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581

(1944) [MARC] Author: Gunnar Myrdal
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Note: Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.

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Chapter 28. The Basis of Social Inequality 581
make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities
of citizens of the United States”—could not be so easily disposed of. The
Southern whites, therefore, in passing their various segregation laws to
legalize social discrimination, had to manufacture a legal fiction of the same
type as we have already met in the preceding discussion on politics and
justice. The legal term for this trick in the social field, expressed or implied
in most of the Jim Crow statutes, is ^^separate, but equal.” That Is, Negroes
were to get equal accommodations, but separate from the whites. It is evi-
dent, however, and rarely denied, that there is practically no single
instance of segregation in the South which has not been utilized for a
significant discrimination. The great difference in quality of service for the
two groups in the segregated set-ups for transportation and education is
merely the most obvious example of how segregation is an excuse for dis-
crimination.^’^ Again the Southern white man is in the moral dilemma of
having to frame his laws in terms of equality and to defend them before
the Supreme Court—and before his own better conscience, which is tied to
the American Creed—while knowing all the time that in reality his laws
do not give equality to Negroes, and that he does not want them to do so.
The formal adherence to equality in the American Creed, expressed by
the Constitution and in the laws, is, however, even in the field of social
relations, far from being without practical importance. Spokesmen for
the white South, not only recently but in the very period when the segre-
gation policy was first being legitimatized, have strongly upheld the prin-
ciple that segregation should not be used for discrimination. Henry W.
Grady, for instance, scorned the ^^fanatics and doctrinaires who hold that
separation is discrimination,” emphasized that ^^separation is not offensive
to either race” and exclaimed:
. . . the whites and blacks must walk in separate paths in the South. As near as may
be, these paths should be made equal—but separate they must be now and always.
This means separate schools, separate churches, separate accommodations everytvherc
—but equal accommodations where the same money is charged^ or where the State
provides for the citizen.
Further, the legal adherence to the principle of equality gives the South-
ern liberal a vantage point in his work to improve the status of the Negroes
and race relations.® Last, but not least, it gives the Negro people a firm
legal basis for their fight against social segregation and discrimination. Since
the two are inseparable, the fight against inequality challenges the whole
segregation system. The National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People has had, from the very beginning, the constitutional pro-
visions for equality as its sword and shield. Potentially the Negro is strong.
* See Chapter 21, Section 5.

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