THE UNVANQUISHED

...There was the shock of recognition that the Attorney-General of South Carolina was complaining about white people...

...He sits alone among his citations of the revered traditions of the common law, but he is not exposed for being alone...

...Autherine Juanita Lucy, who is also a Southerner, sat in the N.A.A.C.P...

...Harry Briggs' father lost his job at a filling station a little while after he won his case...

...But, right now, I don't believe you'd find anyone who'd agree to serve on it...

...The symbol that would be embarrassed to be a symbol is the lady who touches most of all the Southern gentlemen...

...And then the face of the Attorney-General of South Carolina reassumed the reflection that the inmates do run the institution, and he reminded the visitor that there are counties in South Carolina where there'll never be a Negro in a white school...

...The old gentleman who bore the name and the title of the roarer after the Bolsheviki in the morning papers expressed fit gratitude to the Lord above that he need have nothing to do with this sort of thing...

...it had been sent by a Wisconsin high school student who wanted to know what Harry Briggs, Jr., monument in our constitutional history, had to say about the issue of integration...

...It is the special compelling quality of the South that, in every child of its earth, there slumbers and occasionally wakens the knowledge that man's life in this world is a preparation and proof of fitness for a place in heaven...

...They were all addressed to an Autherine Lucy, and she was saying that, when the mob cried out, "Au-therine's Gotta Go," she had not at first recognized herself as the Autherine who was the object of its passion, because her friends and family had always called her Juanita...

...They had come back as they always do—the omnipresent, overriding they who decree and cannot be resisted...

...They were also duly transcribed by the local prints...

...She was a kind of accident...

...These," he said, "are creatures of the legislature, and it can have them...

...Harry Briggs, son of the pioneers, was late coming home that day...

...The worst thing about these radicals is that they make the North think they are our voice...

...His mother said he wants to be a teacher when he grows up and he favors hanging around school with the teachers when his paper route is done...

...I guess," she said, "it's the way it has to be...

...He is the author of "Part of Our Time: Some Monuments and Ruins of the Thirties...

...There was the proposal to investigate the libraries and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for Communist influences...

...the visitor who left her stopped in at Tuscaloosa and recalled that dialogue to a Southern editor, who had no cause to be ashamed of his own conduct, and the editor said that he was sorry that, in all this, it had not been feasible to send a reporter over to find out anything more than what sort of girl Juanita Lucy really was...

...And that great test was being run for the South...

...T. C. Callison nodded his head...

...And the visitor went on to Montgomery and sat in a sparse church, barren of any decoration except humanity, while maids and cooks and part-time help prayed for strength to continue their boycott of their city's segregated buses...

...as Attorney-General of South Carolina, T. C. Callison had to administer all the wild flights of his legislature in its maddened final hours...

...when she had first applied to the University of Alabama, Ruby Hurley of the N.A.A.C.P...

...The way it had to be for Juanita Lucy was not yet the way it had to be for old T. C. Callison...

...wherever he went, strangers asked him how it was, and he could only answer with these stories about these few people...

...She had walked them all with grace and gentility, and visitors seeking the sources of her resources ended in some far corner asking whether she thought of herself just as a girl who wanted an education or whether she considered herself a symbol of her people...

...It was a place of repose...

...In Florence, South Carolina, Jack O'Dowd, executive editor of the Florence Morning News, prepared to lower his own lonely banner and enter the ministry, a native son of the white South driven forth because he argued that the South would someday have to accept reality...

...Juanita Lucy is gone from the headlines, and Jack O'Dowd is departing Florence...

...He looked at the address from the North to Harry Br"iggs> Jr-» m Sommerton...

...If enough moderates would speak out, they would be convinced that they are the majority they are...

...he would end the time left to him in Florence enduring their false fraternity and knowing it false...

...Harry Briggs' name was first by alphabetical order, and so he got to the Supreme Court, and the law books list him as the winner when the Court ordered school integration two years ago...

...T. C. Callison was in their company when he tried to bellow before the Junior Chamber...

...we been on that petition for seven years...

...It is not enough to answer that they are all being changed utterly and a terrible beauty is being born...

...Harry Briggs remains at home...

...It was his recollection that he had not signed the petition...

...or that somebody's maid in Montgomery was dedicating her life to some future proud recollection of her children's children's children's children...

...His mother was a chambermaid at the Sommerton motel until last Christmas when what she calls the City Council had her fired...

...She was the most famous young woman in the South then...

...office in Birmingham the day she was stoned from the campus of the University of Alabama...

...there were flowers from New York on the desk before her and telegrams from France and Denmark...

...It remained his responsibility, of course, to enforce the new South Carolina law discharging any public employee found to hold membership in the N. A. A. C. P. "I get a lot of calls this time of year"—it was the tone of a civilized attendant at an institution for the mentally disturbed, which, by some unfortunate experiment in therapy, has been turned over to the inmates— "I tell the superintendents not to ask too many questions of their Negro teachers...

...Juanita Lucy was by herself and special among Negroes as she had been by herself and a target among whites...

...A reporter drank his coffee in Birmingham and said that no stranger could understand the single most important fact: "There's not a white man in Alabama with a chance to go to heaven...

...Personally, I'd welcome it if the legislature would pass a bill to have a committee talk things over with the N. A. A. C. P. and find out what they want...

...They sang that they could not be moved from where they sat...

...No reason came to the visitor's mind, and, as he sat silent, Juanita Lucy once again framed an answer...

...A bank had restored him to the changeless cycle of debt and the pursuit of the hardest $1000-a-year income an American can get...

...She said she wouldn't...

...Heck, we're pioneers...

...and a visitor had the hardest sort of time recognizing the tiger they portrayed in this old man in shell glasses and a tiny boy tie with his white hair parted in the middle...

...T. C. Callison was Attorney-General of the state of South Carolina that day in May of 1954, and he was in court to announce that blood would flow...

...This was a bad season for any man of sense and reason...

...another told them how their children's children's children's children would remember the thing they were doing...

...By md large," he had said in his envoi, "our appeal for reason has brought expressions of hatred, bigotry, unreason, and filth . . . Those who knew better have not seen fit to consider this fight their concern...

...Early in April, T. C. Callison addressed the Junior Chamber of Commerce of Columbia, South Carolina, on "The Battle for Segregation...

...Mrs...

...He walked out of the bank, and there was no $50 for Christmas for his family, and they remained in their cold cabin and endured...

...Elder Dash, a Negro farmer in El-leree, South Carolina, pushed the ravaged hanks of his mule across his recovered land...

...and the strangers made it clear that these stories were irrelevant, and that any serious student of society would have come home with a better bag than this...

...At last Harry, a pudgy boy, came...

...They won't allow it...

...He will give no occasion for one of his own kind to ask, "Why does it have to be you, General, why does it have to be you...

...Briggs creaked in her old rocker and gazed across her dusty yard carefully decorated with cinder blocks and said, "Ah doan know how Harry can answer that...

...It was not a question easy for a lady to answer as a lady, and Juanita Lucy sat awhile thinking and then she answered: "I'm embarrassed to say so, but I guess I do consider myself something of a symbol...

...He had gone to the Bank of Elleree for a loan, and the teller had pointed to his name on a list of school petitions and told him he'd have to take it off...

...After all, we do have the statute...

...one, until at last one gin owner defied the pressures of the White Citizens Council and processed this outcast's cotton on the Samaritan premise that cash is cash...

...It's just political fear...

...Monsignor Maurice Shean, who is its shepherd, is careful to warn any observer to ask no questions of the children in his school which might indicate that theirs was a course outside the custom...

...or that Juanita Lucy had a trace of embarrassment in her confession that, for a little while, she had to consider herself a symbol...

...man, I don't know what we'd do...

...They heard their ministers...

...a Montgomery editor, departing the scene, could only improvise that they were so much better led than his side was...

...had wondered whether she wasn't a little too mild and gentle to walk the flaming coals before her...

...The visitor returned to the North...

...They had only smiled their fat smiles and deserted him...

...the whites had all the worldly advantages and the Negroes had all the saints...

...He had asked for no more than moderation...

...And just before I went, the matron axed me why I was doing this and what I wanted, and I answered that I only wanted for my children what every other child in America had...

...His words were applauded by the Junior Chamber, to whom common sense is ordinarily a fiscal necessity, and delivered in whatever tone T. C. Callison adopts as an approximation of force, fire, and unshaking conviction...

...No one of his old friends had brought himself to ask, "Why, Jack, does it have to be you...

...But I told him," said Elder Dash, "that, if my name wasn't on, it should be and I wouldn't take it off...

...The visitor said that he wished more than anything else that whites and Negroes could sit down and talk together, that the great tragedy seemed to him not segregation, which is a condition that will pass, but the fact that there is no communication...

...one said the citizens councils couldn't pay him enough money to leave the South that is his home...

...For it is not given to South Carolinians to be heard when they say something so entirely simple...

...He can live out his predictable life, saying one thing and thinking something very different...

...T. C. Callison and Harry Briggs remain where they were...

...But in the end, Harry Briggs' father went to Northern Florida where no one knew him and a white man would hire him...

...He told his auditors that our national leaders had been brainwashed, that the Communists had done their work too well, that the mongrels were yelping at our gates...

...or that the Attorney-General of South Carolina, the embodiment of everything above and beyond them, sits and prays for a return to that state of reason which will exempt him from imitations of untamed passion before Junior Chambers of Commerce...

...The Citizens Council had barred his annual crop loan because he was tainted as a member of the N.A.A.C.P...

...he has a paper route and is thus the only employed member of his household...

...No Southerner could resist them...

...and there arose from their crowded presence an overmastering sense of love and endurance...

...now he was being run out of town...

...they are inextricably bound together because they are both Southerners and because they will live in the history of our constitutional law, the first as the victor, the last as the loser, so far only of record...

...For what is the meaning of these people: what if Harry Briggs' mother counted the wreck of her home and her life and said they did not weigh as much as her wild dream that Harry was an American child...

...The housekeeper told her she could stay if she would tell her husband to take his name off the school petition...

...I think it is saddest of all," he said, "that people will commend you and apologize for not being able to say anything...

...The rewards of victory for Harry Briggs have so far been ashes...

...the face he presents the world is only something stamped in lead...

...Harry Briggs was eight when his father and 59 other Negroes in Clarendon County, South Carolina, signed a petition for the admission of their children to the white schools...

...It seemed somehow hopeless to suggest that Harry Briggs sit down and write that his mother and father had only wanted for him what every child in America has...

...We like them to think," he said, "that this is perfectly ordinary...

...his mother said that there was a letter for him...

...He turned to cropping shares, and, when he had picked his cotton, he took it from gin to gin and was turned away from every MURRAY KEMPTON, staff columnist for the New York Post, has recently returned from many weeks of study and observation in the South...

...The man, who is flesh and pain and body, has been poured into the mold...

...the penalty of defeat has brought no change in the slow round of T. C. Callison's life with his books of law and his resignation to a state where reasonable men can only make the best of nonsense...

...The visitor went North to Rock Hill, South Carolina, to see the only integrated school in the state...

...and he was all alone when he sat in his office and talked about reason...

...Her sister had once asked her: "Juanita, 1 know someone has to do it, but why does it have to be you...

...Of course, if some fellow gets up and proclaims himself an N.A.A.C.P...