A Reply to Critics

...Let us now assume that in the course of such an enterprise, southern citizens who object to integrated education also organized themselves and even succeeded in persuading the state authorities to prevent the opening and functioning of the school...

...The idea that one can change the world by educating the children in the spirit of the future has been one of the hallmarks of political utopias since antiquity...

...Not discrimination and social segregation, in whatever forms, but racial legislation constitutes the perpetuation of the original crime in this country's history...

...I might be forced into it in order to make a decent living or raise the standard of life for my family...

...THIS NOW BRINGS vs to my third question...

...Life can be very unpleasant, but whatever it may force me to do—and it certainly does not force me to buy my way into restricted neighborhoods—I can retain my personal integrity precisely to the extent that I act under compulsion and out of some vital necessity, and not merely for social reasons...

...she was persecuted by a mob of white children, protected by a white friend of her father, and her face bore eloquent witness to the obvious fact that she was not precisely happy...

...Moreover, if I were a Negro I would feel that the very attempt to start desegregation in education and in schools had not only, and very unfairly, shifted the burden of responsibility from the shoulders of adults to those of children...

...The reluctance of American liberals to touch the issue of the marriage laws, their readiness to invoke practicality and shift the ground of the argument by insisting that the Negroes themselves have no interest in this matter, their embarrassment when they are reminded of what the whole world knows to be the most outrageous piece of legislation in the whole western hemisphere, all this recalls to mind the earlier reluctance of the founders of the Republic to follow Jefferson's advice and abolish the crime of slavery...

...Spitz has misunderstood and misconstrued my argument to such an extent that I would have to quote and requote from our articles sentence after sentence, not to answer his rebuttal, but only in order to correct the misunderstandings upon which this rebuttal was based...

...The picture showed the situation in a nutshell because those who appeared in it were directly affected by the Federal Court order, the children themselves...

...He trembled not for the Negroes, not even for the whites, but for the destiny of the Republic because he knew that one of its vital principles had been violated right at the beginning...

...and if I chose this way of bettering myself, I certainly would prefer to do it by myself, unaided by any government agencies...

...To be sure, even pushing and using my elbows might not entirely depend upon my own inclinations...

...The trouble with this idea has always been the same: it can succeed only if the children are really separated from their parents and brought up in state institutions, or are indoctrinated in school so that they will turn against their own parents...

...This T?^: would be the precise moment when, in my opinion, the federal government should be called upon to intervene...

...The rights of parents to decide such matters for their children until they are grown-ups are challenged only by dictatorships...

...Hence, whoever wishes to change the situation in the South can hardly avoid abolishing the marriage laws and intervening to effect free exercise of the franchise...

...And the answer, of course, is simply that while discrimination and segregation are the rule in the whole country, they are enforced by legislation only in the southern states...

...My first question was: what would I do if I were a Negro mother...

...Pride, which does not compare and knows neither inferiority nor superiority complexes, is indispensable for personal integrity, and it is lost not so much by persecution as by pushing, or rather being pushed into pushing, one's way out of one group and into another...

...Instead of being called upon to fight a clear-cut battle for my indisputable rights—my right to vote and be protected in it, to marry whom I please and be protected in my marriage (though, of course, not in attempts to become anybody's brother-in-law), or my right to equal opportunity—I would feel I had become involved in an affair of social climbing...

...The series of events in the South that followed the Supreme Court ruling, after which this administration committed itself to fight its battle for civil rights on the grounds of education and public schools, impresses one with a sense of futility and needless embitterment as though all parties concerned knew very well that nothing was being achieved under the pretext that something was being done...

...Psychologically, the situation of being unwanted (a typically social predicament) is more difficult to bear than outright persecution (a political predicament) because personal pride is involved...

...Again I would try to prevent my child's being dragged into a political battle in the schoolyard...

...For here we would have again a clear case of segregation enforced by governmental authority...

...I would agree that the government has a stake in the education of my child insofar as this child is supposed to grow up into a citizen, but I would deny that the government had any right to tell me in whose company my child received its instruction...

...This is what happens in tyrannies...

...In addition, I would feel that my consent was necessary for any such drastic changes no matter what my opinion of them happened to be...

...I therefore prefer to take my cue from the simple fact that my article was not understood in the terms I wrote it, and I shall try to repeat its essential points on a different, less theoretical level...

...This would be tedious and space-consuming, and still could not result in anything better than a restatement of my original argument...

...If, however, I were strongly convinced that the situation in the South could be materially helped by integrated education, I would try—perhaps with the help of the Quakers or some other body of like-minded citizens—to organize a new school for white and colored children and to run it like a pilot project, as a means to persuade other white parents to change their attitudes...

...Jefferson, too, yielded for practical reasons, but he, at least, still had enough political sense to say after the fight was lost: "I tremble when I think that God is just...

...One last word about education and politics...

...If, on the other hand, public authorities are unwilling to draw the consequences of their own vague hopes and premises, the whole educational experiment remains at best without result, while, at worst, it irritates and antagonizes both parents and children who feel that they are deprived of some essential rights...

...Tumin has put himself outside the scope of discussion and discourse through the tone he adopted in his rebuttal...

...Spiti s argument, on the contrary, would deserve a point-by-point analysis if it constituted a refutation of my position...

...This is by no means an academic question...

...I would in addition be convinced that there is an implication in the whole enterprise of trying to avoid the real issue...

...It is partly a matter of constitutional principle which by definition is beyond majority decisions and practicality...

...The real issue is equality before the law of the country, and equality is violated by segregation laws, that is, by laws enforcing segregation, not by social customs and the manners of educating children...

...there would be no conflict between home and school, though there might arise a conflict between home and school, on one side, and the street on the other...

...If I were a Negro mother in the South, I would feel that the Supreme Court ruling, unwillingly but unavoidably, has put my child into a more humiliating position than it had been in before...

...MY SECOND QUESTION WAS: what would I do if I were a white mother in the South...

...The point of departure of my reflections was a picture in the newspapers, showing a Negro girl on her way home from a newly integrated school...

...I asked myself: what exactly distinguishes the so-called Southern way of life from the American way of life with respect to the color question...

...The answer: under no circumstances would I expose my child to conditions which made it appear as though it wanted to push its way into a group where it was not wanted...

...To be sure, there, too, I would use the children in what is essentially a political battle, but at least I would have made sure that the children in school are all there with the consent and the help of their parents...

...and it also involves, of course, the rights of citizens, as, for instance, the rights of those twenty-five or so Negro boys from Texas who, while in the Army, had married European girls and therefore could not go home because in the eyes of Texas legislation they were guilty of a crime...

...By pride, I do not mean anything like being "proud of being a Negro," or a Jew, or a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, etc., but that untaught and natural feeling of identity with whatever we happen to be by the accident of birth...

...If it were only a matter of equally good education for my children, an effort to grant them equality of opportunity, why was I not asked to fight for an improvement of schools for Negro children and for the immediate establishment of special classes for those children whose scholastic record now makes them acceptable to white schools...

...Unfortunately, despite his fairness and the consistency of his own position, Mr...