Federal intervention as a necessary measure for racial change
McMath explains that federal intervention was necessary for racial progress in the South. According to McMath, Jim Crow may have eventually fallen on its own, but it likely would have taken decades, even centuries. Emphasizing southern regional culture, McMath argues that without federal measures, such as <cite>Brown v. Board of Education</cite>, Jim Crow segregation would have continued to flourish in the South.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Sidney S. McMath, September 8, 1990. Interview A-0352. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
Do you think that most people by that '48, '50, time, knew in
their gut that segregation was not going to last forever?
- SID MCMATH:
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People generally didn't know that.
- JOHN EGERTON:
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They just couldn't assimilate the thing.
- SID MCMATH:
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They couldn't assimilate that. You know, custom dies hard. But there were
people, intelligent people and educationed people
and people in positions of leadership, that knew it was inevitable. The
Brown decision, you know, and after that, it's
just a matter of time. Then, of course, when you get right down to it,
what's America all about. What's your values? "We hold these
truths to be self evident. All men . . . "
- JOHN EGERTON:
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You can't have that kind of language written into your history and dodge
that question.
- SID MCMATH:
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And it's taken us a long time to bring it about. Look at the impact that
that concept, that philosophy, has had on western Europe. They're all
inspired by the American Bill of Rights and the American Declaration of
Independence. So we have to make it work at home. And of course, after
the war, we were motivated by the fact that we'd been fighting against
this kind of thing that exists in, say, Garland County and a lot of
other places over the country. If we're going to fight for it in the
world, we want to fight for it at home.
- JOHN EGERTON:
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Right. Do you think that you yourself as a politician and as a lawyer saw
the Brown decision coming before it got here?
- SID MCMATH:
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Oh sure, absolutely, it's inevitable. I knew it was coming. I knew that
we couldn't continue to keep the black people ignorant, and you can't
keep them enslaved. You know, the Emancipation Proclamation didn't free
the blacks. It freed them from slavery, but it placed them in servitude
under this sharecropper system. And it wasn't until the Second World War
that we escaped from that. I guess it was the John Deere tractor and the
cotton-picking machine that did more to free the blacks
than anybody. It wasn't until 1965, wasn't it, that we
abolished the poll tax?
- JOHN EGERTON:
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That's really true. That's right. That's how long it took.
- SID MCMATH:
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And talk about individual rights and personal freedom and so forth, look
at the women. Women didn't get the right to vote until 1920. 'Course, I
felt and I knew it was inevitable, and I felt for these people. I lived
in south Arkansas and I saw the plight that the black people were in. I
had a great deal of empathy for them as a child.
- JOHN EGERTON:
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And yet growing up as an adult, the common thing that you heard white
leadership say in the South was, two things, separate but equal, and
they knew it wasn't equal. And the other thing was if everybody will
leave us alone, we can work this out ourselves.
- SID MCMATH:
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Yeah, don't want any outside interference, outsiders coming here telling
us what to do.
- JOHN EGERTON:
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Can you imagine that the South would ever have worked it out by itself,
if it hadn't been for Brown and the courts and the
black revolt?
- SID MCMATH:
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Oh, in a century or two centuries. The economic conditions change and
people get educated and so forth, and if the blacks are not equipped to
earn a living and so forth, it might have eventually come about, but it
would have taken a century or two centuries to do it.
- JOHN EGERTON:
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Do you think the notion that . . . ?
- SID MCMATH:
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Well, just like would the South have abolished slavery?
Maybe eventually, economically, maybe in a hundred years it would have
come about. No, you had to have the Brown decision,
and you had to have federal intervention. It was federal intervention
that abolished the poll tax. And look at the child labor laws and the
right of women to vote, and all this came through the federal
government.