Under Two Flags

It took an all-white jury at Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, just one hour and fifty-three minutes to acquit twenty-three out of twenty-five colored citizens charged with participation in "racial disorders" last February. It was a triumph for social justice, and a heartening indication of reconstruction by Southerners themselves. But in the mechanics of courtroom procedure, in the attitudes of both participant and spectator, and in the very conduct of the case, the incident revealed once again the weakness of jurisprudence below the Mason-Dixon: that before the bar two loyalties exist--one to justice, and another, even stronger, to an almost feudal social system.

"It is in one sense this conflict of loyalties which makes it so difficult to deal with even the best-intentioned of men when the racial conflict is in question," wrote Vincent Sheean in the New York Herald-Tribune last week. the acceptance of the social arrangement under a code of "white supremacy," then, went beyond the cranky rantings of Paul Bumpus, circuit Attorney General, whose pleas for hangings were on the grounds that "the trials at Nuernberg were not going to furnish enough victims," or Lynn Bomar, Tennessee's Commissioner of Safety, who raised violent objection to the addressing of Negro defendants and witnesses by "Mr.," "Mrs." or "Miss" It was not, fundamentally, a case of twenty-five Americans vs. the State, but another chapter of an old Southern story: justice vs. a social system.

Partially in the spirit of good-will, and partly under the pressure of national publicity, twelve white men defied their narrow social heritage in returning a verdict of not guilty. This, though a great move in the reconstruction of the South by southerners, is not the millenium. To match this case are hundreds of instances which appear, if at all, in fine print on the bottom of the back pages of your daily newspaper.

If the outcome of the Lawrenceburg case indicates the initiation of a new era in the South, the stage is only embryonic. But only through such trials as these can the social system be changed and reconciled with the concepts of Western justice. Hundreds of lives may be lost in the struggle of flux. The sacrifice is unfortunate, but necessary. To deal with racial questions through alien agencies like Federal courts, as suggested by Sheean, would remove the very problems the South must solve in its self-education. Permanent change must come from within; the group must change itself.. Here is a beginning.