Nullification:

...one hopes that this kind of statesmanship will not be too handicapped by the necessities of the coming election campaign...

...That capacity is indeed one of the most difficult of human achievements...

...it will try to find some high ground of moral or constitutional principle from which to protect its interests and prejudices...

...But when the local community feels itself more integral and compelling than the total community and does not recognize the justice of the law as real justice, the majesty of the law is dissipated and the power of local custom triumphs...

...They should remember that perfect race amity has scarcely been attained in any part of the country and that where there is still a considerable cultural difference between the two races the sense of superiority is aggravated...

...He rightly believes that this can be done by being patient with the organic processes of history, which have done so much in recent decades to break down the walls of segregation...

...They merely prevent opposite solutions from prevailing...

...It is too easy to criticize these people from our vantage point of safety, but it is plain that they could turn the tide down South if they were not so frightened...

...Virginia has passed an amendment which probably sets the pattern of nullification...

...Fortunately, it is not armed rebellion...

...Senator Eastland of Mississippi offered a revealing glimpse of the logic behind this defiance and of the pretensions and rationalizations which sustain it...

...Yet?¬ Stevenson is right...

...But this attitude may cost him much Negro and other support in Northern cities...

...interestingly enough, about the same percentage that was willing to defy the Nazis in Germany...

...There is no pat formula for resolving the tension between the South and the rest of the nation...

...The fact that it is not very appealing to the victims of a current injustice does not make it any less the course of wisdom in overcoming historic injustices...

...Some critics have suggested that the Court should have allowed more time for desegregation...

...The most stubborn defiance comes from those regions of the South where the Negro population is large and the whites' collective survival impulse is most obviously engaged...

...That majesty consists of two elements...

...Negro leaders in California are reported to have been alienated by his disavowal of the use of Federal police power to compel compliance with the Supreme Court decision...

...It requires real statesmanship to uphold the majesty of the law and at the same time win over a custom-bound community to fuller conformity with the law...

...The people in the North can help the cause if they refrain from unnecessary vilification...

...Eastland also clearly revealed the tack which a threatened local community will take when it finds itself pressed by the total national community...

...He was not ready to announce overt rebellion, but he did threaten covert rebellion "by legal means...

...This reflects the uneasy conscience of the majority, both over its treatment of the Negro and over its defiance of the Court decision...

...Perhaps the most serious political and moral issue emerges not from the attempts at nullification but from the hysterical efforts of the Southern white majority to prevent criticism by both whites and Negroes of its defiance of the Court and its desperate attempt to preserve segregation...

...There was immediate rejoicing, because the decision had given our democracy a new prestige, particularly in the sensitive "colored" continents, in our contest with Communism...

...The question is why the "majesty" of the law is not more potent than it has proved to be...

...The leaders of the Southern states are breathing defiance...

...The threats have obviously intimidated a great many Southern whites who possess a sense of justice, who are uneasy about the turn of events, but who lack the courage to defy the dominant racists...

...NULLIFICATION By Reinhold, Niebuhr The Southern rebellion against the Supreme Court's school decision opened a period of dramatic conflict between the majesty of the law and the power of local customs When the Supreme Court ruled two years ago that segregated education was contrary to the Constitutional guarantee of equality before the law, it was obvious that a period of dramatic conflict between the majesty of the law and the power of local custom would ensue...

...In any event, nothing can save the Southern states from progressive deterioration of their communities and a drift toward tyranny unless the leaders carefully weigh the price which must be paid for defying the majesty of the law, whether that majesty be estimated in terms of the moral prestige of standards, equal justice, or the prestige of the total community as against its parts...

...That is...

...The same nation which justly prides itself on being a "melting pot" of various nationalities could not manage the relation between the white and Negro peoples...

...One is the prestige of justice itself...

...Police power can deal with individual recalcitrance, but it is impotent against the collective recalcitrance of a whole community--indeed, it often tends to harden the heart of the rebellious community...

...Their fears merely prove that the capacities of ordinary good men are about the same the world over and that they do not include the capacity for martyrdom...

...The Civil War did not solve the problem of the coexistence of two very different races or increase the capacity of human beings to establish community across the barrier of race distinctions...

...Insecurity, moral or political, always begets hysteria, and hysteria begets violence or the threat of violence...

...Some of the power of local custom is derived from the idea of states' rights, which was presumably annulled by the Union victory over the rebellious states in the Civil War...

...the Civil War removed the original ambiguity in America's self-conception and constituted it a nation rather than a federation of stales...

...The issue of segregation is bound to color our national life in the coming decades, and it may affect the Presidential nominations as well as the election this year...

...The Southern community has not yet become fascist, but the symptoms of hysteria and violence suggest an incipient fascism...

...The mob scenes at the University of Alabama reveal a growing hysteria in the South which threatens to undo much of the progress of recent years...

...If the South does not become too hysterical, the adjustments which have begun in those Southern regions where the Negro population is smaller will gradually spread to the hard core of resistance and recalcitrance...

...Stevenson is anxious to prevent another full-scale breach between the North and the South on the race issue...

...Someone has estimated that only about 5 per cent of the population in the South is willing to defy the dominant group...

...So the South is once more embarked on rebellion...

...Even now, the seriousness of the segregation problem can largely be calculated in mathematical terms...

...Public schools are abandoned in favor of private schools, which receive oblique state support, in order to evade the Supreme Court decision...

...The Southern stales have been slowly integrated into a united nation...

...Perhaps this proves that whatever superiority we may have over the Germans in civic virtue derives not so much from the moral qualities of individuals as from favorable historical circumstances in the Anglo-Saxon countries...

...But it did allow time, and more time might have simply encouraged a complacent nullification by tardiness...

...Prudence is as necessary as courage in the tasks of statesmanship...

...It will certainly complicate Adlai Stevenson's struggle for the nomination...

...These hysterical efforts really endanger the Southern community, for they destroy the mutual trust upon which community rests and use terror to discourage creative dissent...

...Now the sorry realities of "nullification" are being unfolded before our eyes...

...The other is the authority of the total community over its various members...

...We can hardly blame Negroes for being impatient with the counsel of patience, in view of their age-long suffering under the white man's arrogance...

...But the pattern of nullification has been set, and one has the uneasy feeling that the pattern will persist...

...The Senator disavowed his earlier statement that force would have to be used to gain Southern compliance with the Court's decision...

...This rather outrageous disparagement of the majesty of the law betokens a desperation in the defense of the "Southern way of life" which bodes no good for the future...

...Critics of the South must recognize that the South faces difficult problems, but the Southern leaders will have to learn that difficult problems do not excuse wrong decisions...

...It did tolerably well in the North, where the Negroes were clearly in the minority, but it failed most grievously in those Southern counties where the Negro population approached or exceeded the white...

...He declared on television that the Supreme Court had "subverted" the Constitution, that it had been "brainwashed...

...All the progress on which we have prided ourselves in overcoming the "American dilemma" is gravely threatened...

...But in a sense wars do not permanently settle any issues affirmatively...

...It also abolished the institution of slavery, which had prompted the Southern states to assert the rights of the states against the national community...

...But it is always premature to anticipate an easy victory of law over local custom, for custom is a very stubborn force...