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This economic progress has not been accompanied by the slightest spontaneous relaxation of the rigid social and political controls that Southern whites imposed on Negroes after Reconstruction. (Southern talk that segregation is part of the South's traditional way of life is nonsense; in much of the South, Jim Crow is only half a century old.) Gradualists, North and South, used to comfort themselves with the theory that, with increasing Southern prosperity, the poor whites whose votes enforced segregation would lose their fear of Negro economic competition, and the problem of human rights would then solve itself. Unhappily, this has turned out to be untrue. Southern Negroes today enjoy more rights than they did a half century ago. They can vote—if they aren't too aggressive about it. In a few states they can attend "white" colleges—if they are willing to accept "segregated" living quarters. In others they can use the same railroad waiting rooms as whites—provided they are interstate travelers. But in virtually every case, even these spotty and limited gains were not freely conceded by Southern whites; they were imposed on the South by the Federal Government spurred on by the Negroes themselves.
Room for Maneuver. This fact gives a hollow ring to arguments of "moderate" Southerners when they protest against federal intervention and demand to be allowed "to work this thing out our own way." Already the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision has accomplished more toward giving first-class citizenship to U.S. Negroes than anything since the Emancipation Proclamation. It is true that no public secondary schools have as yet been desegregated in eight of the Southern states with the largest percentage of Negro citizens, i.e., Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. It is also true that at least four of these states—Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina—seem certain to go on defying desegregation orders for years to come. But before the Supreme Court decision, racial segregation of public schools was legally required in a total of 17 states and the District of Columbia, an area comprising 4,791 school districts. Today 537 of those school districts are desegregated, and 256,000 Negro children—10% of the Negro enrollment in once-segregated areas—attend integrated schools. Prudently and considerately, the Supreme Court granted lower courts "practical flexibility" in enforcing the decision. In the word flexibility, diehard Southern segregationists saw room for maneuver and delay. And in Southern eyes, the existence of the possibility of delay inevitably put a premium on the politician who would do the most delaying—a politician like James Oliver Eastland.