I
At the time of the Supreme Court’s opinion inBrownv.Board of Education, on Monday, May 17, 1954, seventeen Southern and border States maintained racially separate schools. These included, in addition to the thirteen States to be treated here as “the South,” the States of Maryland, Delaware, Kansas, and Missouri, plus the District of Columbia. Each of the five speedily abandoned segregation—Kansas willingly, Missouri stoically, Maryland cheerlessly, Delaware grudgingly. The District abandoned segregation; white parents abandoned the District, and by 1962 an 82 per cent resegregation could be observed in the schools.Sic transit gloriaMonday. None of the four States was in any real sense a part of the South; their constitutional or statutory requirements for segregated schools were appendages more or less ripe for the clipping. And though southern Missouri and the Delaware shore submitted to desegregation with some bitterness, the surgery was not especially painful and the operations, on the whole, were uneventful.
This essay is concerned chiefly with the other thirteen States, with attitudes and practices that then prevailed widely in all of them and still prevail overwhelmingly in some of them: the States of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. A possibly more definitive list might eliminate Oklahoma and Kentucky from this neo-Confederate fold; their Negro populations comprise no more than 6 or 7 per cent of the State total, and Oklahoma looks to the Southwest while Kentucky (mildly anesthetized by Mr. Bingham’s LouisvilleCourier-Journal) looks nowhere in particular. Yet I myself was reared in Oklahoma, and I know at first hand of the intensely Southern sentiment that still obtains in much of the State; my Kentucky friends write me poignantly, as one writes from East Berlin or Poland, asking CARE packages and seeking prayers, and I judge that many Kentuckians continue to look upon integration as they might look upon orange slices in a julep. Theywill drink the horrid thing, but their sense of propriety is outraged.
These thirteen States together make up a fascinating part of the American Republic. Their combined area amounts to nearly 863,000 square miles, or about 28 per cent of the continental United States. The 1960 census found in them 48,802,000 persons, of whom 24,036,000 were males and 24,755,000 were females; and, more to our point, the census found in them 38,404,000 white persons, 10,231,000 Negro persons, and 167,000 other nonwhites, mostly Indians in Texas, Oklahoma, and North Carolina.
The census of 1960 turned up a great many other figures useful to an understanding of the American South. Some of these are best presented in tabulated form. These figures, for example, bear close study:
Negro Population, Thirteen SouthernStates, 1900-1960
The Negro component within the American Union, it is evident, remains today about what it has been all along. Within the Southern States, the Negro population is dropping steadily as a percentage of the whole. Negroes comprised11.6 per cent of the nation’s total in population in 1900, 9.7 per cent in 1930, and 10.5 per cent in 1960. But this 10.5 per cent of 1960 has shifted dramatically across the nation. Of 18,872,000 Negroes, 8,641,000 or 46 per cent, were living in 1960 outside the thirteen States of the South. There were more Negroes in New York City (1,227,000) than in all of Mississippi or Alabama. Philadelphia turned up 26.4 per cent Negro; Georgia is 28.5 per cent Negro. Chicago counted almost as many Negroes in its city limits (813,000) as there were in the whole of Virginia (816,000), and they represented a larger part of the total—a concentrated 23 per cent in Chicago, a scattered 21 per cent in Virginia.
Between 1950 and 1960, the Census Bureau has reported, the South experienced a net out-migration of about 1,457,000 Negroes. The figure represents the number of Negroes that census enumerators of 1960 would have expected to find in the South if the Negro populations of 1950 had stayed put and had experienced a normal increase of births over deaths. Alabama, which should have gained 225,000 Negroes on this basis, gained only 1000 in the decade; South Carolina, which normally would have gained 226,000 Negroes, gained only 8000. Mississippi actually experienced a net loss in Negro population, from 986,000 in 1950 to 915,000 in 1960.
Where did these Negro migrants go? To the North, primarily—more than a million of them. Others went west: California experienced a net in-migration of 354,000 Negroes. Large numbers moved to Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan. The migration was almost entirely to Northern cities, and ironically, to urban societies of the North almost as segregated by geography as the Old South is segregated by custom.
Yet for all the steady decline of Negro components in Southern States, it still is true that the South, as a region, houses the largest concentration of colored citizens. Of the fifteen States that in 1960 had more than 500,000 Negro residents, all but four (New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey) were in the South. The thirteen Southern States that were 35 per cent Negro in 1900 were still 21 per cent Negro in 1960, and in 140 Southern counties, white residents in 1960 remained numerically in the minority.
Consider some further statistics:
Urban and Rural PopulationThirteen Southern States, 1900-1960.
These figures, as I hope to demonstrate after a while, should be treated with some reserve, but on their own they tell a revolutionary tale. Of the twelve States that were firmly rural in 1940, only North and South Carolina, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Mississippi were found predominantly rural in 1960. This migration from the countryside has seen the number of farms in the South drop from 3,100,000 in 1910 to 1,650,000 in 1959; the number of farms either owned or operated by Negroes has dropped from 890,000 to 272,000 in the same period.
In many aspects, to be sure, the census of 1960 found the South hardly changed at all. The region still is composed overwhelmingly of native-born Americans; except for Florida and Texas, none of the thirteen States has as much as four-tenths of 1 per cent foreign-born population. Southerners still are moving out of the South more rapidly than non-Southerners are moving in, but the Southern tendency to stay put remains much in evidence: 90 per cent of the citizens of Mississippi were born there, and the percentage is almost as high in Alabama and the Carolinas.
In terms of material wealth, our people remain relatively poor. Per capita incomes in 1959 ranged from $1162 in Mississippi to $1980 in Florida, against a national average of $2166. Wages in the thirteen States then averaged $73.31 weekly and $1.82 hourly, far below national averages of $90.91 and $2.29. As one consequence, housing conditions are sadly below par. The 1960 census found, in the country as a whole, 18.8 per cent of all dwellings “dilapidated or lacking plumbing facilities”; the percentages were 49.2 in Mississippi, 44.9 in Arkansas, and 41.2 in Kentucky; and no State outside the South approached these poor ratings.
The picture is not entirely bleak. Poor as they are, the Southern States in general are exerting a much greater effort than their wealthier Northern sisters. Over the country as a whole, State and local governments in 1959 raised $102.12 per capita from their own tax sources. Seven of the thirteen Southern States were far above this average: Mississippi, for example, raised $128.76 per capita from local sources, a figure that compares with $108.92 in New York, $83.56 in Connecticut, and $81.51 in Delaware. With much less tolevy upon, the Southern States proportionately are pouring more into their schools. And the outlook is brightening steadily. Between 1929 and 1959, while the nation as a whole was increasing its per capita personal incomes by 208 per cent, South Carolina was jumping 393 per cent and Louisiana 280 per cent.
Permit a few more statistics. The South’s traditional distaste for government remains quite evident. Florida, Louisiana, and Oklahoma have slightly more than the average number of State and local government workers in terms of population, but the others are far below the national average. The South has small appetite for the welfare state; our relief rolls are large, owing chiefly to social difficulties among the Negroes, but grants are kept relentlessly low. Our people are churchgoers, in fantastic numbers. We continue to produce more moonshine whiskey than any other region. In 1961, there were 486 daily newspapers in the South, with a circulation of 12,500,000. Almost 40 per cent of the country’s radio stations are in the South; North Carolina has more AM stations than the State of New York, and Texas has more radio stations than anybody.
The foregoing figures tell little enough, to be sure, about the South; you learn nothing much about a sonnet by a footnote on its rhyme scheme. For it is a truism that there is not one South; there are, it is said, many Souths.
Eighteen hundred miles separate the Rio Grande at El Paso from the James at Hampton Roads. The intervening land is immensely varied. The South begins, at its western rim, in canyon country, red-walled, black-hilled; the bare and bony mountains stretch across the prairie like the skeletons of dinosaurs. This is hard country, burned by the sun and wrinkled by the unceasing wind; this is Texas, and almost everything men say of it is true. Oklahoma, to the north, is a pocket paper-back edition of its brawny southern neighbor. Both States offer moments of surpassing beauty and long stretches of surpassing dullness; they offer a splendid, lonesome emptiness of time and space, and then, abruptly, thesophistication of Dallas and the busy commerce of Oklahoma City and Houston.
Coming east, one finds Arkansas, and below it Louisiana; Ozark country, the endless foothills that never quite reach to the foot of anything, to the south the flatlands and bayous, the white cranes flying, the River, incredibly massive, the jeweled city one caresses as a mistress in his dreams.
Across the River, Mississippi and Alabama: cotton country, bottom land, mules and iron; small towns that evoke in bank and clock and feed store, in the inevitable bronze soldier standing guard in courthouse square, the image of small towns everywhere; progress and poverty, the hot breath of Birmingham, the Monopoly suburbs, their roofs all in line and neat bibs of crab grass under their chins.
On to the east, Georgia: red clay and cotton, the prosperous incongruity of Atlanta, resting on the homely landscape like a diamond stickpin on a shabby tie. To the south, the separate nation that is Florida, post-card blue, lemon yellow, an old man nodding on a St. Petersburg bench, a swamp child gazing from a quiet pier; Miami, and the Beach, the liquid ripple of Cuban tongues; the bonefish, silver as sixteenth notes in amethyst water. Back again to the north: Tennessee, timbered, taciturn, green-hilled, the great lakes of the TVA; Memphis and Knoxville and Nashville; the accent that thins a shorteto a shorti. Above Tennessee, Kentucky, tied inescapably now to the North and Midwest, hard politics, soft speech, burley tobacco, and good bourbon.
To the east again, Virginia and South Carolina, with North Carolina between them, “a valley of humility between two mountains of conceit,” or more accurately, a peak of giddy-up between two valleys of whoa. South Carolina is moss and small creeks, camellias, azaleas, the rugs a little thin, the white tapers gleaming, ancestors on the walls and Calhoun’s brooding spirit still alive, Camden and Columbia, and a classic capitol still pocked by Yankee shells. To the north, tobacco country; Charlotte, thrusting ahead, brief-cased, snap-brimmed; universities, schools, textiles, furniture mills, the black cypress quietude of the inland waterway.
Finally, Virginia, stretching four hundred miles from her coal country to her beaches; tobacco and peanuts; the gemthat is Williamsburg, the plantation country, the somnolent Northern Neck, Mr. Jefferson’s University, the hunt country, the changelessly changing capital city where I write.
This land of ours is many-rivered, and the rivers have lovely names: the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee, Pee Dee, Yadkin, Tombigbee, Brazoo, Mobile, the York, the James, the Mattaponi. Our mountains are mostly old, worn down, the edges rubbed off: the Blue Ridge, the Alleghenies, the Great Smokies, the Ozarks. Our summers are hot and humid; the winters are uninteresting outside of Florida; but spring in the South is a coolrosé, and October in Virginia is a sparkling champagne. I speak to the court in this brief, as Your Honors will have noted, with an affection that ought perhaps to be brought back in bounds; along with the most beautiful horses in the world, we have some of the meanest mosquitoes south of New Jersey, an oversupply of shif’less dogs, and vast quantities of stinging nettles; we have sandflies, horned toads, and chiggers; we have our fair share of men who give short weight, of bigoted men, unkind, intolerant; we are given in a Cavalier South to drinking too much, and in the Bible Belt, to drinking not enough; we have men who honk at traffic lights, and women who giggle, and politicians who are full of wind; the Southern Shintoism that is sometimes a blessing is as often a curse; some of our cities are dirty, and most of our streets have lumps in them. But this is the many-faceted, cloudy, crystalline compound called the South.
Yet, no,it is not the South. The truism of “many Souths” will not stand too much weight. Every region in the country has its contrasts, its extremes, its anomalies, its measurable differences. An essential point can be missed in overconcentration on the Rural South, the Urban South, the New South, the Old South, the Liberal South, the Conservative South. There remains a great and well-understood meaning simply intheSouth; there is, in fact, a sense of oneness here, an identity, a sharing, and this quality makes the South unique in ways that New England, and the Midwest, and the West do not approach. The Confederacy was, as a matter of law, a state in being; but it was first of all, and still is, what so many observers have termed it: a state of mind. And runningthrough this state of mind, now loose as basting thread, now knotted as twine, now strong and stubborn as wire, coloring the whole fabric of our lives, is this inescapable awareness: the consciousness of the Negro.
How, in 1962, does one begin to discuss this awareness?Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa?No, perhaps, the best observation to make at the outset is that the South, in general, feels no sharp sense of sin at its “treatment of the Negro.” The guilt hypothesis is vastly overdrawn. If wrong has been done (and doubtless wrong has been done), we reflect that within the human relationship wrong always has been done, by one people upon another, since tribal cavemen quarreled with club and stone. And whatever the wrongs may have been, the white South emphatically refuses to accept all the wrongs as her own. For the South itself has been wronged—cruelly and maliciously wronged, by men in high places whose hypocrisy is exceeded only by their ignorance, men whose trade is to damn the bigotry of the segregated South by day and to sleep in lily-white Westchester County by night. We are keenly aware, as Perry Morgan remarked in a telling phrase, of a North that wishes to denounce discrimination and have it too.
But let us begin gently. The Southerner who would grope seriously for understanding of his own perplexing region, and the non-Southerner who would seek in earnest to learn more than his textbooks would tell him, cannot make a start withBrownv.Board of Educationon a May afternoon in 1954. Neither can he begin withPlessyv.Fergusonin 1896, or with ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, or with Appomattox three years earlier. A start has to be made much earlier, in 1619, when the first twenty Negroes arrived from Africa aboard a Dutch slaver and fastened upon the South a wretched incubus that the belated penances of New Englanders have not expiated at all.
We of the South have been reared from that day in a strange society that only now—and how uncomfortably!—isbecoming known at first hand outside the South. This is the dual society, made up of white and Negro coexisting in an oddly intimate remoteness. It is a way of life that has to be experienced. Children mask their eyes and play at being blind. Even so, some of my Northern friends mask their eyes and play at being Southern; they try to imagine what it must be like to be white in the South, to be Negro in the South. Novelist John Griffin dyed his skin and spent three weeks or so pretending to be Negro, looking for incidents to confirm his prejudices. But a child always knows that he can take his hands from his eyes, and see, that he is not really blind; and those who have not grown up from childhood, and fashioned their whole world from a delicately bounded half a world, cannot comprehend what this is all about. They wash the dye from their imaginations, and put asideThe New York Times, and awake to a well-ordered society in which the Negroes of their personal acquaintance are sipping martinis and talking of Middle Eastern diplomacy. They form an image of “the Negro” (as men form an image of the French, or the British, or the Japanese) in terms of the slim and elegant Harvard student, the eloquent spokesman of a civil rights group, the trim stenographer in a publishing office: Thurgood Marshall on the bench, Ralph Bunche in the lecture hall. It is a splendid image, finely engraved on brittle glass, an object of universal admiration on the mantle of theNew Republic. It is an image scarcely known in the South.
My father came from New Orleans. His father, a captain in the Confederate Army, returned from the War and established a prosperous business in ship chandlery there. And though I myself was born in Oklahoma, Father having moved there just prior to World War I, we children visited along the Delta in our nonage. We sailed on Pontchartrain, and crabbed at Pass Christian, and once or twice were taken from school in February to sit spellbound on Canal Street and watch the Mardi Gras go by. Our life in Oklahoma was New Orleans once removed; it was a life our playmates accepted as matter-of-factly as children of a coast accept the tides: The Negroeswere; wewere. They had their lives; we had ours. There were certain things one did: A properwhite child obeyed the family Negroes, ate with them, bothered them, teased them, loved them, lived with them, learned from them. And there were certain things one did not do: One did not intrude upon their lives, or ask about Negro institutions, or bring a Negro child in the front door. And at five, or six, or seven, one accepted, without question, that Calline and Cubboo, who were vaguely the charges of a Negro gardener up the street, had their schools; and we had ours.
Does all this have the air of a chapter from William Gilmore Simms or a post-bellum romance by Thomas Nelson Page? I myself lived it, forty years ago; my own sons have lived it in this generation. My father lived it, and his father before him. For three hundred years, the South has lived with this subconsciousness of race. Who hears a clock tick, or the surf murmur, or the trains pass? Not those who live by the clock or the sea or the track. In the South, the acceptance of racial separation begins in the cradle. What rational man imagines this concept can be shattered overnight?
We had two Negroes who served my family more than twenty years. One was Lizzie. The other was Nash. Lizzie was short and plump and placid, and chocolate-brown; she “lived on,” in a room and bath over the garage, and her broad face never altered in its kindness. Nash was short and slim, older, better educated, more a leader; she was African-black; and as a laundress, she came in after church on Sundays, put the clothes down to soak in the basement tubs, gossiped with Lizzie, scolded her, raised Lizzie’s sights. On Monday, the two of them did the wash, hanging the clothes on heavy wire lines outside the kitchen door, and late in the afternoon Nash ironed. She pushed the iron with an economical push-push, thump; turn the shirt; push-push, thump. And I would come home from school to the smell of starch and the faint scorch of the iron and the push-push, thump, and would descend to the basement only to be ordered upstairs to wash my hands and change out of school clothes.
Toward the end of their lives, disaster came to both of them. Lizzie went slowly blind, through some affliction nosurgeon could correct, and Nash lost the middle three fingers of one hand when her scarf tangled in the bellows of a church organ. Nevertheless, they stayed with us until age at last put them on the sidelines. And as far as love and devotion and respect can reach, they were members of the family. Yet I often have wondered, in later years, did we children know them? Did Mother and Father know them? I do not think we did.
This relationship, loving but unknowing, has characterized the lives of thousands of Southern children on farms and in the cities too. White infants learn to feel invisible fences as they crawl, to sense unwritten boundaries as they walk. And I know this much, that Negro children are brought up to sense these boundaries too. What is so often misunderstood, outside the South, is this delicate intimacy of human beings whose lives are so intricately bound together. I have met Northerners who believe, in all apparent seriousness, that segregation in the South means literally that:segregation, the races stiffly apart, never touching. A wayfaring stranger from the New YorkHerald Tribuneimplied as much in a piece he wrote from Virginia after the school decision. His notion was that whites and Negroes did not even say “good morning” to each other. God in heaven!
In plain fact, the relationship between white and Negro in the segregated South, in the country and in the city, has been far closer, more honest, less constrained, than such relations generally have been in the integrated North. In Charleston and New Orleans, among many other cities, residential segregation does not exist, for example, as it exists in Detroit or Chicago. In the country, whites and Negroes are farm neighbors. They share the same calamities—the mud, the hail, the weevils—and they minister, in their own unfelt, unspoken way, to one another. Is the relationship that of master and servant, superior and inferior? Down deep, doubtless it is, but I often wonder if this is more of a wrong to the Negro than the affected, hearty “equality” encountered in the North. In the years I lived on a farm, I fished often with a Negro tenant, hour after hour, he paddling, I paddling, sharing the catch, and we tied up the boat and casually went our separate ways. BeforeBrownv.Boardof Education, it never occurred to me that in these peaceful hours I was inflicting upon him wounds of the psyche not likely ever to be undone. I do not believe it occurred to Robert either. This is not the way one goes fly-casting on a millpond, with Gunnar Myrdal invisibly present on the middle thwart. We fish no more. He has been busy in recent years, and I too; and when I came across the flyrod recently, I found the line rotted and the ferrules broken.
I say this relationship “has been,” and in the past perfect lies a melancholy change that disturbs many Southerners deeply. In my observation, a tendency grows in much of the white South to acknowledge and to abandon, with no more than a ritual protest, many of the patent absurdities of “Jim Crow.” Many of these practices, so deeply resented in recent years by the Negro, may have had some rational basis when they were instituted in the post-Reconstruction period. When the first trolleys came along, the few Negroes who rode them were mostly servants; others carried with them the fragrance of farm or livery stable. A Jim Crow section perhaps made sense in those days. But in my own nonage, during the 1920s, and in the years since then, few Southerners ever paused to examine the reasons for segregation on streetcars. We simply moved the little portable sign that separated white from Negro as a car filled up, and whites sat in front of the sign and Negroes sat behind it. This was the way we rode streetcars. AfterBrownv.Board of Education, when the abiding subconsciousness of the Negro turned overnight into an acute and immediate awareness of the Negro, some of these laws and customs ceased to be subject to reason anyhow; they became, confusingly, matters of strategy; they became occupied ground in an undeclared war, not to be yielded lest their yielding be regarded as needless surrender. Many aspects of our lives have gone that way since. The unwritten rules of generations are now being, in truth, unwritten; in their place, it is proposed by the apostles of instant integration that there be no rules at all. It seems so easy: “What difference does the color of a man’s skin make?” “Why not just treat them as equals?” “There is no such thing as race.”
Ah, but it is not so easy. The ingrained attitudes of a lifetimecannot be jerked out like a pair of infected molars, and new porcelain dentures put in their place. For this is what our Northern friends will not comprehend: The South, agreeable as it may be to confessing some of its sins and to bewailing its more manifest wickednesses, simply does not concede that at bottom its basic attitude is “infected” or wrong. On the contrary, the Southerner rebelliously clings to what seems to him the hard core of truth in this whole controversy:Here and now, in his own communities, in the mid-1960s, the Negro race, as a race, plainly is not equal to the white race, as a race; nor, for that matter, in the wider world beyond, by the accepted judgment of ten thousand years, has the Negro race, as a race,everbeen the cultural or intellectual equal of the white race, as a race.
This we take to be a plain statement of fact, and if we are not amazed that our Northern antagonists do not accept it as such, we are resentful that they will not even look at the proposition, or hear of it, or inquire into it. Those of us who have ventured to discuss the issues outside the South have discovered, whenever the point arises, that no one is so intolerant of truth as academicians whose profession it is to pursue it. The whole question of race has become a closed question: the earth is a cube, and there’s an end to it; Two and two are four, the sun rises in the east, and no race is inferior to any other race. Even the possibility of a conflicting hypothesis is beyond the realm of sober examination. John Hope Franklin, chairman of the history department at Brooklyn College, sees Southern attitudes on race as a “hoax.” Their wrongness is “indisputable.” To Ashley Montagu, race is a myth. A UNESCO pamphlet makes the flat, unqualified statement that “modern biological and psychological studies of the differences between races do not support the idea that one is superior to another as far as innate potentialities are concerned.” And when one inquires, why, pray, has it taken so long for the Negro’s innately equal potentialities to emerge, the answers trail off into lamentations on the conditions under which the Negro has lived. Thus, the doctrine of environment, like the principle of charity, is trotted out to conceal a multitude of sins. The fault, if there be any fault, is held to be not in men’s genes, but in their substandard housing.
All this is to anticipate some of the points this brief is intended to develop, but it is perhaps as well to know where the argument is going. The South does not wish to be cruel, or unkind, or intolerant, or bigoted; but in this area it does not wish to be unrealistic either. We do not agree that our “prejudice” in this regard is prejudice at all, in the pejorative sense in which the word is widely used. The man who wakes up ten times with a hangover, having had too much brandy the night before, is not “prejudiced” against brandy if on the eleventh occasion he passes the brandy by; he has merely learned to respect its qualities. And what others see as the dark night of our bigotry is regarded, in our own observation, as the revealing light of experience. It guides our feet. As Patrick Henry said, we know no other light to go by.
The consciousness of the Negro, I have said, is one common thread in the fabric of the South. There are others, identified by countless observers who have looked upon this tapestry, that merit some discussion also. Let me expand for a few moments on three themes: The Southerner as Conservative, the Southerner as Romantic, the Southerner as Realist.
Russell Kirk, inThe Conservative Mind, examined the philosophy that generally is identified as “Southern conservatism” and found it rooted in four impulses. Apart from the Southerner’s sensitivity to the Negro question, he said, there is (1) his half-indolent distaste for alteration, (2) his determination to preserve an agricultural society, and (3) his love for local rights. These are good starting points. It was John Randolph who laid it down, as a first principle of political activity, never needlessly to disturb a thing at rest. The pace of lifeisslower in the South, and the tendency cannot be accounted for simply in terms of a climate that often makes it “too hot to move.” We are by nature a contemplative people, and I am inclined to believe this stems from the agrarian tradition. A farm boy learns early that some things can’t be hurried—the birth of calves, the tasseling of corn, the curing of tobacco. On the farm, life is governed by patience,by the inexorable equinoctial rotation of the seasons, by factors beyond man’s control. It is, we say, “God’s will.”
And until quite recently, as the census records show, the agricultural society was our prevailing society. Moreover, the 1960 census figures on urbanization, within the context of the South, can be highly misleading. A great part of this statistically “urban” population lives in towns so small that the towns are spiritually and economically a part of the rural countryside around them. There were in 1960 only seventy metropolitan areas of more than 50,000 population in the thirteen States, and twenty of these were in Texas. In Mississippi, Jackson has edged past 100,000, but no other city in the State is even close to that mark. Outside of Fort Smith and Little Rock, Arkansas is a State of small towns. This is even truer of North Carolina; fewer than one-fourth of the State’s four and a half million residents live in the six principal cities (the largest is Charlotte, with a metropolitan population of 272,000). The others are scattered through scores of towns and villages. Georgia is statistically “urban” now, but urban attitudes are largely concentrated in Atlanta, and perhaps four other cities. Beyond Charleston, Columbia, and perhaps Greenville, South Carolina is almost as countrified today as it was in the time of Calhoun.
The slowness of life in the country, where diversions are few and the reasons for haste almost nil, tends to breed men who are highly resistant to change. They know, as well as they know anything, that change and progress are not necessarily to be equated; and for all the tub-thumping that goes on in local chambers of commerce, many a Southerner is not so sure he is in favor of progress anyhow. The Northern Neck of Virginia, for one example, has a positive antipathy to altering anything.
The conservatism that is identified with the South, as W. J. Cash remarked in his great work,The Mind of the South, runs continuously with the past. It embraces also a strong sense of community, ofplace, of local institutions and families and classes. Primogeniture vanished with the American Revolution, but its vestigial spirit may be observed at every hand; whole generations of Randolphs have been lawyers, and whole generations of Tuckers have been doctors andministers. The South is a land not only of “Juniors,” but of “IIIs” and even “IVs.”
Because of this intense spirit of local as well as State identification, an almost universal dedication to “strong local government” is apparent. There is more to this than local sentiment. If there is one aspect of Southern conservatism more pronounced than the others, it is the instinctive suspicion of all government that forever stirs uneasily in the Southern mind. Cash has described as “the ruling element” of Southern tradition, this “intense distrust of, and, indeed, downright aversion to, any actual exercise of authority beyond the barest minimum essential to the existence of the social organism.” We do notlikeauthority, especially needless, lint-picking, petty authority, and a broody pessimism constantly evokes the apprehension that government, if given half a chance, will put a fast one over on the people. In the eternal conflict of man and the state, the South stands in spirit, at least, firmly on man’s side. From the very beginning of the American Republic, our ruling doctrines have been based upon strict limitation of the powers of government. The people of Virginia came warily into the Union, in 1788, on the explicit understanding that the political powers they were lending the central government “may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression,” and the Virginians wanted it known that “every power not granted [to the central government] under the Constitution remains with them and at their will.” Ten years later, when this promise of pessimism was abundantly fulfilled in the Sedition Act, Kentucky and Virginia were beside themselves. What could be done to restrain officials who usurped power? “Bind them down,” thundered Jefferson, “with the chains of the Constitution!”
Still another aspect of Southern conservatism, deeply rooted in the agrarian tradition, is the respect for property that dwells inherently in the Southern mind to this day. George Mason, composing the Virginia Declaration of Rights, did not hesitate to use the word itself; man’s inalienable rights, he declared, embraced not only the enjoyment of life and liberty, but also the means of acquiring and possessingproperty. Part of this feeling may stem from the Englishman’stradition of his home as his castle, and part from the farmer’s conviction that, though the bottom fall out of the market on corn or pigs or cotton or tobacco, in the end his land will sustain him.
Whatever the root sources, the tendency has carried over even to the expanding cities of the urbanized South. It has not been a fear of integrated housing (this specter is a late arrival on the scene) that has made the South relatively so slow to embrace Federal grants for slum clearance, public housing, and urban renewal. Much of the public resistance, sometimes made manifest and sometimes merely sensed, is a consequence of this inbred feeling for property; it is a feeling that responsibility for housing rests with the individual first of all, and that no man’s property should be taken under eminent domain except for literal public use. When Southern cities experienced their first wave of dime-store “sit-ins,” early in 1960, the startled reaction sped at once to the rights of the store owner: This lunch counter was hisproperty. Did he not have a right to control its use?
Finally, I would suggest that the Southerner as Conservative is affected, perhaps more strongly than he himself would acknowledge, by a respect for divine power. Again, the agrarian inheritance plays a part in this legacy. The miracle of the seed, the continuum of the forest, the closeness of animal birth and life—these work a profound influence on men whose existence is tied umbilically to nature. In the loneliness of field or prairie, the smallness of man and the largeness of God strike to the heart’s core. The blessing of the harvest, the wrath of the storm, and the benediction of a slow and mizzling rain on freshly seeded land speak to the Southerner of God’s handiwork.
Perhaps by reason of these influences, organized religion, predominantly among low-church Protestant denominations, continues to play a pervasive role in Southern life. To be sure, the parent Protestantism gives off some notable sports—the Faith Healers, snake-handlers, and the Holy Rollers—and the abiding fundamentalism of the region continues to manifest itself in pockets of strict Prohibition and in contemporary versions of the Tennessee Monkey Trial. But religion crops up in other ways, in the grace before meals expected at everypublic function, in the phenomenal sales of religious books, and in the incredible proliferation of choirs, sodalities, ladies’ auxiliaries, young peoples’ groups, vestries, boards of deacons, church suppers, and building-committee meetings that characterize life from Brownsville to Virginia’s Eastern Shore. A Southerner who does not belong tosomechurch is not regarded as suspect, exactly, but he is just a little odd. And if the low-tax Southerner traditionally is penurious in rendering unto his Caesars the things that are Caesar’s, he is often sacrificial in rendering unto God the things that are God’s.
The deference that is paid to Holy Writ and to evidences of divine intervention doubtless contributes to the character of the Southerner as Romantic. Faith and superstition and myth are cousins, hardly even once removed, and whatever else it may be, the South is first of all a land of legends. This is a terrible annoyance to historians; they look upon our pretty myths, and know they are not so, and expose their fallacies in a thousand footnotes, but like the South, the legends rise again. “Few groups in the New World have had their myths subjected to such destructive analysis as those of the South have undergone in recent years,” C. Vann Woodward once observed.
Yet the myths persist. There is the Old South legend of the white-columned plantation, the hoop-skirted belles, the hot-blooded men. In the foreground, beneath the magnolia trees, the darkies are plucking banjos; in the background, rows upon rows of cotton, and off to one side, a steamboat coming around the bend. Master loves the Negroes, and the Negroes love old Master. The words and music are by Stephen Foster. This, we like to say, was how thingswerein the ante-bellum South. The exasperated scholar, emerging from his Will Books, cries out his anguish in the quarterly reviews: The recordsproveit was not so; they prove that slave ownership was limited; the records prove that Southern Negroes—as many as 100,000 or 200,000 of them—deserted to the Union cause in the War; the records probably prove there weren’t but thirty-two banjos in all of Carolina.
These labors of genealogy go utterly unrewarded. With what Cash has described as the South’s “naive capacity forunreality,” our people pat the historians on their fevered brows, thank them kindly just the same, and return untroubled to an intuitive devotion to the things that never were.
“I am an aristocrat,” cried Randolph of Roanoke. And the Southerner regards him with an affection not extended to Clay or Calhoun or Jefferson. So, we imagine, were they all—allaristocrats, men of ease, and grace, and elegance, and high birth; men who lived by a code of honor, and died beneath the dueling oaks; men who gambled with skill, and loved with passion; men who fought with a royal disdain for risk. Well, Cash and Woodward and a dozen others have had a hand in exploding this Cavalier myth. Tediously, with infinite pains, they have dredged up the pedestrian facts. The Southerner will have none of them; he knows better than to let a few facts interfere with a good story. His colonists all wear ruffled collars; his ladies, blue-veined, are pale and pure as talisman roses. “I am an aristocrat: I love freedom; I hate equality!” Who in the South could disclaim the Randolph inheritance?
It is not only the myths of the pre-Revolutionary South and the ante-bellum South that have been so sharply assailed. The Southwest’s legends of the cowboy have been worked over too. The frontiersmen of Tennessee and Kentucky, on examination, prove to be something less than godlike men. The Creole stories of New Orleans, the richly embroidered legends of the War of ’61-’65, the tales of Reconstruction hardships, even the twentieth-century chronicle of Jim Crow, have been cracked by the academic refineries—but no catalyst ever seems wholly effective. As soft as Spanish moss, and almost as insubstantial, legends subtly dominate the Southern mind.
And it is not a bad thing. Legend is born of truth, however remote and obscure the fatherhood may be, and legend has a way of siring truths stamped in ancestral molds. The hospitality of the plantation, as a universal pastime, may not bear too strong a light; but “Southern hospitality,” its descendant, is a working truth today. Not all the colonists were Cavaliers, and not all the Cavaliers, we may reasonably assume, were mannered men; but a Southern manner, bornof the Cavalier myth, persists in our own time. It is the Virginian’s “Sir,” the Texan’s “Ma’am.” To the Southerner, in Burke’s phrase, manners are always more important than law. Deference to women, principles of personal honor, the payment of a gentleman’s debts—these are operative aspects of the “Southern Way of Life.” Objections of “unreality” are put to one side.
But, may it please the court, there is the Southerner as Realist too. It is the weight that balances. Cash wrote of the tendency in New England, in the Reconstruction period, for men to turn increasingly to science and technology, and increasingly away from the customary forms of religion. “But in the South,” he said, “the movement was to the opposite quarter. For invariably when men anywhere have come upon times of great stress, when they have labored under the sense of suffering unbearable and unjust ill and there was doubt of deliverance through their own unaided effort, they have clung more closely to God and ardently reaffirmed their belief. Invariably they have tended to repudiate innovation, to cast off accretion, to return upon the more primitive faith of the past as representing a purer dispensation and a safer fortress. And if I have represented our Southerners as determined to have the mastery, yet it must be said that terror was continually threatening to seize the ascendancy, that there was in their thought a huge vein of gloomy foreboding, which trembled constantly on the verge of despair.”
The student of our affairs who does not understand this much about the South does not understand the South at all. I do not know who it was who made the observation first—Donald Davidson, or Richard Weaver, or Louis Rubin, or Arthur Schlesinger, or Vann Woodward, or some forgotten historian of eighty years ago; it does not really matter; untutored, I wrote it myself in high school—that alone among all the regions of the Union, the South has known defeat. To know defeat is to know sin; it is the ultimate blasphemy against the American theology. As a nation, we are geared to instant success: Listerine will vanish bad breath, and Bufferin will cure a headache; a touch of Wildroot will clear up one’s dandruff; any boy may aspire to be President, or to make amillion dollars, or to play center field for the Yankees. Failure—permanent, total, unqualified failure—is unknown. It is intolerable. It shatters the grand American illusion.
But the South has known failure. It has known what it is to do one’s best, to fight to exhaustion, and to lose. This huge vein of gloomy foreboding, this constant trembling on the verge of despair, was not an isolated phenomenon of the Reconstruction period. In Cash’s phrase, it is part of the collective experience of the Southern people. We have known defeat.
And not in war only. Long before the War, as the industrial North leaped to surpass the agrarian South, the thin, serrated edge of poverty began to cut across the South. The Tariff of Abominations was a beginning of it, and Calhoun and the South cried out in anger against its unfairness. The terrible institution of slavery contributed to it, but slavery was a tiger by the tail, and men could not cling to it successfully or safely let it go. There was the War, and the westward expansion, and the lines of commerce that flowed east and west but seldom north and south. The bitter years of Reconstruction resulted in a lean and grinding poverty, a poorness the more pitiful for its stoic acceptance by a proud people. And we know that poorness yet: Look at theStatistical Abstract.
Defeat. Poverty. And Woodward adds to these two grim horsemen still a third: a sense of guilt. While the rest of the Republic has basked complacently in its own virtue, the South’s preoccupation has been with guilt, not with innocence, “with the reality of evil, not with the dream of perfection.” To Woodward’s shrewd insight, I would add a few reflections of my own. This preoccupation with guilt and this reality of evil have not been burdens the South has felt it could regard honestly as entirely its own responsibility. The “peculiar institutions” of slavery and segregation have descended upon the South like pregnancy upon a woman whose lover has ridden away. The New England slavemasters had their fun, and made their dreadful profits, and sailed off to Maine; and they left the South to raise the alien child. Oh, it was a willing union. It was not rape, not seduction. The Southerners who bought the frightened blacks lived for a hundred years in agreeable sin with the European and NewEngland slavers who sold them. But when the assignation ended, the South had all the problems, and the North had all the answers. Thus the preoccupation with guilt is mixed with a resentment for hypocrisy; and when the North speaks loftily to the South, and asserts that we of the North are holier than thou, three hundred years of skepticism seek an outlet: Pray, sirs, since when?
This should be said, too, about Woodward’s “reality of evil.” Surely there have been evils in the South’s policies of racial separation. Poor as the South was, in the sixty years after Reconstruction that preceded World War II, much more could have been done, and should have been done, to encourage the Negro people closer to a cultural and economic equality. I have said it countless times, and say it willingly here: If the South had devoted one tenth of the effort toward keeping schools equal that it devoted to keeping them separate,Brownv.Board of Educationwould not have created so dramatic a crisis. Yes, there have been evils, and very real and poignant and tragic evils, in the South’s treatment of its Negro people.
But I would raise the question if the “evils” have been all on the side of the white South.Allof them? The reality that the South has had to cope with most constantly, beyond the realities of defeat and poverty, is the reality of the Southern Negro. Other races of men, caught at the bottom of the ladder, have clambered up. The identical decades that saw Negroes set free in the South saw the Irish set down in New England. “No Irish need apply.” The signs hung outside New England mills as uncompromisingly as the “white only” signs outside an Alabama men’s room. Who would have imagined in, say, 1880, that a Boston Irish Catholic would be President? But the Irish fought their own way up, on merit and ambition and hard work. Theymadea place at the table. They won acceptance, and they paid their own way.
No such reality has been visible in the South. Instead of ambition (I speak in general terms), we have witnessed indolence; instead of skill, ineptitude; instead of talent, an inability to learn. It is all very well for social theorists to say of Southern Negroes that they arecapableof this, and theirpotentialis for that, and if it were not for segregation andsecond-class citizenship and denial of opportunity, they would have achieved thus and so; but the Southerner, to paraphrase Burke, is not so much interested in determining a point of metaphysics—he is interested in maintaining tranquility. The Southerner may dwell more than others upon the past and brood more intently on the distant future, but in his daily life he has to be concerned with the here and now—in brief, he has to be concerned with reality.
The first reality he faces squarely is the one reality most often shunned: theinequalityof man. The typical Southerner, out of the observation and experience of his lifetime, would accept Burke’s thesis that universal equality may exist, but only as the equality of Christianity—moral equality, or, more precisely, equality in the ultimate judgment of God. He knows that “no other equality exists, or may be imagined to exist.” The South holds small enthusiasm for egalitarian doctrines based upon the infinite perfectibility of man. With John Adams, who would have made a splendid Southerner, we know that men are foolish; that men are not benevolent; and we regard this as a normal condition of existence. Theoretically, to be sure, men are born to equal rights; but empirically, for good or ill, these rights are incapable of equal exercise. All men are not born with equal powers and faculties, said Adams, “to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages through life.” These are realities, and the Southerner as Realist accepts them.
It is necessary, even in the most affectionate examination of the South and its case before the bar, to insert a number of qualifications and to take account of some dismaying contradictions. The South, I have said, is a distinct political, cultural, and social entity, knit together by hundreds of years of shared experiences. But it was a lively and a valid question, in the postwar decade that preceded theBrowndecision, whether this entity would survive. On every hand the “New South” was heralded; the rural tradition was dying, and bulldozers were ripping up the groves of the Nashville agrarians. The provincialisms that had distinguished the South, sometimes mocked, sometimes admired, seemed to be on the way out: Southern cooking, the Southern accent, the South’s pridein being Southern. Dixie, it was said, was rejoining the Union; soon it would rejoin the twentieth century.
The future of “Southern nationalism” still seems to me a valid question. Does it have a future? In the years that followed immediately upon theBrowndecision, make no mistake, the essential unity of the South was abruptly revived. Mr. Chief Justice Warren’s gavel echoed the guns of Sumter, and the “Southern Manifesto” in Congress rang with the sound of bugles. Every latent instinct in the mind of the traditional South rose to the fore: States’ rights, strict construction, resentment of central authority, deference to the past. The Southerner as Conservative found his principles outraged; the Southerner as Romantic saw his dream castles besieged by barbarians; and the Southerner as Realist, with a sense of dreadful foreboding, turned to the coming storm.
TheBrowndecision operated with galvanic force upon the South; but as this is written, eight years afterBrown, it is apparent that the electric shock has lost at least some of its impact. The South, in many respects, is still one; but the prodigious energies that were set in motion after World War II are beginning to reassert themselves widely. If one reads the recent Messages and Inaugural Addresses of Southern Governors, he will find segregation barely mentioned. Everywhere, the emphasis is on industrial promotion, tourist promotion, expansion of higher education. The problems that increasingly absorb Southern legislatures are problems common to such bodies across the Republic—taxation, highways, mental health, the control of air and water pollution.
In brief, I doubt that “the Negro question,” by which is meant the fear of integration and of a revolutionary Negro ascendancy, will provide a sufficient force, in itself, to keep the South welded together. The fears of 1954 are subsiding, as it becomes apparent that there will be no significant integration (not in the definitive sense in which I use the word, as a condition quite distinct from “desegregation”); and we observe that the revolution so many Northerners jubilantly anticipated inBrownis not to be a two-daycoup d’état, but a thirty-year Peloponnesian War. Beyond the borders of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, interest wanes. In Virginia, the assignment of a Negro child to a formerly whiteschool now rates a two-inch item onThe News Leader’spage 48.
What of the other common themes that tie the South together and make the region distinct? What of Southern conservatism? What of the Southern manner? These traits will endure, I believe, though a wry acknowledgment may be made of persuasive evidence to the contrary. It is perfectly true that the Conservative’s traditional animosity to centralization has a way of disappearing in the South when bills are called up in the Congress to support cotton, and peanuts, and tobacco. The Conservative opposes socialism and all its works; it is his favorite devil; but the steam plants of the TVA seem to be marvelously exempt from his anathema. It was a Georgian whose name was longest and most lustrously identified with foreign aid, and an Alabaman whose plan of Federal subsidies for hospitals bears his name, and an Oklahoman who has led the Liberal forces in behalf of a Federal program of medical care. The case for “Southern conservatism” totters before the voting records of Kefauver, Gore, Fulbright, Sparkman.
The defense would respond to this indictment by saying that all things are relative, and in an increasingly Liberal society, it is only the political center that has moved. The old Conservative instincts remain, and if they have been much corrupted, they still manifest themselves in a hundred ways not necessarily susceptible to roll-call vote. A wise and enlightened conservatism does not resist all change; it resists what it views as impulsive change, or change simply for the sake of change, and this tendency, I believe, remains more apparent in the South than in other regions. We still resist abrupt innovation, in art, music, literature, architecture, religion, public morals. Other regions, in our view, should be the first to lay the old aside. Instead of casting away all our old prejudices, as Burke once remarked cheerfully of English Conservatives, “we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed the more we cherish them.” This process of cultural husbandry, this laying by, has been too long ingrained in the South. I cannotimagine its abandonment any time soon.
The South’s identification with “conservatism” will survive, among other reasons, because it fits so perfectly into the real or imagined Southern manner. These days, liberalism is identified with the masses, and not merely identified with them but equated with them. The race issue to one side, this equation simply is not a process that comes easily to the Southern temperament. Implicit in the conservative faith is a high respect for individual variations, for class, and order, and rank; and all these are implicit in the Cavalier ideal as well. Aristocracy is wasted in a shower room; and to the extent that public institutions are reduced to the level of a public bath, the Southerner is bound to object. The graces, the little elegancies, the privileges of birth and office and position—these too are long ingrained; they persevere.
To be sure, a good deal of cynical evidence may be amassed to suggest that this Southern manner, this Southern romanticism, is as unreal as the myths on which it is based. When a gang of foul-mouthed Mississippi white men lynch a fifteen-year-old colored boy, the Southern manner seems a long way away. And when a rabble of black-jacketed young punks assemble to jeer at law-abiding Negro students, notions ofnoblesse obligemay seem just that: notions.
But if Southern conservatism may yield now and then to the temptation of the pork barrel, and Southern romanticism be attenuated by the impatience of an impatient age, the last of my four threads may prove stronger than ever: Southern realism, and with it, the tradition of Southern defeat. For decades to come, despite the phenomenal population shifts (and in many instances because of these population shifts), the South will have to live realistically with the interracial realities it alone, among all the regions of the country, has known well. “It is a condition which confronts us,” said Cleveland of the tariff, “and not a theory.” Just so with race relations in the South. The gentlest concepts of brotherhood, the broadest reaches of the law, the finest theories of integration, go through a sea change in crossing the Potomac. These comfortable Liberal attitudes emerge from the gauzy mists of illusion and encounter the blazing sun of fact:Theserural schools,thesecountry people,thesechildren, white and black,intheseparticular towns and villages. The Negro is not moving in any substantial numbers to the remote rural counties of the North; he is moving predominantly to the cities, where everything works in his favor during a period of transition: job opportunities, the melting-pot tradition, the impersonal anonymity that protects him in a larval time. Yet millions of Negroes remain back home in the South, salt-and-peppered across the rural countryside, and they and their problems and aspirations are daily, personal realities to the Southerner. He knows he must cope with them somehow.
And the Southerner knows more than this. He knows, in the marrow of his bones, that new defeats are entirely probable. He takes this much profit from the lessons of the past, that he learns something for the future. Desegregation, as a legal principle, is accepted inwardly by many of the Southerners who cry out most vehemently against it. Something of the spirit has been surrendered. One more defeat has been experienced, and we know it. In the first few years afterBrown, we perceived in this judicial Gettysburg nothing finally decisive. The talk then was of sending Governors to jail, or of challenging the Justice Department to arrest whole legislatures. Let them call out the troops! Well, Mr. Eisenhower did call out the troops; and our Governors had second thoughts about going to jail, and not even the Louisiana legislature could devise a way to get itself arrested. Little by little, the hopeless conviction has begun to seep in that it has happened again, that the courts reallymeanthis, that so far as laws and litigation are concerned, nothing remains but the long road to Appomattox. Proud Virginia gazed upon the voluntary desegregation of her schools with bitter distaste, but in the end we were like Byron’s heroine who “vowing she would ne’er consent, consented.” Defeat.
And yet; and yet. The fabric of the South is snagged with a beggar’s lice of contradictions. The jesting exhortation that the South will rise again has a hard kernel of truth at the bottom. It is precisely because the South has experienced defeat, again and again, in Nullification, in the Missouri compromise, in the War, in Reconstruction, in the postwar generations, time and again, in contradiction to the success of our neighboring regions, that defeat has become an oldfriend. We meet it, and survive; we rise again. And paradoxically, the prospect of defeat in lunch counters, waiting rooms, public schools, places of assembly, is no harbinger of ultimate despair; the prospect is an old friend, the face of defeat, and in the South it is a symbol not of disintegration but of unity. Misery loves company. It does, indeed; oh, it does indeed! And we are our own best company.
I speak with a mild cynicism, and do not mean to: It floats to the surface. The mystical entity that is the South is held together, in a lovely, helpless, hapless bond, by its consciousness of the Negro, by its abiding conservatism, by its dedication to romanticism, and by its inexorable sense of realities, and whenever one of these threads wears thin, another is redoubled and twice twined together to knit the fabric whole. The defeated South is never wholly defeated; the romantic South cannot be wholly disillusioned; the conservative South can flirt with liberalism and remain as chastely conservative as before; and to the twin inevitabilities of death and taxes we philosophically add a third: the Negro,in saecula saeculorum, world without end. Amen.
Let me move on, may it please the court, with fewer digressions and random interpolations, to the South’s case against “integration.” The quotation marks are intended to suggest that the noun has a distinctive meaning. This is as good a place as any for a definition of terms.
Increasingly, in the Southern lexicon, words that are used interchangeably elsewhere in the country have come to take on a special and well-understood meaning. By “segregation,” for example, we now mean the body of practices enforced by State or local law. Prior toBrown, our schools were legally segregated. As this is written (though probably not for long), places of assembly, athletic contests, certain public records, also are segregated by law in several States. As these laws and institutions one by one are bowled over by court decree, a process ofdesegregationsets in. It is an abominable word, by any philological standpoint, as madly illogical as “irregardless” or “inflammable,” but a new spirit of lexicographyis abroad in the land: Whatever is, is right. Our schools, save in Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, are entering upon desegregation.
By racialseparation, we mean something much less precise. In almost every aspect of Southern life, the races are separate, though not necessarily (or even very often) are they segregated. Day in and day out, white and Negro inevitably are thrown closely together in the South—shopping in stores, working in factories, riding in elevators and buses, standing in queues at banks or liquor stores or post offices—but this is the normal condition of existence. I have termed it an intimate remoteness. It is a condition that goes beyond the ordinary impersonal encapsulation of strangers; it is a subconscious recognition that ours are separate races, separate worlds. This does not imply that there is no communication. On the contrary, the Southern white and the Southern Negro are gregarious animals; thrown temporarily together, they will make agreeable conversation: “Think this rain will ever stop?” “It suttinly is po’in, it is that.” This is the relationship that conditions all human intercourse in the South. A murder has been committed; the police reporter’s first question, before he thinks of who or where or why or when, is simply “white or colored?” A candidate qualifies for public office: Is he white or colored? News values start from this point. (Even as I write this paragraph, the telephone rings, and it is an informant at the State penitentiary calling to tell me that clemency has been granted a prisoner in death row. I am not familiar with the case. “White boy or colored boy?” I ask. Doubtless it makes no difference; they are equally fallen sparrows, but the question is automatic, instinctive, inescapable. It is a consequence of racial separation, and this is a part of the world we live in.)
Finally, by way of definition,integrationhas come to mean a willing suspension, or abolition, of the state of mind I attempt to convey byseparation. So defined, integration is almost nonexistent in the South. The term embraces the complete and unrestrained intermingling of races, on terms of social equality, without constraint of any sort; it is color-blindness, voluntarily accepted; it is more than mere joint membership on civic committees or school boards. And it isnot something that can be achieved by writ of mandamus. A court can impose a legal condition of desegregation, and thus put an end to segregation; but a court cannot enjoin separation and thus achieve integration. The arm of the law, long as it is, cannot reach into certain areas of the human spirit.
It would be pointless, at this late stage, to prepare even a hypothetical brief directed wholly against “desegregation.” The desegregation of public institutions is afait accompli. True, the process is far from complete; in the Deep South, in this late spring of 1962, the process has not even begun—and I would not hazard a guess when it will begin, or be complete. No time soon. But my thesis here is primarily the South’s abhorrence of integration, and especially the South’s continuing stubborn resistance to a widespread desegregation of the public schools that fearfully would result in integration of the races. Why is the South resisting race-mixture in its public schools?
I am going to suggest three primary reasons. Other writers about the South might put them down as five or ten or fifteen reasons, but in the end perhaps we would cover the same points. Mine are, first, the arguments of anthropology; second, the arguments of practicality; and third, the arguments for gradualism.