
          Gradualism, South Africa, and Civil Rights
          By Lawson, Steven F.Steven F. Lawson
          Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 1-3
          
          In February 1986, a white student from the University of Cape Town
in South Africa paid a visit to my campus at the University of South
Florida in Tampa. Twenty-six years after black students in the
southern United States initiated their wave of sit-ins against
segregation American style, this young South African offered his
thoughts on eradicating his country's version of apartheid. Rather
than supporting divestment of funds from companies doing business in
South Africa, he counselled against any economic sanction that would
interfere with the Botha regime's commitment to bring about change "in
a peaceful and orderly fashion." To do otherwise, he argued, would
only succeed in plunging his nation into financial chaos, injuring
both black and white South Africans alike and pushing the government
further to the political right.
          On the surface this native South African sounded reasonable. He was
advocating the dismantling of the "dehumanizing system" of apartheid,
and he cited the progress that had been made toward this end. Within
the past two years, the Botha administation had repealed the Mixed
Marriages and Immorality Act and announced modification of the Group
Areas Act to permit blacks to own property in their designated
townships. These measures, he asserted, have strengthened the hands of
those like himself who are dedicated to working for change from within
to "bring about peace and justice for all in a country with tremendous
wealth and potential for all her inhabitants." Accordingly, the
correct position for Americans to take 

was to back the "constructive
engagement" policy of President Ronald Reagan.
          Reading these remarks as they appeared in my school newspaper, I
was immediately struck by their similarity to those put forth by
moderate segregationists during the Civil Rights Era. Though
significant differences exist between the situations in the U.S. and
South Africa, in both countries the response of ruling whites was much
the same. In neither case did they want to alter fundamentally the
system of racial control or share political power in any equitable
arrangement. Like the Pretoria regime today, "enlightened" southern
whites a generation ago advocated gradualism as the best approach to
resolving racial conflicts. Willing to accept desegregation in
principle, they attempted to delay its implementation for as long as
possible. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court's pronouncement in
Brown, moderates opposed school closings and other extreme measures of
white massive resistance but devised pupil placement laws and freedom
of choice plans to keep integration to a minimum. Furthermore, though
the courts and Congress had struck down practices denying the right to
vote on the basis of race, southern whites continued to employ
literacy tests to keep three-quarters of adult blacks
disfranchised.
          Throughout that period, southern moderates pleaded for
understanding and sufficient time to solve their own problems. They
criticized meddlesome northerners for not comprehending the unique
pattern of race relations that had developed in the South over three
hundred years and warned that attempts to overturn longstanding
folkways would plunge the region into violence and cause more harm to
blacks than to whites. Just as white South Africans admonish that
blacks will suffer most from economic consequences of divestment, so
too did moderates warn that blacks would be harmed if the federal
government cut off funds to segregated schools. They presented their
brand of gradualism as the antidote to the racist potions of the likes
of George Wallace, Orval Faubus, the White Citizens Councils, and the
Ku Klux Klan. Nevertheless, their prescriptions for change called for
more deliberation and less speed, civilities more than civil
rights.
          The record of Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida illustrates the
dilemma of the southern moderate. Elected to two terms beginning in
1955, on each occasion Collins defeated arch-segregationists in the
Democratic primary. As governor he advocated modernization of
Florida's economic and governmental structures through attracting
industry to the Sunshine State, expanding educational opportunities,
and reapportioning the legislature. In the aftermath of Brown and
Little Rock, Governor Collins pursued a middle course designed to keep
public schools open, maintain the dual system of segregation, and
avoid violent confrontations that would tarnish the image of the state
with northern investors. Consequently, he refused to endorse
legislative resolutions nullifying the Brown opinion, but at the same
time he also supported laws permitting local school boards to assign
students and teachers to segregated schools based on criteria other
than race, such as intelligence, character, and potential for
disruption. The governor insisted that the state did not have to defy
the US Supreme Court to assure "that there will be no integration in
our public schools so long as it is not wise in the light of the
social, economic and health facts of life as they exist in various
localities."
          In his final year in office, Collins began to reconsider his
position in a fashion that should be instructive for his South African
counterparts.
          In 1960, blacks throughout the state mounted sit-in demonstrations
to desegregate lunch counters in five and dime stores and other
facilities. The governor publicly urged white Floridians to reevaluate
the morality and fairness of a policy that prohibited blacks from
eating in an establishment where they were allowed to shop. In
addition, he created a biracial committee to facilitate the
desegregation of these businesses. After leaving office, Collins moved
even further toward embracing the goals of the civil rights movement
as well as recognizing the necessity of federal intervention to
achieve them. In 1965, he played a key role as President Johnson's
emissary in arranging an agreement that averted bloodshed on the
voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. In the span of
a single decade, LeRoy Collins had marched on his own personal odyssey
toward the attainment of first-class citizenship for blacks. 

Activism
rather than gradualism had triumphed.
          Had the United States moved at the pace desired by southern
gradualists, blacks would have continued to live under the yoke of
second-class citizenship well into the twenty-first century. As Martin
Luther King wryly observed during the Selma voting rights campaign in
1965, it would have taken 103 years at the rate they were going for
local registrars to enroll all the qualified blacks who
applied. Realizing that freedom is indivisible, black Americans and
their white allies refused to wait that long. They not only resisted
the new forms of segregation instituted to slow down racial equality,
but also challenged the federal government to abandon its constructive
engagement policy of allowing the South to manage its own affairs, as
long as it did so in a respectable fashion. In the end, coercion by
means of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, not
voluntarism, broke the back of Jim Crow. Frederick Douglass summed up
the lesson long ago: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It
never did and it never will."
          The cosmetic reforms of the Botha regime are as intellectually
shallow and morally bankrupt today as were those offered by southern
gradualists during our age of civil rights. They did not succeed then,
and they are doomed to fail in South Africa.
          
            Steven F. Lawson is Professor of History at the
University of South Florida, Tampa, and author of In Pursuit of
Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965-1982
(Columbia University Press).
          
        