Democracy and Desegregation
HOOK, SIDNEY
Democracy and Desegregation By Sidney Hook It is commonly agreed that the United States Supreme Court's decision on integration in education is one of the most important rulings in its long and...
...The personal realm is not merely the solitary: It involves our friends and families...
...To enforce vaccination or the medical segregation of children with contagious diseases is certainly not as bad as preventing it even if we admit it is always deplorable to compel parents to comply with school and health laws...
...One writer of this school of thought, in characterizing the social sphere, asserts flatly that what matters here is not at all personal distinction...
...In fact, if the discrimination is reasonable and equitably enforced, it does not appear as objectionable discrimination at all...
...But surely the social discrimination which prevents a Negro student from attending a medical or engineering school, which bars him from certain vocations even after he has spent years of his adult life in preparing himself for it, which denies him housing in restricted communities without even providing him with the separate and equal facilities of the segregated bus, is a much crasser violation of his rights as a human being...
...Educational context and association, however, extend far beyond the classroom into school buses, lunchrooms, playgrounds, pools, gymnasiums...
...For make no mistake about it: Social discrimination in housing in effect confines Negroes and other minority groups to ghettos where they must share their four walls with multiple families and are in consequence denied their own sacred rights of privacy...
...They do so on the ground that this violates the personal freedom of those who discriminate to act as they please "within the four walls" of their own home...
...A third group protests against the clear violation of previous controlling precedents—especially Plessy vs...
...The fact is that extreme Southern segregationists have defined their right of privacy, their right to live according to customs and folkways they call the Southern way of life, so as to deny the equal protection of laws to all but native whites...
...For a long time, American Negroes were excluded from even the promise of American life...
...If they are on the side of the mobsters and hoodlums, the responsibility rests with the Governor, and, when the Governor is a Faubus, with the Federal authorities...
...Such a pattern of discrimination is segregation...
...Since the war against Nazism and its racial ideology, however, enormous gains have been made in integrating Negro citizens into the pattern of democratic life...
...The Thirteenth Amendment alone obliterated the race line, so far as all rights fundamental in a state of freedom are concerned...
...They are more convinced of the validity of their way of life than of the abstract rights of man and of citizens in whose name such ways of life may be condemned...
...To be sure, they have to pay a certain economic price for it, even though in its tradition of tolerance the community subsidizes these private schools by giving them remission from taxes and allowing those who contribute to their support to deduct contributions from their income tax...
...The rights which Congress, by the act of 1875, endeavored to secure and protect are legal, not social, rights...
...But did the freedom thus established involve nothing more than exemption from actual slavery...
...Finally, I come to the criticism made by some conservative liberals and liberal conservatives who see in the legal prohibition of segregation in educational facilities (as in employment and in housing) a violation of one's personal freedom or private right to choose one's associations, companions, neighbors and fellow workers...
...They reflect the unreasoning authority and hysterical feeling of their homes and parents, which they may come to challenge if only they stay long enough in desegregated schools to test their prejudices against their experiences...
...Justice Harlan, grandfather of the present Justice, in his famous dissent in the Civil Rights Cases, with which the present Court is only now catching up...
...Political equality, especially equality in voting, is only one form of equality...
...Suttee was a social custom, too—as was child marriage, infanticide, dueling, and quite a number of other quaint practices described in anthropological texts...
...It is true that law-abiding citizens are rarely heroes...
...And it is surely obvious that public housing projects which legally bar segregation also violate the private rights of white parents not to have their children associate with undesirables...
...Morally, no set of principles will be sufficient to determine by themselves in which cases the law should intervene when private prejudices result in public discrimination...
...In a way, those who oppose legal desegregation in the name of personal freedom were answered a long time ago by Mr...
...Those who, although opposed to integration, were prepared to live with the Court decision and eschew all violence numbered more than 75 per cent...
...To that decree everyone must bow, whatever may have been, or whatever now are, his individual views as to the wisdom or policy either of the recent changes in the fundamental law or of the legislation which has been enacted to give them effect...
...and all this solely because they belong to a particular race which the nation has liberated...
...But equality can be legislated only in the political sphere...
...Some regard this area of human relations as one in which the Supreme Court is really legislating and therefore usurping the functions of Congress and state legislatures...
...He maintains that, in the social sphere, people are identified by their membership in a group and by their differences only insofar as they symbolize group difference...
...It remains now to inquire what are the legal rights of colored persons in respect of the accommodations, privileges and facilities of public conveyances, inns and places of public amusement...
...A typical study among Negro high school students in Dade County, Florida shows that, when asked to state the changes they most desired in their way of life, they named most frequently changes in the area of education...
...It assumes either that integration and segregation are, morally, on all fours, or that the evils of enforcement always outweigh any alternative good to be derived therefrom...
...The moral principle is the same one which justified the abolition of slavery...
...It is discrimination between and not discrimination against...
...The content of education has some fixed elements, but its variables depend on the kind of society in which instruction is given and on its history...
...No one chooses to be prejudiced...
...Education may be exclusively a matter for state jurisdiction...
...They are degrading in the same way that the yellow patch or badge of inferiority, the mark of the pariah, the stigma of the outcast, are degrading...
...On the other hand, to require students, if they wish a public school education supported by tax monies levied upon all alike, to attend unsegregated schools is not unjust...
...This is independent of vicissitudes in the Supreme Court's interpretations of these rights we enjoy as citizens of our individual states or as citizens of the Federal Republic...
...Natural law as well as Judeo-Christian ideals have been invoked to prove that man is essentially a discriminatory creature because he is capable of choice...
...Has the individual ever a right to discriminate, and if so, where...
...It is enough that it is enforced by habit, custom, use and wont...
...But I hold that since slavery [was the] principal cause of the adoption of that amendment, and since that institution rested wholly upon the inferiority, as a race, of those held in bondage, their freedom necessarily involved immunity from, and protection against, all discrimination against them because of their race, in respect of such civil rights as belong to freemen of other races...
...But we are not without knowledge about the kind of consequences that some types of action have...
...They are prepared to defend the human rights, they tell us, of all minorities, but they insist that the right to discriminate in education, even if this results in segregated schools, is one of the basic human rights...
...Had the law-abiding citizens of Little Rock, black and white, been as brave as some writers expected them to be, a fracas would have flared into a race riot or small-scale civil war...
...But it seemed to me that it enabled us to condemn all types of community segregation and at the same time permit a man to choose his friends and control the pattern of his personal and family life...
...There are situations in which legally to compel certain practices is as bad as legally to prohibit them...
...No matter how gradual, sooner or later the moment comes when the readiness of the community to accept the law of the land is tested by the exercise of the Negro child's right to attend the public high school of his district...
...Many inconsistencies and confusions in this position flow from vague distinctions between the political, the public, the social, and the personal or private...
...It remains to be seen how representative polls of this character are for the South as a whole, even when their reliability has been tested in local areas...
...Little Rock is a severe defeat in a long war which the American people are winning—a war which must be won if we are to survive as a free culture the assaults of Communist totalitarianism...
...The public hospitals are unsegregated and therefore objectionable to him...
...If the cost is sufficiently high, they may give up their opposition to integration if not their prejudices...
...For the greater part of the near-century since the Emancipation Proclamation, progress was slow, uncertain and gained through bitter struggle...
...Ferguson and the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 when the Supreme Court nullified Congressional legislation of which Professor Milton Konvitz has said that "it was probably the first attempt in the history of mankind to destroy the branches of slavery after its root had been destroyed...
...Generalized, it is an argument against razing by legal measures the walls of the ghettos by which a local majority arbitrarily and unfairly keeps any minority—racial, religious or ethnic—fenced in and deprived of the benefits of their rights as American citizens and as members of a democratic community...
...Have I not the same human right to use the road as they...
...Aside from this, the moral issue of segregation in education still remains, whether it is a question for the states or the Federal Government...
...In so doing, we sought to redress a crime—one perhaps even greater than those committed in some settlements against the Indians...
...I agree that if one citizen chooses not to hold social intercourse with another, he is not and cannot be made amenable to the law for his conduct in that regard...
...I mention this merely to indicate that critics of laws against segregation are not alone in their concern for personal freedom and the right to privacy...
...Appendix JUSTICE HARLAN'S DISSENT IN THE CIVIL RIGHTS CASES OF 1883 After the Civil Tar, the states ratified the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which abolished slavery, gave the Negro national and state citizenship, and guaranteed his right to vote...
...That is why the lawful spread of integrated education in South and North is our best hope for making the promises of American life come true...
...The processes of education work gradually but effectively in eroding the bigotry of fanaticism...
...In the second sense, the "private" means the "personal...
...It never even tried to do this in the South, because the pattern of segregation prevailed from the beginning in the schools, which were late in getting founded...
...The more liberal among these critics make a distinction between the public and private domain according to which it would be wrong to permit segregation on buses and railroads because these lie in the public domain but wrong to prevent segregation, on the ground of personal freedom, in private life...
...The requirements of citizenship in a democratic community require the integration of the public classrooms even more than integration in the armed services...
...They were not hard-core segregationists resolved to defy government by force rather than yield to an unpopular court decision...
...in another, the opposite of the "private" is the "social...
...It is precisely here that, as moral creatures, reflecting upon the consequences of our actions on others, we are called upon to apply appropriate rules of equality and, where differences are relevant, rules of equitable inequality in the light of some shared ideal, even if it be no more than the ideal of peace or mutual sufferance...
...This is a very curious statement...
...But one can help discriminating unless under some compulsion...
...But the unfortunate thing is that their argument so interprets the right of privacy that it embraces the entire realm of the social or public, if not the narrowly political...
...Today, it is the colored race which is denied . rights fundamental in their freedom and citizenship...
...Prejudice is an antipathetic feeling or attitude against some person or group not rationally justified by objective evidence...
...But with respect to the exercise of the private right of sending children to segregated schools, they become economic equalitarians...
...I find this attitude explicable only in terms of unfamiliarity with the South...
...Why should differences not bound up with personal distinction lead to humiliating discriminations...
...One would think that this was a generous, even over-generous attitude toward individuals whose prejudice against permitting their children to associate with Negroes was so overwhelming...
...The hard-core segregationists are found mainly among the poor whites, not among the individuals who have high status and vested interest in a stable community...
...It would take us back to the days, with respect to education at least, of Plessy vs...
...Atoning in part for the long history of moral evasion by previous Courts, the Supreme Court in Brown vs...
...nothing more...
...If the constitutional amendments be enforced . . . there cannot be in this republic any class of human beings in practical subjection to another class, with power in the latter to dole out to the former just such privileges as they may choose to grant...
...Under certain historical conditions, restrictions on the right to vote—age, literacy, residence—provided they are equitably applied to all, may actually lead to inequality in the exercise of the vote...
...Most defenses of the decision, particularly since Little Rock, have consisted in shifting the issue by insisting that the supreme law of the land, whatever we may think of its wisdom, should be obeyed...
...They oppose the latter—but then, just as resolutely, oppose the legal prohibition of such discrimination as a social custom...
...At the moment it is experienced, one can't help feeling prejudiced...
...But, together with the record of integration to date, it presents impressive evidence for the belief that a fairly large spread exists in the attitude of Southerners toward desegregation...
...That the Supreme Court decision overturns earlier precedents is true...
...Although gradualness and patience are a sine qua non of peaceful enforcement, once the law is openly flouted it must be enforced...
...Neither the state by law nor society by custom has a moral right to discriminate prejudicially against individuals and groups in public life...
...The terms of the Thirteenth Amendment are absolute and universal...
...a right which the nation conferred...
...Something else again is the deafening silence of the two Arkansas Senators...
...To deny children equal public educational opportunities and possibilities of proper vocational fulfilment merely because of the color of their skin or their religion or national origin, whether enforced by law or by social custom, is manifestly unjust...
...And because one does, one's choice can be inhibited or influenced by many things besides his prejudice...
...Finally, there is an ambiguity in the category of the private...
...A social custom which violates human rights, and imposes unfair and cruel penalties upon individuals, hurts no less even if it is not enforced by law...
...Parents' Rights and Public Schools The case against Negro segregation in any area of public life, whether enforced by law or by custom, rests upon simple ethical principles which are implicit in the Declaration of Independence and which later guided the adoption of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments...
...The state does not actually compel him to vote, any more than it compels parents, black or white, to send their children to a public school...
...The greater his knowledge, the greater his range of discrimination...
...But to what sphere, then, belong the inalienable human rights "to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
...If there is any relation between morality and law, the existence of certain evil social practices may (not must) justify us in taking legal action to prevent them...
...It is wrong to force parents to send their children to legally unsegregated public schools if they do not wish their children to associate with the children of religious, racial or ethnic minorities...
...Focal to it is the right to vote...
...It is manifestly improper to confuse the political realm with one very special form of political life—a democracy of universal suffrage...
...Society of Sisters...
...More than a decade ago, in a review of To Secure These Rights, the report of the President's Committee on Civil Rights (The New Leader, March 13, 1947), I pointed to the necessity of establishing a principle which would guide us in drawing a line between "justifiable" and "unjustifiable" discrimination: "The presence of a justifying principle with respect to legitimate and illegitimate discrimination is necessary in order to allay fears that, under the cover of social welfare, individual freedom and the rights of privacy may be abridged...
...And politicians have teamed up with those who scorn it, to pass laws against it—as though morals can be manufactured by the pen of a legislator and the gun of a policeman...
...The citizenship [acquired by the Negro in the Fourteenth Amendment] may be protected, not alone by the judicial branch of the government, but by Congressional legislation...
...The ultimate question is the character, grounds and wisdom of its legislation...
...It not only provided a ladder of opportunity on which millions climbed out of poverty, but by virtue of its integrated classrooms, in which students studied and played in common, unified the most diverse ethnic groups that elsewhere lived together in snarling hostility...
...Enforcement is the function, first, of the local law officers...
...for no legal right of a citizen is violated by the refusal of others to maintain merely social relations with him...
...Congress also passed numerous anti-bias laws, including the act of March 1, 1875, which outlawed race discrimination by inns, public carriers and places of public amusement...
...According to this view, only the political sphere is the sphere of equality...
...Excerpts from his opinion (109 U. S. 26) follow: The first section of the Thirteenth Amendment provides that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction...
...These principles of equality and freedom are expressed in the language of natural rights, but they are best defended in terms of their empirical consequences: The Negros are part of the human race and as such should enjoy the same human rights of freedom and the same protection of our laws as any other group of human beings in the United States...
...What the nation, through Congress, has sought to accomplish in reference to [the Negro] is—what had already been done in every state of the Union for the white race—to secure and protect rights belonging to them as freemen and citizens...
...It seems to me that they would lead not only to the abolition of laws which compel segregation in about twenty states but to the abolition of laws which prohibit discrimination in public education and allied fields in about as many states...
...This is not unusual...
...Board of Education of Topeka declared that segregated public educational facilities are "inherently unequal...
...Actually there are both moral and legal limits to what a person can do in the privacy of his own home...
...It established and decreed universal civil freedom throughout the United States...
...These constitutional questions are not really germane to the basic argument...
...In a sense, everyone has a right to his thoughts or feelings...
...After the Civil War, they were cruelly denied the fulfilment of the promise implied in their liberation...
...It is commonly acknowledged that the state may not only enforce compulsory attendance but prescribe the content or subject matter of instruction in order to insure an education appropriate for the exercise of citizenship...
...Yet the effects of some state actions may have consequences affecting the rights and privileges of citizens...
...I believe I am as much concerned with preserving the rights of privacy as any segregationist, but I cannot see how the right of every person to do as he pleases within the four walls of his own house is undermined by legislation designed to make it possible for our colored neighbor to live within his four walls...
...I can see no reason why the community should be concerned about this man's prejudices unless he could show that his wife and children were going to suffer unjust discriminatory treatment...
...If desegregated schools violate the personal and social rights of parents to discriminate against undesirable associates and contexts for their children, so do desegregated buses and all other public educational facilities where context and association are prolonged for hours...
...But if he chooses to exercise his right to vote and is prevented from doing so by others, the state would be enforcing his right to vote, not actually compelling him to vote against his will...
...The history of America has been not only a history of promises made but of promises redeemed...
...The classification which puts transportation in the field of the political, and education and employment in the field of the personal, is completely arbitrary as well as irrelevant...
...Even before the Supreme Court decision, some exponents of discrimination as a personal right related it to the defense of free enterprise...
...Is it not more humane to fortify the principle of political equality by equality of educational opportunity, which is negated by segregated schools, than by invoking the principle of economic equality to justify perpetuating such schools...
...Discriminations in such facilities against Negroes] are burdens which lay at the very foundation of the institution of slavery as it once existed...
...This involves another kind of discrimination...
...Is it any different from the situation in which the Negro's right to vote is protected...
...I conclude as I began...
...These children are a product of segregated schools...
...Could group snobbery find a more perfect expression...
...This is so when the practices in question are equally evil, or when they are morally indifferent...
...What happened at Little Rock is a national disgrace, but it does not tell the whole story...
...The mode of association within a school may have a definite bearing on the content and values of the education it gives...
...Since most of these critics do not propose to abolish our compulsory education laws, and rule out private education as economically unfeasible, they must require the state or community to build separate schools for any group of parents who wish to safeguard their children from any kind of context and association they regard as seriously undesirable...
...One has a right to have his wife and children treated by a physician of his choice...
...The more willingly they accept the promised heritage of American ideals, the more they resent their educational conditions...
...What holds for public education must by these principles also hold for public health and medical facilities...
...At most, these spokesmen hold, the state may prescribe some of the content of education but not the context of association and social life which invariably develops out of attendance at school...
...This has always been true of the American public school, which has played a great and unique role in the creation of the modern American nation...
...Privacy, Social Custom and Law ONE of the main premises is contained in the explicit acceptance of William Faulkner's declaration that "enforced integration is no better than enforced segregation...
...The consequences in each situation must be considered...
...The nub of many an error here is the confusion, where social relationships and membership in social groups are involved, between "discriminating against" and "discriminating between" and treating them as synonymous expressions...
...It cannot be that the latter is an attribute of national citizenship, while the other is not essential in national citizenship or fundamental in state citizenship...
...It is on moral grounds that we are justified in adopting a Fair Employment Practices Act...
...Negroes desire political equality in order to enforce recognition of their human rights, which they believe they have even when they lack political equality...
...To be sure, there are great differences between public schools and public health facilities, even when the latter have mainly preventive and remedial functions...
...What has been most surprising is the absence of a principled defense of desegregation and the program of school integration from the point of view of the ethics of democracy...
...He caps this by proclaiming that their very identifiability as members of a group demands that they discriminate against other groups...
...True, there never is any trouble if a law is not enforced, except to those who suffer from its lack of enforcement...
...A moment's reflection will show that they have mixed everything up...
...Why, to begin with a trivial matter, must owners of Cadillacs discriminate against me, driving a more modest car...
...It is true that the Supreme Court "legislates...
...The tide of its advance measures the authentic growth of the democratic idea...
...In reflecting on Little Rock, we must not lose sight of the fact that the people of Little Rock, although opposed to the desegregation decision, voted in effect twice to accept the gradual integration plan, once in election for the city officials, once for a local school board...
...If he regards membership in a certain race or religion as a sine qua non of professional suitability, no one can morally or legally compel him to believe or act otherwise (barring emergencies...
...In this respect, law-abiding Southerners are no different from law-abiding Northerners and Europeans...
...The human freedoms we safeguard by legal action against segregation and unfair discrimination are more important than those we restrict...
...Together with the better educated and always less prejudiced elements, the latter are more likely to be the opinion-makers in the long haul than the hard-core intransigents...
...It is well known that discrimination has come to be widely scorned...
...One does not enforce law by mobs, except in Westerns...
...Equality "exists" first in the field of human rights...
...Unassailable evidence shows that Negro students, especially in high schools, smart under the restrictions of the segregated school...
...So far I have not been criticizing the argument against legal desegregation so much as exploring the consequences of some of the principles and distinctions on which it rests in order to see where they lead...
...It bleeds afresh every time the pattern is imposed upon him...
...This is really saying that there would have been no trouble at Little Rock if nothing had been done about the matter, if the nine Negro children had not sought to go to the high school...
...It can scarcely be claimed that exemption from race discrimination, in respect of civil rights, . . is any less . . . [a] constitutional right . than is exemption from such discrimination in the exercise of the elective franchise...
...Some Southern moderates see this in the case of certain public facilities, such as transportation...
...I do not feel discriminated against merely because they ride in comfort while I ride in enjoyment and economy...
...Leaving aside the strictly legal questions created by the most recent interpretations of Section I of the Fourteenth Amendment, particularly the provision extending the equal protection of laws to all citizens, this equation in condemnation seems to me completely inadmissible morally...
...I therefore focus directly on some of the basic premises of their position...
...Why not make the segregationists pay the costs of their prejudices...
...Were the states . to be left free, so far as national interference was concerned, to make or allow discriminations against that race, as such, in the enjoyment of those fundamental rights which, by universal concession, inhere in a state of freedom...
...Worse in such situations than the risks of a firm and rapid enforcement would be the abandonment of the legal position already won or the indefinite postponement of further integration until such time as God softens the hearts of the hard-core segregationists...
...Because our associations here have no consequences that extend beyond those who are engaged in them, we owe no one an accounting for our choices, however arbitrary, biased, prejudiced or unwise...
...Even if the physical facilities of Negro schools (or buses) were physically better than those set aside for the whites, segregation would still be degrading for the same reason that we regard a well-fed slave as still a slave...
...At some future time, it may be that some other race will fall under the ban of race discrimination...
...No one asked them to fight, but only to open their mouths in safety as widely as they did on vote-risky occasions of lesser moment...
...For they hope to reverse the decision or transform it into a dead letter not by argument or reason but by delaying tactics and sporadic outbursts of recalcitrance...
...This is so even when they approve the desegregation law, as the people of Little Rock admittedly did not...
...Beyond a certain point, the longer the delay, the more costly in tears and suffering will be the process of desegregation for everyone concerned, but especially for those who have so far endured the greatest indignities...
...There are social customs and social customs...
...The Thirteenth Amendment abolished their slavery and involuntary servitude generally...
...But—the objection runs—it will not do to tell parents they can educate their children at home or send them to private schools...
...For a basic human right is violated wherever segregation is practiced, no less in public education than in public transportation, and the denial of this right to Negroes in education seriously affects the expression of their basic political rights as well...
...Although this is a justifiable position with respect to the laws of a democracy, which, if unwise and unjust, are modifiable and reversible, it evades the basic moral issues that in the last analysis underlie every fundamental conflict of values and social policy...
...Legally to compel us to consume bananas is as bad as legally to prohibit us from doing so...
...Once tested, the law cannot abdicate before the interference of mob violence without making a mockery of the Negro child's constitutional right to the equal protection of the laws...
...The social realm is emphatically not in the first instance the realm of discrimination and inequality, although they are found there...
...Are not his private rights to see that his wife and offspring get tender and loving care from racially or ideologically qualified physicians and nurses, and to insure the proper contexts and associations for his children, likewise dependent upon his economically underprivileged status...
...Nonetheless, it is false to gauge the true sentiment of a community by the behavior of a hate-crazed minority...
...To go on to the discriminations some believe are legitimate within the social sphere, why, if I am a Negro, should I be required by custom to attend segregated schools or to sit in the back of school buses or be fenced in whenever I use educational facilities...
...For this deprives them of rights which clearly belong to them in all free societies—the private right over their children and the social right to free association...
...In one sense, the opposite of the "private" is the "public," as when we contrast private societies with public ones...
...But not everyone has a right to discriminate...
...This shows that there is considerable variation in the attitude toward segregation among Southern whites...
...What these critics declare does not matter—personal distinction—is precisely the only thing that should matter where discriminations operate in the social sphere...
...If it is morally wrong for a trade union to exclude from membership individuals of certain racial or religious groups, when such membership is essential to continued employment, it is just as morally wrong for an employer, except in some highly special circumstances of personal service, to deny people work on the same grounds...
...If it is wrong to force white parents to send their children to an integrated school because of their private right over their children, it is wrong to force Negro parents to send their children to segregated schools, and wrong to force white parents who do not object to their children associating with Negro children to do the same...
...Since the desegregation decision, this note has been struck with increasing frequency by critics who believe that discrimination in education lies in the field of private morals and is thus beyond the reach of law...
...Prejudice is sometimes distinguished by psychologists and sociologists from discrimination...
...There is some written criticism of desegregation along these lines, but the volume of spoken criticism is much greater...
...Actually, parents are not forced to send their children to an integrated school...
...The Constitution and Civil Rights, New York, 1947—an invaluable book...
...But what is true for bananas would not be true for habit-forming drugs, or for smoking in a powder plant...
...They are not relevant, however, to the principle invoked by anti-integrationists in discussing a possible injustice to the economically underprivileged segregationist...
...If slavery is abolished, then all the institutional restraints and indignities which constituted servitude must be abolished, too...
...The Thirteenth Amendment . . did something more than to prohibit slavery as an institution, resting upon distinctions of race and upheld by positive law...
...Freedom opened the doors not only to citizenship for Negroes but to personhood and brought them into the kingdom of moral ends...
...Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented, framing the issues in a manner as appropriate today as it was 75 years ago...
...In 1883, the Supreme Court declared the 1875 law unconstitutional...
...Democracy and Desegregation By Sidney Hook It is commonly agreed that the United States Supreme Court's decision on integration in education is one of the most important rulings in its long and controversial history...
...The social sphere is the sphere in which discrimination is legitimate even if unwise...
...It is clear that sometimes we may wonder whether a people is ready for universal suffrage but never whether they have human or social rights, no matter how primitive they are...
...If I am to suffer from legitimate discrimination in school, it should be only because I lack certain relevant gifts, knowledge or qualifications, not because of the color of my skin or my religion...
...It is on moral grounds that we are justified in adopting a Fair Education Practices Act prohibiting certain discriminatory practices not only in public schools but sometimes even in private schools which are dependent upon the public largesse in various ways...
...That would automatically and necessarily make it one of injustice...
...It is fundamental in American citizenship that, in respect of such rights, there shall be no discrimination by the state, or its officers, or by individuals or corporations exercising public functions or authority, against any citizen because of his race...
...They embrace every race which then was, or might thereafter be, within the United States...
...The real question is: Should the precedents be retained or overturned...
...They are not to .be sustained, except upon the assumption that there is in this land of universal liberty a class which may still he discriminated against—even in respect of rights . so necessary and supreme that, deprived of their enjoyment in common with others, a freeman is not only branded as one inferior and infected but, in the competitions of life, is robbed of some of the most essential means of existence...
...Since these are normally incidental to public education, special facilities would have to be provided for the entire gamut of parental fastidiousness...
...The difficulty has been to compel a recognition of the legal right of the black race to take the rank of citizens, and to secure the enjoyment of privileges belonging, under the law, to them as a component part of the people for whose welfare and happiness government is ordained...
...One can easily misread the significance of the picture of white students—also a small minority—jeering at Negro children...
...it marks the degree to which a society has been morally organized into a genuine community...
...But the situation we are discussing presupposes hospitals (and schools) in which irrelevant and therefore unjust discrimination is legally forbidden...
...It does not tell the story of successful integration on a much larger scale in many other communities of the South...
...I no longer believe that the principle I then too briefly formulated in terms of the needs of personal growth is adequate...
...See appendix, page 17, for excerpts from his opinion.] Their argument, were it accepted widely, would help pin the badge of servitude upon our Negro fellow citizens in their vocations, their education, their housing, and even their use of public accommodations...
...They desert the streets when the mob takes over, even a small mob...
...that it involves the use and abuse of other human beings who are bitterly opposed to this way of life...
...I regard this as a reductio ad absurdum of their argument...
...In other words, unless we can guarantee the equal economic status of the prejudiced, segregation would be a privilege of the rich...
...At every step in this direction, the nation has been confronted with class tyranny, which a contemporary English historian says is of all tyrannies the most intolerable, "for it is ubiquitous in its operation and weighs, perhaps, most heavily on those whose obscurity or distance would withdraw them from the notice of a single despot...
...and that, unless they have some other justification for the status quo than that it is a status quo, a new status quo may be imposed upon them with the same warrant—all this they are content to ignore...
...In identifying the social world with discriminating against, one is describing it as it appears to the eyes of the snob with vestigial cultural longings for feudal hierarchy...
...The difficulty with this kind of analysis, however, is that it cannot convince those who are prepared to swallow one absurdity to defend another...
...I shall, therefore, avoid the strictly legalistic aspects of the question...
...Some Northern liberals have been caustic about the failure of the town's law-abiding citizens, black and white, to enforce the law against the mob and see the Negro children safely to school...
...But ideal societies exist only in heaven...
...It is the premise from which we derive the most powerful argument against slavery...
...This the law permits (Pierce vs...
...And we must not prevent others from doing the same except where, as sometimes is the case in private quarrels, the consequences affect the lives of others...
...all we can enforce is the right to vote, political equality...
...In time even their prejudices may wither...
...Was it the purpose of the nation simply to destroy the institution, and then remit the race theretofore held in bondage to the several states for such protection in their civil rights . [as those states] might choose to provide...
...One might argue that a more gradual approach might have met with less opposition...
...They know that the public schools are supported by tax money levied directly or indirectly upon all citizens irrespective of race...
...Ferguson—which established the "separate but equal" doctrine...
...Opponents of integration do not contest the right of every child, Negro or white, to receive an education in the public schools...
...Finally, it is on moral grounds that we are justified in adopting a Fair Housing Law the exact provisions of which we need not specify here...
...According to this argument, many of our difficulties arise from attempts to curb by law the exercise of a discrimination which is ours by natural right and which is justified in addition by the greater power it gives us to advance the arts of civilization...
...It does not tell the story of the great strides that have been made in reducing discrimination all over the country since 1940...
...The same principle obviously obtains with respect to the feelings of parents toward the children of any minority...
...The right, for instance, of a colored citizen to use the accommodations of a public highway, upon the same terms as are permitted to white citizens, is no more a social right than his right under the law to use the public streets of a city or a town . or a public market or a post office, or his right to sit in a public building with others, of whatever race...
...Others believe that education is exclusively a matter for state jurisdiction and no concern of the Federal Government...
...This is beside the point to those for whom the issue is not the time and manner of enforcement but the fact of enforcement...
...But why should we be concerned with economic equality here...
...They were liberated and admitted to citizenship even before the Fifteenth Amendment specifically forbade abridgment of the right to vote on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude...
...This is not necessarily true and in the case in hand—the historical situation of the Negro in the United States—patently false...
...It always has...
...It is instructive to explore some of the implications of this position and observe to what it commits anyone holding it...
...but, even if the right of privacy were absolute, it would not carry with it the right to push out one's walls until they encompassed the public neighborhood, school and factory...
...A second group opposes desegregation on constitutional grounds...
...Some anti-integrationists make a distinction between segregation as a "social custom" and segregation as "discrimination enforced by law...
...Consider the meaning of this concern for economically underprivileged bigots in another sphere in which we recognize private rights...
...Morally, Negroes are entitled to life, liberty, property, and equal protection of laws on the same terms as the rest of us...
...The private sphere is one of exclusion...
...The old-line Southerners, who represent the majority of the opposition, hardly deign to offer reasons for their opposition except that laws against desegregation destroy their traditional "way of life...
...The numerous ways in which economic inequalities affect the political realm, especially in the winning of consent, bother this school of thought not at all...
...Parents may object to having Negro physicians or nurses treat their children in public hospitals to which Negro children are admitted...
...What a strange state of affairs...
...Education, they say, is one of those areas of personal life that are by their very nature outside the purview of law in a democratic society...
...Exemption from discrimination in respect of civil rights is...
...Parents may choose to send their children to private schools which are not integrated...
...The Meaning of Little Rock It is a hateful thing to enforce laws in education, where ideally there should be no coercion except the inescapable cogencies encountered in the quest for truth and beauty...
...Since private education requires the possession of means, it would make the safeguarding of certain private rights dependent upon economic status and consequently underprivilege those who are forced to send their children to public school...
...If slavery was a crime, segregation is the still open and unhealed wound it left on the body of the Negro...
...We must note also the willingness of the local officials from the Mayor down to comply, as well as the peaceful illustrations of compliance in neighboring states where the Governors did not predict and thereby invite violence...
...For the moral question is primary and it cuts across all categories...
...The same argument which opposes slavery opposes the perpetuation of the discrimination that continues in another form some of the practices of slavery...
...It did not come from the states in which those colored citizens reside...
...Should we therefore, reasoning pari passu, insist that public hospitals and facilities not be legally integrated or desegregated...
...But after the South secured the victory of Republican Rutherford Hares in the disputed election of 1876, the Washington climate changed...
...The public sphere includes both...
...It does not tell the story revealed in the most recent and most intensive poll conducted by Professor Tumin and his Princeton associates on "Readiness and Resistance to Desegregation" in Guilford County, North Carolina...
...Some assert that the desegregation decision would probably have caused no great furor if it had not been followed by enforced integration...
...The opposition to desegregation comes from various groups...
...The social realm, the locus of most of our associations with other human beings, is the sphere in which the questions of justice arise in their most complex as well as most acute form...
...That their way of life has a history...
...There can be no justification for first- and second-class citizens derivative from a previous condition of servitude...
...Can the democratic state be indifferent to this...
...In the light of the historical situation which has developed since the abolition of slavery, segregated educational facilities are "inherently unequal," not because of the actual differences in facilities, great as they are, but because they are inherently cruel, unjust and degrading to the group discriminated against...
...By arbitrarily extending the realm of the personal and delimiting the realm of the public, the segregationists would give those in possession of power justification to impose their way of life, subtly if possible, brutally if necessary, on any minority and (crowning irony) to do it in the name of persona] freedom...
...Is there not here, too, a manifest injustice on the basis of the above principle...
...It is evident that since many kinds of private associations, in the first sense of private, have their locus in social space and not in the space within one's four walls, situations may arise which require some kind of public regulation...
...It is as if someone were to define personal property, without which there could be no privacy or personal freedom, in such a way that ownership of a steel mill, which gives power over the lives of those who live by it, is a piece of personal property, necessary for the owner's sense of privacy and freedom...
...And at some point, after consultation and negotiation have run their course, the law must be applied...
...What I affirm is that no state, nor the officers of any state, nor any corporation or individual wielding power under state authority can, consistently either with the freedom established by the fundamental law or with that equality of civil rights which now belongs to every citizen, discriminate against freemen or citizens in those rights because of their race...
...Thus, F. A. Harper, in a pamphlet on Blessings of Discrimination published a few years ago by the Foundation for Economic Education, asserts: "Many of the leading problems of our day stem from a thought-disease about discrimination...
...Despite the obscurity of the Court's language, this was not based on a discovery of a new fact or on recovery of an old law, but on the reaffirmation of a moral principle that led to a new law in the land...
...His neighbor, similarly prejudiced, can afford the services of a private physician or segregated hospital, but he himself cannot...
...The supreme law of the land has decreed that no authority shall be exercised in this country upon the basis of discrimination, in respect of civil rights, against freemen and citizens because of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude...
...These opponents of school integration tell us they really are not opposed to equality...
...But one chooses to discriminate...
...We may walk, dance, drink, talk philosophy, quarrel or pray with whomever we please...
...Or, in most states, they may provide education at home...
...And if this is of necessity an abridgment of some human freedom, as is true of every law, it is taken in behalf of other human freedoms...
...For four years now, the decision has been subjected to a steadily mounting barrage of criticism on all sorts of grounds and from almost all points of the ideological compass...
...Discrimination is a pattern of behavior in which one acts against others by excluding them from opportunities commonly enjoyed...
...No race, as such, can be excluded from the benefits or rights thereby conferred...
...Citizenship in this country necessarily imports at least equality of civil rights among citizens of every race in the same state...
...They contend, however, that it is wrong to force parents to send their children to an integrated school...
...I do not contend that the Thirteenth Amendment invests Congress with authority, by legislation, to define and regulate the entire body of the civil rights which citizens may enjoy in the several states...
Vol. 41 • April 1958 • No. 66
