As a creature of the law, racial segregation in the United States is dead. The voices once confidently raised in the South, crying that the court would reverse itself in time, have all but died out now. The court will not reverse itself. On February 26, 1962, a _per curiam_ opinion rebuked a Mississippi Federal court in icy terms: “We have settled beyond question that no State may require racial segregation of interstate or intrastate transportation facilities. The question is no longer open; it is foreclosed as a litigable issue.” (_Bailey_ v. _Patterson_, 30 LW 4164.) Similarly, the court has plunged far beyond the reasoning it advanced in _Brown_ as a justification for prohibiting segregation in the schools; the hearts and minds of children, the importance of education, and the intangibles of a classroom do not figure at all in cases that involve golf courses, courthouse cafeterias, and the rest rooms of public buildings. Many staunch Southerners, declaring themselves unwilling to surrender, do not realize that as a matter of law, the war is over. There is now not the slightest possibility of a constitutional amendment to undo what the court did; the Congress will never pass a law that sanctions segregation in a public institution; the court is unanimous in its resolution, and some of its members are young. The Southern State that puts reliance hereafter in any law requiring racial separation is relying upon a vain and useless thing. We should be better off, as a matter of law, if Southern legislatures would go through their Codes with an art gum, erasing the word “Negro” wherever it appears. Statutory defenses against segregation, apart from any remaining value they may have in obtaining the law’s delays, are useless. These are harsh truths for the South, but the South would do well to grasp them; once understood, they suggest a course of events in which accommodation may be found within the broad structure of a voluntary society. Ovid is sufficient authority for the maxim that nothing is stronger than custom; and by relying upon custom, and freedom, and precepts of the law as yet uncorrupted by the court, the South--and here I mean the white South and the Negro South alike--can discover some room to turn around in.