For Lack of Knowledge

Editorial note: since this decision, the racial demographics of Savannah have devolved, with Whites making up 49% of the district’s population, about 5% less than the state average for Georgia.

by Paul Jones

One of my favorite quotes from the Bible is “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” (Hosea 4:6) This came to mind when I looked at the case of Stell v. Savannah-Chatham County Board of Education which resulted in a decision by the U.S. District Court for the Sixth District of Georgia issued on June 28, 1963. It upheld the segregation of white and black students in the public schools of Savannah, which at that time were about 60% white and 40% black students.

In all my many years of following politics I had not read about this case until I had gotten about halfway through “Which Way Western Man,” written by William Gayley Simpson, considered until his death in 1991 to have been one of the foremost intellectuals on the Right. Simpson’s reaction to the Stell case was that “It clearly indicated the negro’s inferiority to the white man, average against average, in many ways, but in no way more significantly than in size and weight of brain, especially in the measurements of the brain’s frontal cortex and its supra-granular layer, which are concerned with will, intellect, self-control, etc. Upon all this a man’s capacity to create, participate in and maintain a civilization such as ours, absolutely hinges.” (p. 655)

Looking specifically at the case itself, it first explains why the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 was not relied on to prevent the pleading to even be considered in the first place. “….this court is bound by the decision of Brown v. Board of Education to the extent that it states rules of law. It has no application to any determinations of fact in that case.” The facts and information involved in making the decision to end segregation by the Supreme Court in 1954 were related to what was going on in Topeka, Kansas, not anywhere else.

“The Supreme Court in Brown referred to the current state of ‘psychological knowledge’ as the basis for its finding of injury from separate schooling.” The court then goes on to show the fallacies in the doll test of Dr. Kenneth B. Clark that made it unscientific as a means of showing how black children supposedly suffered from a sense of inferiority as a result of segregated schooling.

Most damning was information entered as evidence in the case from a speech by Dr. Alfred H. Kelly of Wayne State University. He testified before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 87^th Congress and said in part the following:

“It is not that we were engaged in formulating lies; there was nothing as crude and naïve as that. But we were using facts, emphasizing facts, bearing down on facts, sliding off facts, quietly ignoring facts, and above all interpreting facts in a way to do what (Thurgood) Marshall said we had to do ‘get by those boys down there.’”

Information to justify segregation of black and whites in the Savannah public schools was entered as evidence by, among others, Dr. R.T. Osborne, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Student Guidance Center at the University of Georgia: “In reading, Negro students are two school years behind the white children at the sixth grade level. This increases to a reading difference between the two of more than three years in the twelfth grade…The average Negro pupil in the twelfth grade of the Savannah-Chatham County schools is below the eighth grade national arithmetic norm. White children who have been given the same courses tested above the eleventh grade national norm.”

In the case of I.Q., “Of the 10% of Negro students who scored at or above the white median in the sixth grade, only 1% exceeded the median in the tenth grade where the white median I.Q. was 103, the Negro 81…”

Also brought in for expert testimony was Dr. Henry E. Garrett, Visiting Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Columbia University where he was head of the Department of Psychology and taught for more than 30 years. “Plaintiffs conceded that the opinions of Dr. Garrett were authoritative in his field of experimental and differential psychology. Dr. Garrett stated that the test differences which Dr. Osborne reported in Savannah-Chatham County were of approximately the same order as those observed and reported in the nation as a whole including both Northern and Southern schools…Dr. Garrett than gave his opinion that the differences in educability between Negro and white children were inherent, and that only minor changes could be achieved by educational readjustment or other environmental change…and cited the larger percentage of individuals of mixed inheritance in the higher score areas of Negro testing.”

As Simpson states in his book, “But for all its significance, no meaningful discussion of the case appeared in any newspaper of national significance, and the appeal court, ignoring the evidence entirely, reversed the decision on the ostensible ground that an inferior federal court could not ‘refrain from acting as required (by the 1954 segregation decision of the Supreme Court) even if such a court should conclude that the Supreme Court erred either as to its facts or as to the law’…And the Supreme Court finally decided, without a word or comment, that it would not review the evidence or rehear the case.” (pp. 656-657)

It’s definitely a shame that the Stell case didn’t come about in 1954 instead of the Brown one. By 1963 the process of desegregating schools had already been well underway for several years and was pretty much reaching its conclusion. So for the Supreme Court in 1963 to revise its own findings would have been to basically admit that the nine old men in 1954 had been old fools, something impossible at such a late stage to come to grips with.

But aside from the role that the Franz Boas School of Anthropology played back in 1954 in influencing the judges’ decision in Brown, more than anything it was the control by the Jews of the mass media and education to be able to push their integrationist agenda. So also, lack of any national publicity of the Stell case kept from the public any consideration of the new facts and information brought out in 1963. At present too, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” due to the same organized, anti-white ethnic group which is steadily pushing us to our demise through withholding information that would be beneficial for us to have regarding the racial predicament we are in.

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