Introduction
May it please the court:
When this book was conceived, it was intended to be titled “U.S. v. the South: A Brief for the Defense,†but it seemed a cumbersome title and the finished work is not, of course, a brief for the South in any lawyer’s sense of the word. It is no more than an extended personal essay, presented in this form because the relationship that exists between the rest of the country and the South, in the area of race relations, often has the aspect of an adversary proceeding. We of the South see ourselves on the defensive, and we frequently find ourselves, as lawyers do, responding in terms of the law and the evidence.
It is an unpleasant position for the South, which regards itself as very much a part of the American Republic, and it is an uncomfortable position also: We find ourselves defending certain actions and attitudes that to much of the country, and to much of the world, appear indefensible; some times we are unsure just what it is we are defending, or why we are defending it. We would like to think more upon these questions, but in this conflict there seldom seems to be time for thought or for understanding on either side. When one side is crying “bigot!†and the other is yelling “hypocrite!,†an invitation to sit down and reason together is not likely to draw the most cordial response.
This brief for the South, as any brief must be, necessarily is a partisan pleading. My thought is to present the South’s case (with a few digressions, irrelevancies, reminiscences, obscurities, and mean digs thrown in), but I hope to present it fairly, and without those overtones of shrill partisanship that drown out the voice of reason altogether. And it seems to me, if the suggestion may be advanced with due modesty, that a Virginia Conservative is perhaps in an unusually advantageous position to write such a brief. By tradition, inheritance, geography, and every intangible of the spirit, Virginia is part of the South. The Old Dominion, indeed,is much closer to the “Old South†than, say, North Carolina or Florida. Richmond was for four years the capital of ade factonation, the Confederate States of America; to this day, our children play soldier in the trenches and romp happily on the breastworks left from the bloody conflict in which the CSA were vanquished. The Confederacy, the War, the legacy of Lee—these play a role in Virginia’s life that continues to mystify, to entrance, sometimes to repel the visitor to the State. Virginia’s “Southernness†reaches to the bone and marrow of this metaphysical concept; and if Virginia perhaps has exhibited more of the better and gentler aspects of the South, and fewer of the meaner and more violent aspects, we nevertheless have shared the best and the worst with our sister States. On questions of race relations, of school segregation, of amodus vivenditolerable to black and white alike, Virginia’s views have been predominantly the South’s views.
Yet it is evident, as this is written, that the immediate battle over school segregation has passed Virginia by. The Old Dominion no longer struggles in the arena; we watch from the grandstand now. The desegregation of our public schools has been accepted in principle; a State Pupil Placement Board voluntarily has assigned hundreds of Negro children to schools that formerly were white schools. In our largest cities, most department-store dining facilities, in theory at least, serve any customer who asks to be served. Segregation has ended in transportation facilities, in libraries, in parks, in most places of public assembly. Negroes register and vote freely. It is true of Virginia, I believe, that the more things change, the more they stay the same; down deep, very little has changed. But by and large, Virginia has been eliminated from the fight. I wrote one book about the South a few years ago, when Virginia was still in the thick of it, and I was on horse and the pen was a lance. The sidelines offer a better perspective.
A word of definition is in order. When I speak in this essay of “the South,†what I mean is the white South, and more narrowly still, I mean the white adults of thirteen States who continue to share, in general, an attitude on race relations that has descended from attitudes of the “OldSouth.†There is, of course, a Negro South, but it is mysterious and incomprehensible to most white men. And there is a Liberal South, comprising a large number of white persons who oppose racial segregation in principle if they seldom oppose it in daily practice. These groups have their own able and articulate spokesmen; they have filed their own briefs by the dozen. And it is simply to avoid interminable qualifications—“most white Southerners feel,†or “the large preponderance of opinion among white adults in thirteen Southern States holdsâ€â€”that I here define “the South†for my own immediate purposes.
With those preliminary remarks, let me turn, if I may, by slow degrees, to argument on the case at bar.
James Jackson Kilpatrick
RichmondMay 1962