I couldn't resist surfacing this further quote from Alan Paton:

Many Americans are too pessimistic about their own country; they measure their moral strength in terms of sleeping-tablet consumption, Kinsey reports, juvenile delinquency and McCarthyism. Let them try measuring it as well in terms of the advance of the Negro. Let them try measuring it in terms of justice, which, so often defeated, has a way of conquering in the end.

And the last line, which rings too true today:

Perhaps it might be true, after all, that a nation gets the Supreme Court that it deserves.