No decree of court, no act of Congress, can give the Negro more than this. He has no right--no legal right, no moral right--to intrude upon the private institutions of his neighbors. If individual liberty means anything, it must mean that each individual, regardless of color, is at liberty to choose his own personal and business associates, and to choose them for whatever reason. This the Negro must understand. If he is to become a part of this association, on equal terms, he must do what every other race of men has done since time began, and that is to demonstrate his worth to the community he seeks to enter. For more than three-hundred years, the white South by and large has regarded such entry as impossible. I would be less than honest if I did not acknowledge that a great part of the Deep South still views the slightest yielding as anathema. But elsewhere in my changing and unchanging land, the old unequivocal “no” to Negro equality slowly merges into a doubtful “maybe.” On the day that I write these concluding paragraphs, the local transit company in Richmond has announced employment of its first Negro bus drivers. The story made page one; but it made just the bottom of page one, and the Capital of the late Confederacy will not voice the slightest ripple of objection. If these drivers make it up the hill, others will follow. If the first Negro clerks in local retail stores can sell themselves, the experience of one merchant will persuade his neighbor. And the more the Negro people can do within their own neighborhoods and business communities, the more the white community’s retreat to neutrality will continue.
I believe the South will maintain what I have termed essential separation of the races for years to come. This means very nearly total segregation in education, where the intimate, personal, and prolonged association of white and Negro boys and girls, in public schools, in massive numbers, as social equals, is more than community attitudes will accept. The sad example of Prince Edward County, where a resolute rural people abandoned all public schools, offers an instructive lesson to the advocates of frontal assault. “We see the wisdom of Solon’s remark,” Jefferson once observed, “that no more good must be attempted than the nation can bear.” This essential separation also takes in such wholly social institutions as private clubs. I cannot foresee the integration of Protestant churches in the South. And whatever the Supreme Court may do in time to the miscegenation laws, ostracism, swift and certain, awaits those who would cross this marital line. But my guess would be that in areas of higher education, in many fields of employment, in professional associations, in such quasi-public fields as hotels, restaurants, and concert halls, doors that have been closed will open one by one. And a South that once would have regarded these innovations with horror will view them at first with surprise, then with regret, for a time with distaste, and at last with indifference. As the migration of the Negro out of the South continues, other parts of the nation, at once benefited and handicapped for want of the South’s experience in coexistence, will grapple in their own fashion with the cultural and economic assimilation of the Negro. They will not find it easy, but they can rely upon this: The South will not intrude its views upon theirs. This is a big country, a great country; it remains the freest country on earth, and the Negro people are a part of it. The law has done what it can for Negroes as a whole; the law will do more, in specific situations. The rest is up to time, and up to the Negroes themselves.