Marching Through Charleston

For more than two years, no white Charlestonian had called socially at the gracious, grey stucco home of Federal Judge J. Waties Waring and his Yankee wife. First, the judge's lifelong friends in Charleston's proud and starchy society had cut him cold for divorcing one of their own to marry a twice-divorced woman from Connecticut. Then the rest of white Charleston had drawn itself aloof when he ruled that Negroes were entitled to vote in South Carolina's primary elections (TIME, Aug. 23, 1948). Over the months there were loud whispers that the Warings were entertaining Negroes. But nobody was prepared for what Mrs. Waring had to say last week.

Before a small mixed audience at Charleston's Negro Y.W.C.A., she blazed like a flamethrower, exhorting the South's

Negroes to a cold war "to attain the rights you already legally have." Said she: "You Negro people already have picked up the torch of culture and achievement from the whites down here. They are a sick, confused and decadent people. They are full of pride and complacency, introverted, morally weak and low . . ."

When she had finished, a Negro woman walked to the platform to hand Mrs. Waring a small bouquet of roses wrapped in tissue paper, was fondly hugged in return. The next day's brickbats were wrapped in white rage. "Beneath comment," snorted Dixiecrat Governor J. Strom Thurmond. On the floor of the state legislature, Representative Joe Wise, a 23-year-old Air Forces veteran, added: "We need no words such as hers from a damyankee."

Said Mrs. Waring: "I realize that if one has a cause, one has to be willing to suffer for it." Her telephone was kept busy with anonymous threats. Condemnatory--and a few congratulatory--letters poured in from over the South. Telegrams of praise came from the corners of the U.S. But still no callers came to Mrs. Waring's door.

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