From the earliest days of the civil rights movement, a taboo on accepting inherent racial differences in intelligence was already deeply embedded in American intellectual life. An amusing demonstration of the power of the taboo is found in a pro-segregation 1961 book called Race and Reason, written by Carleton Putnam, who had been chairman of the board of Delta Air Lines. The argument presented was Cofnasesque – by refusing to emphasize biological differences between the races, Southerners were left defenseless against their enemies in debates over segregation. The problem was that white Southerners loved blacks too much to tell the truth about them.
White Southerners understood the Negro and in large measure loved him. They realized that the agitation rending the South originated with organized white minorities in conjunction with mixed-bloods well over on the white side of the spectrum. They deplored the deterioration this agitation was producing in existing race relations in the blacker South. Yet they could scarcely bring themselves to hurt their own. The South, after generations of experience, had developed customs and a way of life with the Negro that took his limitations into consideration with a minimum of friction and a maximum of kindness. It was entirely against these customs, these adaptations, openly to analyze and publicize the reasons for them.
Segregationists didn’t completely avoid race science arguments in all contexts. Putnam’s book itself became popular, and was even endorsed by Senators Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Richard Russell of Georgia. Around this time, the governor of Alabama commissioned a study on race differences in intelligence to be used in desegregation cases, and the resulting work was a 1962 book called The Biology of the Race Problem, written by a UNC anatomist named Wesley Critz George.
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