Dawn of Desegregation: J. A. De Laine and Briggs v. Elliott

Epilogue

Epilogue ’Tis the set of the soul that determines its goal, and not the calm or the strife. Ella Wheeler Wilcox Rev. De Laine found sanctuary in New York State, where the governor refused to grant extradition. However, the AME Church never gave him any official recognition for his role in the struggle for racial equality. Furthermore it gave him only token support as a minister, despite promises made before he left South Carolina. His first assignment was to start a new congregation in the western part of New York State, but no financial assistance was forthcoming to achieve the goal. Two years later he was transferred against his wishes to the New York City area and given a pastorate with less than thirty members. In 1958 he was assigned to a small church in Brooklyn whose members had requested him ever since he fled South Carolina. As he had done in Buffalo, my father built up the congregation by attracting new members who hailed from South Carolina. He and my mother bought a house in Queens, New York, where they lived until 1971 when Daddy retired and moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. My father died on August 3, 1974, twenty years after the Supreme Court’s historic decision, never having returned to his beloved Clarendon County and with a warrant still out for his arrest. Even with his death, the AME Church, to which he had steadfastly retained his allegiance, failed to acknowledge officially his gift to America. In 1994 a well-wisher requested that the warrant for his arrest be removed. The request was denied with the explanation that, if Rev. De Laine looked for a job, the prospective employer had a right to know his history. At the time my father had been dead twenty years. If he had still been alive, he would have been ninety-six years old. The arrest warrant was finally removed on October 10, 2000, forty-five years after it was issued. My mother taught in the public schools of New York State for seventeen years, her income giving my parents financial security. After her retirement in 1973, she joined Daddy in Charlotte. My father’s treasure, support, helpmate, and best friend for forty-three years died in 1999, twenty-five years after his demise. Epilogue 191 Their children—my brothers and I—achieved professional successes that would have been impossible had we remained in South Carolina. In a remarkable bit of irony, BB became the director of safety and driver education for North Carolina’s largest school district during the first year of court-ordered busing that was intended to desegregate its schools. The Lake City home where my parents had lived, St. James parsonage, was searched the day after the shooting. There police found a microscope bearing the name of a doctor from New York State. Contacted at the address on the case, the doctor’s parents were told by South Carolina authorities they had recovered the stolen microscope. The couple informed the officials that the instrument was the lawful possession of a young South Carolina man named J. A. De Laine, Jr., who was serving his country as an army medic in Korea, along with their son. Unlike South Carolina’s educational revolution of school equalization, the national revolution of public school desegregation did not occur quickly. It has been more like the Hundred Years’ War. In 1965, ten years after the Supreme Court called for desegregation to proceed “with all deliberate speed,” the courts had to issue a desegregation order that forced Summerton to stop “deliberating” and to integrate its schools immediately. In spite of the townspeople’s intense resistance, five black students attended the previously all white Summerton High School that year. Perhaps to prevent further desecration of its sacrosanct halls, the school was permanently closed the following year, and the formerly all black Scott’s Branch High School was kept open. Every white student was taken out of the district’s schools—either to be sent to an integrated public school in nearby Manning or to be placed in a local, newly established private school—and Scott’s Branch remained all black. Fifty years after the Brown decision, in the year 2004, white parents in Summerton were still managing to keep the town’s public schools segregated. In Clarendon County, particularly in the Summerton area, the reign of hate and retaliation continued for more than fifteen years. It is almost impossible to describe...