A word of definition is in order. When I speak in this essay of “the South,” what I mean is the white South, and more narrowly still, I mean the white adults of thirteen States who continue to share, in general, an attitude on race relations that has descended from attitudes of the “Old South.” There is, of course, a Negro South, but it is mysterious and incomprehensible to most white men. And there is a Liberal South, comprising a large number of white persons who oppose racial segregation in principle if they seldom oppose it in daily practice. These groups have their own able and articulate spokesmen; they have filed their own briefs by the dozen. And it is simply to avoid interminable qualifications--“most white Southerners feel,” or “the large preponderance of opinion among white adults in thirteen Southern States holds”--that I here define “the South” for my own immediate purposes. With those preliminary remarks, let me turn, if I may, by slow degrees, to argument on the case at bar. JAMES JACKSON KILPATRICK Richmond May 1962 Part I The Evidence I At the time of the Supreme Court’s opinion in _Brown_ v. _Board of Education_, on Monday, May 17, 1954, seventeen Southern and border States maintained racially separate schools. These included, in addition to the thirteen States to be treated here as “the South,” the States of Maryland, Delaware, Kansas, and Missouri, plus the District of Columbia. Each of the five speedily abandoned segregation--Kansas willingly, Missouri stoically, Maryland cheerlessly, Delaware grudgingly. The District abandoned segregation; white parents abandoned the District, and by 1962 an 82 per cent resegregation could be observed in the schools. _Sic transit gloria_ Monday. None of the four States was in any real sense a part of the South; their constitutional or statutory requirements for segregated schools were appendages more or less ripe for the clipping. And though southern Missouri and the Delaware shore submitted to desegregation with some bitterness, the surgery was not especially painful and the operations, on the whole, were uneventful.