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These are disturbing words, especially when placed beside the fact that in eight Southern states from Florida to Virginia, the governor or legislature or both have publicly proclaimed a firm resolve to maintain racial segregation in public schools. To justify this defiance of the Supreme Court, the South has breathed new life into constitutional issues that most Americans had assumed were conclusively settled in 1865. Looking back, it is now clear that the Civil War settled in the U.S. the questions of slavery and secession. But the underlying problem, that of absorbing the Negro into the U.S. body politic, was shirked. The Reconstruction, blundering and shameful as it sometimes was, included the last serious attempt to give Negroes full citizenship. In 1877 the weary North, in one of the fateful compromises of U.S. history, agreed to sweep the whole unpleasant issue under the carpet. Rather than accept Democrat Samuel Tilden as President of the U.S., the North traded withdrawal of Federal troops from the South for Southern acquiescence in the dubious election of Republican Rutherford Hayes. Thereafter, the South was free for decades to handle the race problem in its own way.
Fatal Flaw. The results have not been entirely negative. In the fourscore and eleven years since the Civil War, Negroes have made greater progress than any comparable group in modern history. Today, the total income of the 16 million U.S. Negroes is $16 billion, nearly as great as that of prosperous Canada's 15.7 million citizens. Nor has this economic progress been confined to Northern Negroes. Since 1932, the Federal Government and U.S. industry between them have wrought an economic revolution in the South, and Negroes as well as whites have benefited. Nowhere is the change more dramatic than in Jim Eastland's Mississippi, where Negroes make up 45% of the population. Mississippi now has Negro editors, doctors, businessmen. It has Negro farmers who gross $10,000 a year or better. Many of the tumbledown Negro cabins which once disfigured the Delta have been painted and electrified; and the sons of illiterate field hands drive to their factory jobs in new cars. Most important of all, their children, in many cases, go to decent schools.