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Virginia's Creeping Desegregation:
Force of the Inevitable
- Abstract
A northerner traveling in the South soon learns not to embarrass his hosts by supposing that they really believe their popular social mythologies any more than we do in the North. During a trip of some fifteen hundred miles from the Potomac to well below the Appomattox and back, I was unable to find one intelligent Virginian who attached much weight to the idea that “mongrelization” would inevitably follow desegregation of the public schools. Even intransigent segregationists acknowledged the elementary anthropological facts: such mixture of the races as has occurred thus far was largely a product of the plantation slavery system; and the glacial spread of miscegenation was not perceptibly accelerated in the North by the relatively free mingling of the races in the schools and elsewhere, or greatly inhibited in the South by the adoption, about the turn of the century, of the tightly segregated dual society of Jim Crow.
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