The Best of Enemies: Chapters 4–5

Unable to find a full-time job, Ann worked sporadically, wherever she could find a position.

The Montgomery bus boycott that precipitated these events, like the sympathetic action it prompted in Durham, shocked most whites.

To impose an anachronism: desegregation simply did not compute.

Spicely again refused, and, according to Council’s testimony, made disparaging comments about the driver’s military status (or lack thereof).

Another claimed that Spicely had “been profane” to the white driver, and added that by defying the law the soldier had brought dishonor to his uniform, which “should be a symbol of law and order.”

When Wally Nelson, a representative of the pioneering civil rights organization CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), visited Durham in January 1952, he encountered a black citizenry ready to defy Jim Crow laws using the innovative techniques of nonviolence.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was referring to this reality when, asked what motivated Rosa Parks that afternoon in Montgomery, he replied, “She had been tracked down by the Zeitgeist.”

If most white Southerners balked at recognizing the obvious, some federal officials acknowledged the changing times.

And wherever housing patterns loosened slightly, officials gerrymandered school districts to keep them racially homogeneous.

Some whites attempted to mollify critics (and, perhaps, their own consciences) by urging patience, claiming that it was only a matter of time until black students caught up with their white counterparts.

Perhaps a few moralists were disappointed that it was economics and not ethics that triumphed over racist ideology, but clearly economic pressure achieved better results than black appeals to white morality.

That ambivalence was most clearly embodied by the President of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower.

The Court’s enforcement decree, issued a full year after Brown, seemed conciliatory to segregationists, imposing no deadline for achieving racially mixed schools and calling merely for “good faith implementation.”

But Hodges quickly proved to be a consummate politician of the Southern progressive type, using words like “compromise” and “understanding” while adroitly undermining any real change in the status quo.

Rather, he would quietly appoint a committee to deliberate for eternity over exactly which door, and of what dimensions, would best facilitate the ingress and egress of all students.

Hodges’ chief political foe at this time was an outspoken segregationist named I. Beverly Lake, an assistant state attorney general, who, it was rumored, planned to oppose Hodges in the 1956 gubernatorial race.

About the Pearsall Plan itself, Austin was just as unsparing: "It capitulates to intolerance, to hatred and proceeds to hammer out a way through which intolerance can be nourished.... [It] says to the citizens of the state, go ahead, indulge your hatred at the state’s behest. The Plan would put a premium on hatred. It would pay...for racial hatred.”

And there matters rested for three years, while schools in progressive Durham remained as segregated as those in reactionary Birmingham.

The efforts made by the legislative of this province in their last sessions to free themselves from slavery, gave us, who are in that deplorable state, a high degree of satisfaction.

Speaking later to a reporter, Moore disingenuously explained, “We just decided we wanted to cool off, to get some ice cream or milk shakes.”

“Oh, yes,” the black leaders would respond, smiling ruefully and shaking their heads in commiseration, “we appreciate your delicate position. However, we have our positions to consider, too...”

While most blacks were genuinely pleased by the NAACP’s work for school integration, there was, wrote one black journalist, “a widespread doubt that a nationally directed battle of attrition that took so long and cost so much to bring so little to so few would ever get to the heart of the issue.”

On the first day of classes, Joycelyn’s parents escorted her to school through a gauntlet of angry whites screaming...

Closer to home, the tobacco industry—and so the Piedmont region—would benefit from a bill wending its way through Congress, legislation designed to keep tobacco support payments steady and high.

Black Durhamites laughed about the many powerful whites who would be stewing in their own juices over the prospect of an "uppity” black man controlling the purse strings for federal education programs.

“All right,” said McNeil tersely, "tomorrow we’re going down.”

The organizers didn’t want to hand the white establishment ammunition for its perennial allegation that any racial unrest in the South was incited by outside agitators.

It was a strange sight: a phalanx of well-dressed black college students filed in silently and walked through the ornate main floor (a stylized version of an ancient Egyptian temple), passing clusters of plaster lotus blossoms while the white shoppers stood immobile and frowning in the aisles, confused about what they were witnessing.

This time, however, the older, more accommodating generation represented by the NAACP could not paper over the division or simply use its greater institutional clout to force renegades into line.

The high school students played a crucial role in keeping the sit-ins and picket lines going when college students were busy with exams or out of town on vacations.

Three years earlier, the black Ministerial Alliance had turned its back on Moore’s antisegregation protests, but now its leaders issued a statement, imbued with religious significance: "The Pagan Authorities paid the early Christians an ambiguous compliment when they charged that they had ‘turned the world upsidedown.’"

When the college students began sitting in at the Durham lunch counters, the DCNA leapt into the fray—this time on the side of the protesters.

Officials of state-supported black colleges had to be more circumspect since they depended upon the funding provided by the all-white state legislature.

The Durham Sun opined: “[I]t is doubtful if the closings have advanced any cause of the Negroes, have contributed anything constructive to racial relations in North Carolina, have inspired any interracial friendship or have done anything to bring whites and Negroes into any area of greater understanding. From the community standpoint, whatever may be said for the militant approach, it is unlikely that civic unity is being served.”

In 1968, he would write "that the integration of public facilities was meaningless if blacks didn't have the wherewithal to pay for goods and services.”