Mixed Race Studies

Mixed schools and mixed blood

Citizen’s Council of Mississippi: States’ Rights-Racial Integrity
1956
14 pages
Source: Digital Collections of the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries
USM Identifier: mus-mcc029

Herbert Ravenel Sass

From the McCain (William D.) Pamphlet Collection; In the pamphlet, Sass argues that segregation is an American institution and that the Civil Rights movement is a Communist propaganda machine dedicated to weakening the United States through biological amalgamation of its races. He says that African Americans have a better life than any other population descended from Africans around the world. He also erroneously compares the separation of the races to the biological speciation of birds.

Herbert Ravenel Sass, author, presents the fundamental case for the white South. A native of Charleston, South Carolina, an independent, and an Episcopalian, Mr. Sass is imbued with a tradition which he believes is based on unchanging truth. His argument goes to the very heart of the controversy: Would integrated schools lead to mixed blood?

What may well be the most important physical fact in the story of the United States is one which is seldom emphasized in our history books. It is the fact that throughout the three and a half centuries of our existence we have kept our several races biologically distinct and separate. Though we have encouraged the mixing of many different strains in what has been called the American “melting pot,” we have confined this mixing to the white peoples of European ancestry, excluding from our “melting pot” all other races. The result is that the United States today is overwhelmingly a pure white nation, with a smaller but considerable Negro population in which there is some white blood, and a much smaller American Indian population.

The fact that the United States is overwhelmingly pure white is not only important; it is also the most distinctive fact about this country when considered in relation to the rest of the New World. Except Canada, Argentina, and Uruguay, none of the approximately twenty-five other countries of this hemisphere has kept its races pure. Instead (though each contains some pure-blooded individuals) all these countries are products of an amalgamation of races—American Indian and white or American Indian, Negro, and white. In general the pure-blooded white nations have out-stripped the far more numerous American mixed-blood nations in most of the achievements which constitute progress as commonly defined.

These facts are well known. But now there lurks in ambush, as it were, another fact: we have suddenly begun to move toward abandonment of our 350-year-old system of keeping our races pure and are preparing to adopt instead a method of racial amalgamation similar to that which has created the mixed-blood nations of this hemisphere; except that the amalgamation being prepared for this country is not Indian and white but Negro and white. It is the deep conviction of nearly all white Southerners in the states which have large Negro populations that the mingling or integration of white-and Negro children in the South’s primary schools would open the gates to miscegenation and widespread racial amalgamation.

This belief is at the heart of our race problem, and until it is realized that this is the South’s basic and compelling motive, there can be no understanding of the South’s attitude…

Read the entire pamphlet here.