Actually, of course, it is no longer possible to predicate discrimination and segregation on Negro inferiority. So long as it was possible and seemed forever possible, the “practical-minded” found a kind of social justification in disfranchisement, in raising economic and cultural barriers, in the despotic paternalism which said, “Thou shalt not.” Even _the_ Negro leader, Booker Washington, found it blameless and, indeed, good, without ever suspecting that the tradition of _noblesse oblige_, on which all this was claimed to be founded, might someday be as ineffective as necromancy. Segregation was order; it was control; it was the steel and concrete casing sealing up a devastating social explosion. It still seems so to the vast majority and their leaders. The strongest voices in the South today say that segregation must be kept: Governor James Byrnes in his inaugural was not so intent on expressing his views on foreign policy that he did not assure his listeners of his unaltered opposition to the Fair Deal. Hodding Carter, the liberal mentioned above, is not so liberal that he does not see it as “tragic for the South, the Negro, and the nation itself” if segregation is done away with. And “only a fool,” Lillian Smith quotes from the Atlanta _Constitution_, “would say the Southern pattern of separation of the races can, or should be overthrown.” But if segregation must be kept, it must now be predicated on something else than Negro inferiority. And what else is there? The cynical ideology of power-worship, what H. A. Overstreet calls “the fight-and-grab image,” the philosophy of hate. It is what Hitler came to. It is the result of a pattern of thinking desperately threatened by science and social change. 8 I am an integrationist. I have been for a long time. It is not a principle that I arrived at through intellection. Until the past few years, I did not bring to bear on it whatever intelligence I have. I felt my way to it, just as some men, in spite of obstructing experience, feel their way to ideals of honesty, sobriety and continence. Nor was the feeling of my way wholly conscious. It was rather like the action of one who kicks and splashes frantically to save himself from drowning and suddenly finds that he has reached a shelf on which he can stand in the river bed. His objective was not the shelf, but just to be saved. I kicked and splashed in all directions, and suddenly there I was.