**Why the South Must Prevail**

The most important event of the past three weeks

was the remarkable and unexpected vote by the

Senate to guarantee to defendants in a criminal contempt

action the privilege of a jury trial. That vote

does not necessarily affirm a citizen's intrinsic rights :

trial by jury in contempt actions, civil or criminal,

is not an American birthright, and it cannot, therefore,

be maintained that the Senate's vote upheld,

pure and simple, the Common Law.

What the Senate did was to leave undisturbed the

mechanism that spans the abstractions by which a

society is guided and the actual, sublunary requirements

of the individual community. In that sense,

the vote was a conservative victory. For the effect

of it is-and let us speak about it bluntly-to permit

a jury to modify or waive the law in such circumstances

as, in the judgment of the jury, require so

grave an interposition between the law and its violator.

What kind of circumstances do we speak about?

Again, let us speak frankly. The South does not want

to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving

him of the vote. Political scientists assert

that minorities do not vote as a unit. Women do not

vote as a bloc, they contend ; nor do Jews, or Catholics,

or laborers, or nudists-nor do Negroes ; nor

will the enfranchised Negroes of the South.

If that is true, the South will not hinder the Negro

from voting-why should it, if the Negro vote, like

the women's, merely swells the volume, but does not

affect the ratio, of the vote? In some parts of the

South, the White community merely intends to prevail-

that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on

which there is corporate disagreement between Negro

and White. The White community will take whatever

measures are necessary to make certain that it has

its way.

What are such issues? Is school integration one?

The NAACP and others insist that the Negroes as

a unit want integrated schools. Others disagree, contending

that most Negroes approve the social separation

of the races. What if the NAACP is correct,

and the matter comes to a vote in a community in

which Negroes predominate? The Negroes would,

according to democratic processes, win the election ;

but that is the kind of situation the White community

will not permit. The White community will not count

the marginal Negro vote. The man who didn't count

it will be hauled up before a jury, he will plead not

guilty, and the jury, upon deliberation, will find him

not guilty. A federal judge, in a similar situation,

might find the defendant guilty, a judgment which

would affirm the law and conform with the relevant

political abstractions, but whose consequences might

be violent and anarchistic.

The central question that emerges-and it is not

a parliamentary question or a question that is

answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the

rights of American citizens, born Equal-is whether

the White community in the South is entitled to take

such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically

and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate

numerically? The sobering answer is Yes

-the White community is so entitled because, for

the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy,

and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing

the median cultural superiority of White over Negro :

but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be

hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists

. The question, as far as the White community

is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization

supersede those of universal suffrage. The British

believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya,

where the choice was dramatically one between civilization

and barbarism, and elsewhere ; the South,

where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in

Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative

differences between its culture and the Negroes',

and intends to assert its own.

r/DRAMA believes that the South's premises

are correct. If the majority wills what is socially

atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though

undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for

any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and

live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands

of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes

impossible to assert the will of a minority,

in which case it must give way, and the society will

regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot

prevail except by violence: then it must determine

whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible

price of violence.

The axiom on which many of the arguments supporting

the original version of the Civil Rights bill

were based was Universal Suffrage. Everyone in

America is entitled to the vote, period. No right is

prior to that, no obligation subordinate to it ; from

this premise all else proceeds.

That, of course, is demagogy. Twenty-year-olds do

not generally have the vote, and it is not seriously

argued that the difference between 20 and 21-yearolds

is the difference between slavery and freedom.

The residents of the District of Columbia do not

vote: and the population of D.C. increases by geometric

proportion. Millions who have the vote do not

care to exercise it ; millions who have it do not know

how to exercise it and do not care to learn. The

great majority of the Negroes of the South who do

not vote do not care to vote, and would not know

for what to vote if they could. Overwhelming numbers

of White people in the South do not vote. Universal

suffrage is not the beginning of wisdom or

the beginning of freedom. Reasonable limitations

upon the vote are not exclusively the recommendation

of tyrants or oligarchists (was Jefferson either?).

The problem in the South is not how to get the vote

for the Negro, but how to equip the Negro-and a

great many Whites-to cast an enlightened and

responsible vote.

The South confronts one grave moral challenge.

It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness

to preserve the Negro as a servile class. It is tempting

and convenient to block the progress of a minority

whose services, as menials, are economically useful.

Let the South never permit itself to do this. So long

as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior

mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine

cultural equality between the races, and so long as

it does so by humane and charitable means, the South

is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that

permits it to function.