Your petitioners are hopeful that such an approach, much as it may annoy the advocates of compulsory integration, will find a favorable response among men who are willing to take the long view. It seems to us wholly in accord with the oldest principles of federalism--principles that have contributed much to the strength and vitality of this Republic. It is the diversity of the States, their ability to experiment, their right and power to respond to a variety of local conditions and customs that together prevent the evils of excessive centralism. “The traditions and habits of centuries were not intended to be overthrown when the Fourteenth Amendment was passed,” said Holmes. He remarked again: “There is nothing that I more deprecate than the use of the Fourteenth Amendment beyond the absolute compulsion of its words to prevent the making of social experiments that an important part of the community desires, in the insulated chambers afforded by the several States, even though the experiments may seem futile or even noxious to me and to those whose judgment I most respect.”
Not only is this approach in accord with a wise federalism; it also offers the greatest opportunity to the Southern Negro himself. In the course of a debate in the _Saturday Review_ with William Sloane Coffin, the New York-born William F. Buckley, Jr., said this: “If it is true that the separation of the races on account of color is nonrational, then circumstance will in due course break down segregation. When it becomes self-evident that biological, intellectual, cultural, and psychic similarities among the races render social separation atavistic, then the myths will begin to fade, as they have done in respect of the Irish, the Italian, the Jew; then integration will come--the right kind of integration.”
The South has begun to look upon its Negro people, since _Brown_, in a new way. Shortcomings of the Negro that earlier had been merely sensed are now acutely seen. But this is no bad thing. Before any social ill may be remedied, it first must be diagnosed and understood. Many a Southerner is now sensitive to the outward and visible signs of segregation; he was not so before. Today the detritus of a crumbling institution may be observed at every hand, and there are times when he squirms a little inside. This retreat to neutrality on the white man’s part is a necessary condition if the Negro, _by his own exertions_, is to find an equal place in the sun. In the end, the white man cannot do the job for him; Jim Crow is dead, but the legal shot that felled him also put Massa in the cold, cold ground. It is said that the high court “cast off the Negro’s shackles”; it cast off his crutches too. The paternalism of generations is vanishing year by year, to be replaced by a healthy skepticism: The Negro says he’s the white man’s equal; _show me_.