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THE RHETORIC OF RESPONSIBLE RESISTANCE 5 Just two years after the tumultuous political season of 1948, the defenders of segregation looked to South Carolina for a glimpse of Jim Crow’s future. “Of all the primary campaigns,” Atlanta newspaperman Ralph McGill reported in 1950, “no other was as strange to the South as that of James Francis Byrnes.” Gone were the demagogue theatrics, the “jug bands,” the “hillbilly grammar,” and a host of other “shabby old political props” that had plagued southern politicking for decades. Instead, McGill reported, South Carolina welcomed back a favorite son who promised a refined brand of racial politics. Byrnes, the former congressman, senator, Supreme Court justice, and secretary of state, had emerged from political retirement to run for governor of his home state. Honoring a state primary rule that required all candidates to make at least one campaign speech in each county, the seventy-one-year-old Byrnes crisscrossed the state in a chauffeured sedan. Arriving to a hero’s welcome at the local rallies, the sharplydressed statesman would shake hands, make his stump speech, and promptly head for the door. Byrnes virtually ignored his three opponents, who stammered through their speeches in front of a crowd decimated by the departure of “the dapper political Pied Piper.”1 The gubernatorial race was not so much a primary as an extended coronation . “Jimmy just walked in, with the benediction of the people,” reflected one local columnist. “Remarkable, wasn’t it?” The gubernatorial campaign stood in stark contrast to the bitter senatorial race between governor and erstwhile presidential candidate Strom Thurmond and former governor Olin Johnston. “Off on the far horizon one could hear the loud trumpetings of Thurmond and Johnston, whose antics were in the old mudstained pattern of recrimination,” McGill noted. “But the Byrnes tour went on its antiseptic way, calm and serene, until one fancied, even, the voice of the turtle could be heard in the pleasant, pastoral land.” For McGill, Byrnes embodied the dominant political trend of the primary sea- 122 | The Rhetoric of Responsible Resistance son. “The South is freer of ranters and demagogues than it has been for a generation or more,” McGill announced. For proof, he pointed to the election of moderate candidates in Alabama, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Even McGill’s hometown nemesis, Georgia governor Herman Talmadge, disappointed his late father’s followers with his “lack of demagogic fire” during a successful reelection campaign.2 The moderating trend that McGill celebrated in 1950 was already several years in the making. Postwar racial violence and the divisive Dixiecrat rebellion had convinced many committed segregationists to refine their rhetoric and tactics. From pragmatic conservatives to former firebreathers , Jim Crow’s defenders invoked white supremacy less and touted segregation more. But Byrnes did more than embrace a political trend— rather, he attempted to imbue the segregationist crusade with a reform agenda by arguing that segregation’s survival rested upon white southerners ’ ability to adapt and improve their social order. By promoting a policy of “equal educational rights,” Byrnes repackaged white resistance in a reformist veneer. White southerners, he pledged, would improve the black side of Jim Crow in order to keep the color line intact. Southern liberals and moderates had made similar arguments before, but now time seemed short. Even the diehards and militants had to get on board, and Byrnes possessed the conservative credentials and political prestige necessary to rally skeptics behind a reform agenda. “He does not believe segregation can, or should, be nowabolished,” McGill explained, “but he fiercely insists the status quo is not the answer.”3 Byrnes’s reform program shook up Deep South politics, and his contingency plan for a federal desegregation order spread tremors as well. If the Supreme Court would allow South Carolina the necessary time, Byrnes promised, then it would bring black educational facilities up to par with those of whites. But if the federal government demanded integration, then the governor-elect would lead a campaign to abolish the public school system in South Carolina. “Whatever is necessary to continue the separation of the races in the schools of South Carolina is going to be done by the white people of the State,” Byrnes pledged. That “whatever” could mean spending millions to improve black schools or abandoning state responsibility for schooling altogether. Byrnes had the power to push either plan, and he offered the carrot and the stick to black South Carolinians and federal authorities alike. Even as he advocated reform, the defiant governorelect thus...

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