This brief for the South, as any brief must be, necessarily is a partisan pleading. My thought is to present the South’s case (with a few digressions, irrelevancies, reminiscences, obscurities, and mean digs thrown in), but I hope to present it fairly, and without those overtones of shrill partisanship that drown out the voice of reason altogether. And it seems to me, if the suggestion may be advanced with due modesty, that a Virginia Conservative is perhaps in an unusually advantageous position to write such a brief. By tradition, inheritance, geography, and every intangible of the spirit, Virginia is part of the South. The Old Dominion, indeed, is much closer to the “Old South” than, say, North Carolina or Florida. Richmond was for four years the capital of a _de facto_ nation, the Confederate States of America; to this day, our children play soldier in the trenches and romp happily on the breastworks left from the bloody conflict in which the CSA were vanquished. The Confederacy, the War, the legacy of Lee--these play a role in Virginia’s life that continues to mystify, to entrance, sometimes to repel the visitor to the State. Virginia’s “Southernness” reaches to the bone and marrow of this metaphysical concept; and if Virginia perhaps has exhibited more of the better and gentler aspects of the South, and fewer of the meaner and more violent aspects, we nevertheless have shared the best and the worst with our sister States. On questions of race relations, of school segregation, of a _modus vivendi_ tolerable to black and white alike, Virginia’s views have been predominantly the South’s views.
Yet it is evident, as this is written, that the immediate battle over school segregation has passed Virginia by. The Old Dominion no longer struggles in the arena; we watch from the grandstand now. The desegregation of our public schools has been accepted in principle; a State Pupil Placement Board voluntarily has assigned hundreds of Negro children to schools that formerly were white schools. In our largest cities, most department-store dining facilities, in theory at least, serve any customer who asks to be served. Segregation has ended in transportation facilities, in libraries, in parks, in most places of public assembly. Negroes register and vote freely. It is true of Virginia, I believe, that the more things change, the more they stay the same; down deep, very little has changed. But by and large, Virginia has been eliminated from the fight. I wrote one book about the South a few years ago, when Virginia was still in the thick of it, and I was on horse and the pen was a lance. The sidelines offer a better perspective.