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The Prospect. Will the U.S. stand for years of delay—stretching according to Eastland's intention to "eternity." Certainly the dominant opinion in the North and West of the U.S. respects the sincerity and depth of Southern white feelings on this issue and shrinks from the thought of coercion. Just as certainly, the U.S. outside the South will not tolerate the indefinitely prolonged prospect of Negroes as a legally segregated group, with all the injustice involved in that status.
The political strain created by this basic moral and social conflict is felt most keenly in the Democratic Party. In New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois and other Northern states, at least 70% of the Negro vote in recent years has been Democratic and has been necessary for Democratic victory. Northern Democrats cannot abandon their pro-civil rights position, nor do their leaders wish to do so.
At the 1956 Democratic Convention, a civil rights plank may touch off a North-South fight so hot that Southern delegates will bolt the party. The chance that this will happen is increased by the accepted probability that Eisenhower will win whether or not the South bolts. Some Southerners may feel that 1956 is a good year to stand on "principle" and to express the vigor of their pro-segregation feelings through a third party.
Whether or not that happens, what of the prospects for desegregation? By determined and cool legal action, it can probably be enforced without violence over much of the South. It probably cannot be enforced in Mississippi, Georgia or South Carolina or in parts of other states as long as they retain their present very high proportion of Negroes.
But the South's Negroes, despite their economic progress, have been moving north for 40 years; today 2,500 Negroes arrive in Chicago every month. This exodus from the South, an ultimately healthy process, is checked by the wretched conditions under which many Negroes live in Northern cities. The contribution of the North and West to the greatest internal problem facing the nation is not to give in to the Eastlands, nor to try to match them in rancor. It is to hasten the progress of Negroes outside the South, while pressing for all "deliberate speed" in the enforcement of the court's decision. In U.S. Grant and the American Military Tradition, Historian Bruce Catton says that "the Civil War . . . infinitely broadened the category of American citizenship and the meaning of the American experiment ... It had committed the nation to a working belief in the brotherhood of man. This probably was a little too much to swallow at one gulp in the 18703 or at any other time." It is surely too big a gulp for one part of the nation to swallow without the help and vigorous cooperation of the rest of the U.S.