"I am not a member of any organization that believes in the overthrow of the American Mathematical Society"

Photo from the book Civil rights in South Carolina.

The title of this post is meant to be a play on California's 1950 loyalty oath which state employees, especially university professors, were required to sign.  The loyalty oath was mentioned in Abigail Thompson's editorial which appears in the latest issue of the Notices of American Mathematical Society.  I expect the editorial will generate has generated much discussion among mathematicians.  Thompson criticizes the UC system's current practice of requiring university job applicants to submit diversity statements and compares it to the use of loyalty oaths in the 1950s.  The South Carolina state government used  similar tools to enforce segregation.   I thought it'd be timely to discuss the topic in greater depth.

The term "loyalty oath" as applied to the 1950 California oath is somewhat of a misnomer.  I encourage you to read the full text here.  The oath is a commitment to two different things: loyalty to the federal and state governments ("I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution...") and nonmembership in the Communist Party and organizations that advocate for the overthrow of the U.S. government ("... I am not a member of the Communist Party...").  The most controversial part of the oath is the declaration of nonmembership, so it could more properly be called a membership ban.

(In all this condemnation of of loyalty oaths, I was surprised to see that nobody pointed out that California seems to still require them.  See here, here, and here for contemporary discussions.  I think the current oath is here.  Presumably the current oath is less controversial since it doesn't include a membership ban.)

South Carolina implemented a simple membership ban.  In 1956, South Carolina Legislators passed a law barring government employees from holding membership in the NAACP and fining public officials who failed to implement the ban.  The law was designed to target teachers.  At the start of the school year, public school teachers were asked to fill out a questionnaire that asked if they were members of the NAACP or if they believed in integration.  One of the more detailed questionnaires is this one for a school in Orangeburg country:

1956 Teacher Application taken from The Problem of Desegregation in South Carolina

About 20 teachers refused to fill out the form.  They were subsequently fired.

The NAACP ban targeted public school teachers because African American teachers were an early focus of the civil rights movement in South Carolina.  In the 1940s, for example, the NAACP campaigned for African American public school teachers to receive the same pay as white teachers (teacher pay scales were set by a formula that explicitly took account of a teacher's race).  African American teachers were a natural group to organize because they formed a large professional body that was negatively impacted by segregation laws.

Govorner Timmerman

The fight over civil rights had become especially intense by 1956.  The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ruling racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional had presented a major challenge for segregationists.  In part as a response to the Brown decision, George Timmerman was elected governor in 1955 after running on a populist, segregationist platform.  Signing the NAACP ban into law was one of Timmerman's many actions to preserve segregation.

There was a long legal fight over the ban.  The NAACP almost immediately tried to challenge it in federal court, but before the case made its way through the legal system, the state legislature repealed the ban.  Legislators seem to have been concerned about legality and replaced it with a law requiring teachers to declare all organizations they belonged to.

The idea behind the new law was that it would force disclosure of NAACP membership while being easier to defend legally than the ban. (The new law didn't explicitly target a specific organization.) The new law didn't explicitly require that NAACP members be fired, but disclosure of membership would would expose members to serious danger.  For example, Joseph De Laine, a leader behind a South Carolina suit that was incorporated into Brown v. Board of Ed, was fired from his job, had his church burned, and was the target of an attempted drive-by shooting.

I can't find much information about how the NAACP bans were used after 1956.  The 1960 Supreme Court decision Shelton v. Tucker ruled a similar law in Arkansas unconstitutional, so presumably South Carolina's laws would have unenforceable at that point.  No idea what happened between 1957 and 1960.

In contrast to the situation with loyalty oaths in California, the laws targeting the NAACP do not seem have been used on university professors.  They did, however, have an impact on higher education.  In response to the NAACP ban and similar laws passed at this time, university faculty and staff at South Carolina State University, the public HBCU, drew up a resolution in protest.  The protest escalated over the course of the school year.  The governor sent state law enforcement officials to campus and the students responded by going on strike.  The strike ended when the university president threatened to expel the protesters.  Calm returned to campus after that, although about 10 students were suspended, 1 was expelled, and about 5 faculty fired.

Some fallout from the S.C. State protests appears in my article on James Solomon.  I mention in the article that, under pressure from the governor, 6 faculty were fired from the private HBCUs Allen University and Benedict College.  These schools were targeted in part because of the support they provided the S. C. State protesters:  the expelled student enrolled and completed his degree at Allen University.

Rereading Thompson's article after reflecting on this piece of South Carolina history was insightful for me.  In comparing them to loyalty tests, I think Thompson is trying to make the point that mandatory diversity statements are a bad idea regardless of the merit of the intended goal of promoting diversity.   Her view is that a job screening for political views is an inherently bad political tool.  I find it hard to productively contemplate this view in the context of the 1950s bans on membership in the Communist Party and the NAACP because I find the political goals of the bans so odious.

If we reach back further back into South Carolina's history, we can find loyalty tests being used to advance more noble political goals.  In the 19th century, oaths were one of the tools politicians used to limit the political power of Confederate sympathizers during and after the Civil War.  All the mathematicians I know are certainly supportive of this aim.  Were laws barring unreconstructed Confederate from federal jobs bad political tools despite their aims?  I honestly don't know, but this seems like a good question to consider when thinking about the use of political screenings in job hiring.

Loyalty oath signed by a former Confederate surgeon after the Civil War.  
Photo from the IC Blog.

Sources:

1). Civil rights in South Carolina: From peaceful protests to groundbreaking rulings by James L. Felder.

2). Making civil rights law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961 by Mark V. Tushnet.

3). The problem of desegregation in South Carolina by W. E. Solomon.

4). South Carolina State University: A Black land-grant college in Jim Crow American by William C. Hines.