The ponderous load of important cases facing the Supreme Court seemed to add weight to the argument advanced by the attorney general of Alabama. The nation's highest court, he said, should not bother itself with "frivolous" questions, "with an attempt to enforce social amenities and rules of etiquette."
Mary Hamilton, a Negro field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality, felt otherwise. If there was any etiquette involved, she figured, it was Southern etiquette, the sort of "social amenity" that was really a form of discrimination. What bothered her was the traditional Southern practice of addressing all Negroes by their first names,...
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