After only eighteen years of non-interference, there were already indications of melioration, though "in a slight degree", to be sure.

There were more indications by the mid-twentieth century.
I leave it to the statisticians to say what they were, but I noticed several a few years ago, during an automobile ride from Memphis to Hattiesburg.
In town after town my companion pointed out the Negro school and the White school, and in every instance the former made a better appearance (it was newer, for one thing).
It really looked as if a change of the sort predicted by Booker T. Washington had been going on.
But with the renewal of interference in 1954 (as with its beginning in 1835), the improvement was impaired.

For over a hundred years Southerners have felt that the North was picking on them.
It's infuriating, this feeling that one is being picked on, continually, constantly.
By what right of superior virtue, Southerners ask, do the people of the North do this?
The traditional strategy of the South has been to expose the vices of the North, to demonstrate that the North possessed no superior virtue, to "show the world that" as James's Christopher Newman said to his adversaries) "however bad I may be, you're not quite the people to say it".

In the pre-Civil War years, the South argued that the slave was not less humanely treated than the factory worker of the North.
At the present time, the counter-attack takes the line that there's no more of the true spirit of "integration" in the North than in the South.
The line is a pretty good one.

People talk about "the law of the land".
The expression has become quite a cliche.
But people can't be made to integrate, socialize (the two are inseparable by Southern standards) by law.

I was having lunch not long ago (apologies to N. V. Peale) with three distinguished historians (one specializing in the European Middle Ages, one in American history, and one in the Far East), and I asked them if they could name instances where the general mores had been radically changed with "deliberate speed, majestic instancy" (Francis Thompson's words for the Hound Of Heaven's Pursuit) by judicial fiat.
They didn't seem to be able to think of any.

A Virginia judge a while back cited a Roman jurist to the effect that ten years might be a reasonable length of time for such a change.
But I suspect that the old Roman was referring to change made under military occupation -- the sort of change which Tacitus was talking about when he said, "They make a desert, and call it peace" ("Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant".
).

Moreover, the law of the land is not irrevocable;
it can be changed;
it has been, many times.
Mr. Justice Taney's Dred Scott decision in 1857 was unpopular in the North, and soon became a dead letter.
Prohibition was the law of the land, but it was unpopular (how many of us oldsters took up drinking in prohibition days, drinking was so gay, so fashionable, especially in the sophisticated Northeast!
) and was repealed.
The cliche loses its talismanic virtue in the light of a little history.

The Declaration of Independence says that "governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed".
The phrase "consent of the governed" needs a hard look.
How do we define it"?
Is the consent of the governed a numerical majority?
Calhoun dealt with this question in his "Disquisition On Government".

To guard against the tyranny of a numerical majority, Calhoun developed his theory of "concurrent majority", which, he said, "by giving to each portion of the community which may be unequally affected by the action of government, a negative on the others, prevents all partial or local legislation".
Who will say that our country is even now a homogeneous community?
That regional peculiarities do not still exist?
That the Court order does not unequally affect the Southern region?
Who will deny that in a vast portion of the South the Federal action is incompatible with the Jeffersonian concept of "the consent of the governed"?

Circumstances alter cases.
A friend of mine in New Mexico said the Court order had caused no particular trouble out there, that all had gone as merry as a marriage bell.
He seemed a little surprised that it should have caused any particular trouble anywhere.
I murmured something about a possible difference between New Mexico's history and Mississippi's.

One can meet with aloofness almost anywhere: the THIDIU viewpoint, It Doesn't Affect Us!
Southern Liberals (there are a good many) -- especially if they're rich -- often exhibit blithe insouciance.
The trouble here is that it's almost too easy to take the high moral ground when it doesn't cost you anything.
You've already sent your daughter to Miss X's select academy for girls and your son to Mr. Y's select academy for boys, and you can be as liberal as you please with strict impunity.
If there's no suitable academy in your own neighborhood, there's always New England.
New England academies welcome fugitives from the provinces, South as well as West.
They may even enroll a colored student or two for show, though he usually turns out to be from Thailand, or any place other than the American South.
It would be interesting to know how much "integration" there is in the famous, fashionable colleges and prep schools of New England.
A recent newspaper report said there were five Negroes in the 1960 graduating class of nearly one thousand at Yale;
that is, about one-half of one per cent, which looks pretty "tokenish" to me, especially in an institution which professes to be "national".

I must confess that I prefer the Liberal who is personally affected, who is willing to send his own children to a mixed school as proof of his faith.
I leave out of account the question of the best interests of the children, the question of what their best interests really are.
I'm talking about the grand manner of the Liberal -- North and South -- who is not affected personally.
If these people were denied a voice (do they have a moral right to a voice?
), what voices would be left?
Who is involved willy nilly?
Well, after everybody has followed the New England pattern of segregating one's children into private schools, only the poor folks are left.
And it is precisely in this poorer economic class that one finds, and has always found, the most racial friction.

A dear, respected friend of mine, who like myself grew up in the South and has spent many years in New England, said to me not long ago: "I can't forgive New England for rejecting all complicity".
Being a teacher of American literature, I remembered Whittier's "Massachusetts To Virginia", where he said: "But that one dark loathsome burden ye must stagger with alone, And reap the bitter harvest which ye yourselves have sown".
There is a legend (Hawthorne records it in his "English Notebooks".
And one finds it again in Thomas Nelson Page) to the effect that the Mayflower on its second voyage brought a cargo of Negro slaves.
Whether historically a fact or not, the legend has a certain symbolic value.

Complicity is an embarrassing word.
It is something which most of us try to get out from under.
Like the cowboy in Stephen Crane's "Blue Hotel", we run around crying, "Well, I didn't do anything, did I"?
Robert Penn Warren puts it this way in "Brother To Dragons": "The recognition of complicity is the beginning of innocence", where innocence, I think, means about the same thing as redemption.
A man must be able to say, "Father, I have sinned", or there is no hope for him.
Lincoln understood this better than most when he said in his "Second Inaugural" that God "gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came".
He also spoke of "the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years in unrequited toil".
Lincoln was historian and economist enough to know that a substantial portion of this wealth had accumulated in the hands of the descendants of New Englanders engaged in the slave trade.
After how many generations is such wealth (mounting all the while through the manipulations of high finance) purified of taint?
It is a question which New Englanders long ago put out of their minds.
But didn't they get off too easy?
The slaves never shared in their profits, while they did share, in a very real sense, in the profits of the slave-owners: they were fed, clothed, doctored, and so forth;
they were the beneficiaries of responsible, paternalistic care.

Emerson -- Platonist, idealist, doctrinaire -- sounded a high Transcendental note in his "Boston Hymn", delivered in 1863 in the Boston Music Hall amidst thundering applause: "Pay ransom to the owner and fill the bag to the brim.
Who is the owner?
The slave is owner, And ever was.
Pay him"!
It is the abstractionism, the unrealism, of the pure idealist.
It ignores the sordid financial aspects (quite conveniently, too, for his audience, who could indulge in moral indignation without visible, or even conscious, discomfort, their money from the transaction having been put away long ago in a good antiseptic brokerage).
Like Pilate, they had washed their hands.
But can one, really?
Can God be mocked, ever, in the long run?

New Englanders were a bit sensitive on the subject of their complicity in Negro slavery at the time of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, as Jefferson explained in his "Autobiography":

"The clause reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it.
Our Northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures;
for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others".

But that was a long time ago.
The New England conscience became desensitized.
George W. Cable (naturalized New Englander), writing in 1889 from "Paradise Road, Northampton" (lovely symbolic name), agitated continuously the "Southern question".
It was nice to be able to isolate it.

New England, as everyone knows, has long been schoolmaster to the Nation.
There one finds concentrated in a comparatively small area the chief universities, colleges, and preparatory schools of the United States.
Why should this be so?
It is true that New England, more than any other section, was dedicated to education from the start.
But I think that something more than this is involved.

How did it happen, for example, that the state university, that great symbol of American democracy, failed to flourish in New England as it did in other parts of the country?
Isn't it a bit odd that the three states of Southern New England (Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) have had state institutions of university status only in the very recent past, these institutions having previously been A & M colleges?
Was it supposed, perchance, that A & M (vocational training, that is) was quite sufficient for the immigrant class which flooded that part of the New England world in the post-Civil War period, the immigrants having been brought in from Southern Europe, to work in the mills, to make up for the labor shortage caused by migration to the West?
Is it not ironical that Roger Williams's state, Rhode Island, should have been the very last of the forty-eight to establish a state university?
The state universities of Maine, New Hampshire, And Vermont are older and more "respectable";
they had less immigration to contend with.

A Yale historian, writing a few years ago in The Yale Review, said: "We in New England have long since segregated our children".
He was referring not only to the general college situation but more especially to the preparatory schools.
And what a galaxy of those adorns that fair land!
I don't propose to go into their history, but I have one or two surmises.
One is that they were established, or gained eminence, under pressure provided by these same immigrants, from whom the old families wished to segregate their children.
In the early days of a homogeneous population, the public school was quite satisfactory.