjustments. The elementary schools may reflect neighborhood differences. But if there is only one high school in town it will have to accommodate all the students eligible to attend it.

The greatest problem will no doubt exist in rural regions which enjoy a minimum of flexibility. There the segregated school has been least convenient and most expensive; and there it most often produced the types of inferiority that the Supreme Court condemned. It may be that no solution other than integration in the general school system will do justice to the dozen Negro families of Clinton, Tennessee. But the fact that integration is sought there does not mean it will be sought everywhere.

The experience of the colleges has been instructive in this regard. Desegregation began sooner in higher than in elementary education. Yet it has not produced a hegira from the Negro to the white institutions. The Universities of Texas and of North Carolina now admit colored students, but relatively few choose to attend in preference to their own excellent colleges. The consciousness that they are free to choose destroys the imputation of inferiority.

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THE fact is that there are no grounds for the belief that a mass intermingling of the races would everywhere immediately follow the end of compulsory segregation. On the contrary, all the available evidence sustains the belief that genuine equality and freedom of choice within the latitude of the Court s decision would petmit a variety of experiments that could cope with the problem and creatively resolve it.

The inability to act rationally in these matters is grounded in the fear that the new school contacts between blacks and whites will produce a higher degree of racial mixture than in the past. This is the crux of the matter.

Yet there is not a shred of evidence to support the contention that desegregation will hasten amalgamation. There are good grounds for expecting rather that widened equality may retard the trend in that direction.

The assertion that the white race in the United States has maintained its purity through three centuries of history flies completely in the face of the facts. Let us beg the question of whether it is even possible to speak of a pure race; and let us assume that the “whites” are one race and the “blacks” another. Still it is demonsruble that the ‟blood” of the one group has long since been crossed with that of the other. In the nature of the case, the number of Negroes who have passed into the white group is not ascertainable; estimates range as high as 30,000 a year. Whatever the number, the trend has been substantial since the eighteenth century; and those who have “passed,” with their progeny, must form a considerable element of the total population.

The evidence of white strains among the Negroes is more visible. Almost 3,000,000 Americans are mulattoes; and many more, whose skin color is darker, have nevertheless some degree of mixed paternity. Careful studies have shown that between 70 and 90 per cent of the Negroes of the Cnited States have at least one known white ancestor; the number without some such strain in their heritage must be small indeed. Racial intermixture was begun when the slaves were first brought into this country in the North and in the South; it was not prevented by the existence of slavery; nor has the persistence of segregation slowed it down.

The apparent difference between the United States and South America is primarily one of definition and attitude. In the United States, a man is a Negro, whatever his color, if he has any known Negro ancestor. In Brazil, and elsewhere in Latin America, color is determined by the preponderant strain. Thus in the United States a man with one Negro great-grandparent would he colored; in Brazil he would be white. In the United States his marriage to a white would be an intermarriage and would earn the opprobrium of the prejudiced; in Brazil it would not. Otherwise, the difference shrinks to one of degree.

In any case, intermarriage has been a negligible factor in causing race mixture. The law forbids it in many parts of the country; and where it is legal the number of unions so consummated is small. In Northern cities, where such marriages are most likely to occur, they form only between 3 and 5 per cent of those in which Negroes are involved. Expressed in terms of the percentage of white marriages, they would make but an infinitesimal fraction. It is not thus that the blood strains have in the past been crossed.

Furthermore, all of our data indicate that the growth of equality between the races does not increase the rate of intermarriage. There are communities in Ontario, in northern Michigan, and in western Massachusetts where whites have lived side by side with Negroes for more than a hundred years. No segregation there has kept apart the children of the two races. Yet the two groups have nevertheless maintained their identity and separateness. Wherever statistics measure the rate of intermarriage, they deny rather than confirm the fear that equality stimulates intermarriage. In Boston, for instance, the percentage has fallen steadily since 1900 as the position of the Negroes has improved.

This is exactly what might be anticipated in view of the character of American marriage and of the factors that generally influence the choice of partners in it. Concealed in the Southern view is the curious assumption that, given freedom of choice, men and women would tend to select mates of the opposite race, for this, clearly, is a purely voluntary matter: mere propinquity forces no one into love. All the evidence points in the opposite direction. Marriages are usually formed among individuals of common cultural, social, and religious backgrounds — even where race does not intrude. Take a large city high school, where boys and girls of diverse antecedents mix without distinction of race, creed, or national origins. Ten years after graduation, the former students will have sorted themselves out in marriages with the partners closest to themselves in color, religion, and antecedents. This, after all, is a process by which the family is extended across the generations; and those who enter upon it have in mind not only their own emotions but also the feelings of their parents and relatives as well as of the children who will come of it. In the absence of compelling forces to the contrary, opportunity and inclination will alike lead to marriage within some existing group.

All the scholarly investigations of the intermarriages which have actually occurred confirm this conclusion. Such marriages are most likely to involve the lower social classes and individuals whose own family ties are weak. Generally it is the black man who marries a white woman whose status is inferior to his own. (Many such unions were effected by servicemen abroad.) The white man who takes a black wife is likely to be foreignborn, detached from any group of his own, and without, binding social ties. Significantly a large percentage of those who enter upon such unions are divorced or widowed, people whose earlier attempts at marriage had failed.

It is important in this connection to remember that the upper social groups among the Negroes have always frowned upon interracial marriages, precisely because these groups, although closest to the whites, were prosperous and stable in their own family life. Frederick Douglass thus lost a good deal of his popularity when he took a white wife: and W. E. B. DuBois, in Dusk of Dawn, describes his own mixed emotions as he gave up courting a colored girl because she looked quite white and he feared the inference that he was marrying outside the race.

Does if not follow then that segregation, which established the inferiority of the Negro and prevents him from attaining a stable personal and family life, actually magnifies the incentive to seek the escape of intermarriage? On the other hand, any measure, like desegregation, which widens opportunities and increases the scope of equality also increases the stability of Negro family life, heightens self-respect, and thus indirectly diminishes the incentives toward intermarriage.

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IT is not surprising, therefore, to find a subtle change in the attitudes of Negroes with the improvement of their status in the past thirty years. There was a time when colored people were so depressed by the sense of their own inferiority that they accepted unquestioningly all the white man’s standards. Their own habits and tastes, like their blackness, were inherently degrading; and success and happiness went to those who could most closely model themselves upon the dominant race. There was a premium upon “marrying light” even though within the group, because that most closely approximated the standards of the whites.

With the Negro’s achievement of some degree of stability and the restoration of his self-confidence, there has been a significant change, even since Gunnar Myrdal noticed it in 1944. Rejecting the notion of his own inferiority, the Negro has ceased to take the white as the determining model. He has come to value the standards and tastes of his own group and often actually to take pride in his color. Not a few are unwilling to “pass” even though their pigmentation is pale enough to permit them to do so. The girl who holds the cake of soap in the Ebony advertisement is black; and she is pretty to those who see her because she is black. The era of the hair straightener is coming to an end. The notion that Negroes are eager to marry whites is a delusion born of the white’s own vanity and of his ignorance of the real sentiments of his fellow Americans of another color.

The experience of schools in which segregation has come to an end amply confirms these judgments. The circumstances vary widely according to the conditions and traditions of the communities in which the adjustment occurs. In the Southern colleges, Negroes, once admitted, have generally enjoyed a minimum of social contact with white students. Elsewhere the relationship between the races has extended beyond the classroom to the formal social activities conducted under school auspices. But even when the boy and girl of different colors dance together at the senior prom, they do not think of dating. They hesitate, as does the Methodist with the Catholic, because courtship and marriage involve an altogether different order of considerations.

The obsession with the unreal dangers of intermarriage has unfortunately obscured the true source of race mixture in the past and in the present. The white ancestors of the mulattoes and of the Negroes of varying degrees of lightness of skin were not married to blacks. These are the progeny of relationships outside wedlock; and miscegenation, not intermarriage, has, in the United States, been the mode of infusing the black with the white strain in our society. Furthermore, miscegenation under these terms was the direct product of the inferiority of Negro women. Whatever has tended to increase that inferiority has increased the rate of miscegenation. Whatever diminishes it lowers the rate. In that sense, segregation actually is indirectly more conducive to the mixture of races than is desegregation.

Through much of the nineteenth century, white men who kept black concubines suffered no loss of social esteem thereby. Until the Civil War, the women were their property, and no control limited the treatment accorded them. In most of the Southern states miscegenation was no crime, although intermarriage was.

Concubinage began to decline after the Civil War. It hardly exists now. It was extirpated by the liberation of the Negroes, which removed their women from the absolute power of the masters.

Less formal sexual relations between white men and black women, however, were long thereafter tolerated in many parts of the South. They were facilitated by the disorganization of Negro family life and by the simple brute fact that blacks were incapable of protecting their daughters and sisters against the aggressions of those who had once been their masters. The law and the mores were alike acquiescent. There are authentic, if scarcely credible, instances of respectable white businessmen who warned off the Negro preacher who wished to strengthen the morals of the women in his flock.

Insofar as that can be measured, the incidence of interracial sexual intercourse seems also to have declined perceptibly in the last forty years. It has fallen off precisely because the Negro now sees the prospect of leading a decent family life and because he himself has grown in self-respect and in the power to resist. The transformation in the general conception of what the law and the practices of society owe him is the most important element in that change.

If we strengthen the trend toward equality of opportunity and of rights, then we strengthen also the elements of cohesion and order in the Negro’s own life. If we weaken that trend and perpetuate his inferiority, then we weaken also the fabric of his family life and leave him a loose, helpless, and potentially disorderly element in our society. Desegregation, which opens doors to full participation in citizenship, will have the former effect. Segregation, our experience has shown us, will have the latter.

In the perspective of centuries, amalgamation may or may not be desirable. The question is unreal and irrelevant. Our problem is immediate; and in the perspective of the next few decades the creation of a school system that segregates none of our children against their will and offers all of them equal treatment can only help us all.

Our democratic society has an abundance of room for a plurality of social types and social groups. If we can but free ourselves of the habit of thinking in terms of the absolutes of total conformity and amalgamation on the one hand and of total separateness and segregation on the other, we shall find our institutions flexible enough to accommodate a variety of solutions among which individuals will be able to make their own personal choices, It was the virtue of the Supreme Court to have understood that, and in its decision to have laid a foundation for constructive development in the future. And it is the insistence upon thinking of the nightmare of amalgamation as the only alternative to segregation that is most likely to perpetuate the tensions that all Americans should dread.

Mr. Sass’s reply to Mr. Handlin’s argument will be found in Atlantic Repartee, page 31 of this issue.