Part I_The Southern Case for School Segregation

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been

placed at the end of the book.

Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.

_James Jackson Kilpatrick_

THE SOUTHERN

CASE FOR SCHOOL

SEGREGATION

_The Crowell-Collier Press_

First Crowell-Collier Press Edition 1962

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-17492

Hecho en los E.E.U.U.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

INTRODUCTION 7

Part I

THE EVIDENCE 13

Part II

THE LAW 105

Part III

PRAYER OF THE PETITIONER 183

APPENDIX 197

Introduction

_May it please the court_:

When this book was conceived, it was intended to be titled “U.S.

v. the South: A Brief for the Defense,” but it seemed a cumbersome

title and the finished work is not, of course, a brief for the South

in any lawyer’s sense of the word. It is no more than an extended

personal essay, presented in this form because the relationship that

exists between the rest of the country and the South, in the area of

race relations, often has the aspect of an adversary proceeding. We

of the South see ourselves on the defensive, and we frequently find

ourselves, as lawyers do, responding in terms of the law and the

evidence.

It is an unpleasant position for the South, which regards itself as

very much a part of the American Republic, and it is an uncomfortable

position also: We find ourselves defending certain actions and

attitudes that to much of the country, and to much of the world,

appear indefensible; some times we are unsure just what it is we are

defending, or why we are defending it. We would like to think more

upon these questions, but in this conflict there seldom seems to

be time for thought or for understanding on either side. When one

side is crying “bigot!” and the other is yelling “hypocrite!,” an

invitation to sit down and reason together is not likely to draw the

most cordial response.

This brief for the South, as any brief must be, necessarily is a

partisan pleading. My thought is to present the South’s case (with a

few digressions, irrelevancies, reminiscences, obscurities, and mean

digs thrown in), but I hope to present it fairly, and without those

overtones of shrill partisanship that drown out the voice of reason

altogether. And it seems to me, if the suggestion may be advanced

with due modesty, that a Virginia Conservative is perhaps in an

unusually advantageous position to write such a brief. By tradition,

inheritance, geography, and every intangible of the spirit, Virginia

is part of the South. The Old Dominion, indeed, is much closer to

the “Old South” than, say, North Carolina or Florida. Richmond was

for four years the capital of a _de facto_ nation, the Confederate

States of America; to this day, our children play soldier in the

trenches and romp happily on the breastworks left from the bloody

conflict in which the CSA were vanquished. The Confederacy, the

War, the legacy of Lee--these play a role in Virginia’s life that

continues to mystify, to entrance, sometimes to repel the visitor to

the State. Virginia’s “Southernness” reaches to the bone and marrow

of this metaphysical concept; and if Virginia perhaps has exhibited

more of the better and gentler aspects of the South, and fewer of the

meaner and more violent aspects, we nevertheless have shared the best

and the worst with our sister States. On questions of race relations,

of school segregation, of a _modus vivendi_ tolerable to black and

white alike, Virginia’s views have been predominantly the South’s

views.

Yet it is evident, as this is written, that the immediate battle

over school segregation has passed Virginia by. The Old Dominion no

longer struggles in the arena; we watch from the grandstand now. The

desegregation of our public schools has been accepted in principle;

a State Pupil Placement Board voluntarily has assigned hundreds of

Negro children to schools that formerly were white schools. In our

largest cities, most department-store dining facilities, in theory

at least, serve any customer who asks to be served. Segregation has

ended in transportation facilities, in libraries, in parks, in most

places of public assembly. Negroes register and vote freely. It is

true of Virginia, I believe, that the more things change, the more

they stay the same; down deep, very little has changed. But by and

large, Virginia has been eliminated from the fight. I wrote one book

about the South a few years ago, when Virginia was still in the thick

of it, and I was on horse and the pen was a lance. The sidelines

offer a better perspective.

A word of definition is in order. When I speak in this essay of “the

South,” what I mean is the white South, and more narrowly still,

I mean the white adults of thirteen States who continue to share,

in general, an attitude on race relations that has descended from

attitudes of the “Old South.” There is, of course, a Negro South,

but it is mysterious and incomprehensible to most white men. And

there is a Liberal South, comprising a large number of white persons

who oppose racial segregation in principle if they seldom oppose it

in daily practice. These groups have their own able and articulate

spokesmen; they have filed their own briefs by the dozen. And it is

simply to avoid interminable qualifications--“most white Southerners

feel,” or “the large preponderance of opinion among white adults in

thirteen Southern States holds”--that I here define “the South” for

my own immediate purposes.

With those preliminary remarks, let me turn, if I may, by slow

degrees, to argument on the case at bar.

JAMES JACKSON KILPATRICK

Richmond

May 1962

Part I

The Evidence

At the time of the Supreme Court’s opinion in _Brown_ v. _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 gloria_

Monday. 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

Louisville _Courier-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. They will 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 SOUTHERN STATES, 1900-1960

_Per cent Total Pop._ _Per cent_ _Number_

_State_ _1900_ _1920_ _1940_ _1960_ _1960_

----------------------------------------------------------------

Alabama 45.2 38.4 34.7 30.0 980,271

Arkansas 28.0 27.0 24.7 21.8 388,787

Florida 43.7 34.0 27.1 17.8 880,186

Georgia 46.7 41.7 34.7 28.5 1,122,596

Kentucky 13.3 9.8 7.5 7.1 215,949

Louisiana 47.1 38.9 35.9 31.9 1,039,207

Mississippi 58.5 52.2 49.2 42.0 915,743

North Carolina 33.0 29.8 27.5 24.5 1,116,021

Oklahoma 7.0 7.4 7.2 6.6 153,084

South Carolina 58.4 51.4 42.8 34.8 829,291

Tennessee 23.8 19.3 17.4 16.5 586,876

Texas 20.4 15.9 14.4 12.4 1,187,125

Virginia 35.6 29.9 24.7 20.6 816,258

The U.S.A. 11.6 9.8 9.8 10.5 18,871,831

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 comprised 11.6 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 POPULATION

THIRTEEN SOUTHERN STATES, 1900-1960.

_State_ _Urban 1960_ _Rural 1960_ _Total 1960_

Alabama 1,791,721 1,475,019 3,266,740

Arkansas 765,303 1,020,969 1,786,212

Florida 3,661,383 1,290,177 4,951,560

Georgia 2,180,236 1,762,880 3,943,116

Kentucky 1,353,215 1,684,941 3,038,156

Louisiana 2,060,606 1,196,416 3,257,022

Mississippi 820,805 1,357,336 2,178,141

North Carolina 1,801,921 2,754,234 4,556,155

Oklahoma 1,464,786 863,498 2,328,284

South Carolina 981,386 1,401,208 2,382,594

Tennessee 1,864,828 1,702,261 3,567,089

Texas 7,187,470 2,392,207 9,579,677

Virginia 2,204,913 1,762,036 3,966,949

_Per cent Rural_

_State_ _1900_ _1920_ _1940_ _1960_

Alabama 89.0 78.3 65.2 45.2

Arkansas 91.5 83.4 77.2 57.1

Florida 79.7 63.5 44.9 26.0

Georgia 84.4 74.9 65.6 44.7

Kentucky 78.2 73.8 70.2 55.4

Louisiana 74.5 65.1 58.5 36.7

Mississippi 92.3 86.6 80.2 62.3

North Carolina 91.1 80.8 72.7 60.4

Oklahoma 92.6 73.5 62.4 37.0

South Carolina 87.2 82.5 75.5 58.8

Tennessee 86.5 73.9 64.8 47.7

Texas 82.9 67.6 54.6 24.9

Virginia 81.7 70.8 64.7 44.4

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 to

levy 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, the sophistication 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 short _e_ to a short _i_. 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 gem that 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 cool _rosé_, 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 in _the_ South; 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 running through 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.

III

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 with _Brown_ v. _Board of Education_

on a May afternoon in 1954. Neither can he begin with _Plessy_ v.

_Ferguson_ in 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!--is becoming 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 aside _The 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 the _New 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 Negroes _were_; we _were_.

They had their lives; we had ours. There were certain things one

did: A proper white 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 no surgeon 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 York _Herald Tribune_ implied 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. Before _Brown_ v. _Board

of 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. After _Brown_ v. _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 lifetime

cannot 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, _ever_ been 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, in _The 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 life _is_ slower 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, of _place_, 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 and ministers. 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 not _like_ authority, 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 possessing _property_. Part of this feeling may stem from the

Englishman’s tradition 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 his _property_. 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 every public 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 to _some_ church 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 things _were_ in the

ante-bellum South. The exasperated scholar, emerging from his Will

Books, cries out his anguish in the quarterly reviews: The records

_prove_ it 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 for unreality,” 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--_all_ aristocrats, 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,

born of 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 a million 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 the _Statistical 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 New England

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, _Brown_ v. _Board of Education_ would 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. _All_ of 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. They

_made_ a 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 are _capable_ of this, and their _potential_ is for that, and

if it were not for segregation and second-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: the _inequality_ of 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 the _Brown_ decision, 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 pride in 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 the _Brown_ decision, 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.

The _Brown_ decision operated with galvanic force upon the South;

but as this is written, eight years after _Brown_, 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 in _Brown_ is not to be a two-day

_coup 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 white school

now rates a two-inch item on _The News Leader’s_ page 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 cannot

imagine 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 of _noblesse oblige_ may 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: _These_ rural schools, _these_

country people, _these_ children, white and black, in _these_

particular 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

after _Brown_, 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 really _mean_

this, 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 old friend. 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 to _Brown_, 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 of _desegregation_ sets in. It is an

abominable word, by any philological standpoint, as madly illogical

as “irregardless” or “inflammable,” but a new spirit of lexicography

is abroad in the land: Whatever is, is right. Our schools, save

in Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, are entering upon

desegregation.

By racial _separation_, 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, _integration_ has come to mean a

willing suspension, or abolition, of the state of mind I attempt to

convey by _separation_. 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 is not 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 a _fait 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.

On the first point: The South earnestly submits that over a period

of thousands of years, the Negro race, as a race, has failed to

contribute significantly to the higher and nobler achievements of

civilization as the West defines that term. This may be a consequence

of innate psychic factors. Again, it may not be, but because

contemporary evidence suggests little racial improvement, the South

prefers to cling to the characteristics of the white race, as best it

can, and to protect those characteristics, as best it can, from what

is sincerely regarded as the potentially degrading influence of Negro

characteristics.

Now, that is a “racist” thesis, and if one would listen to no more

than the horrified gasps of the Liberal left, the very statement

is a dreadful example of racism at its worst. Hitlerism! Fascism!

Kluxism! White supremacy! To the doctrinaire theologians of a Liberal

socio-anthropology, the thesis is blasphemy, and it is mortal sin

even to consider it. A Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, in

May 1957, denounced such heresy in unequivocal terms: “The _fact_

is, _of course_, that the Negro possesses the same capacities and

potentialities as does the white.”

But if this is a _fact_, how did it get to be a fact? How “of

course”? Is the question of innate aptitudes and characteristics no

more arguable than the sum of two plus two? Is the flat statement

that “the Negro possesses the same capacities and potentialities as

the white” to be regarded on a level with “Washington was the first

President,” or “the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle

is equal to the sum of the square of its other two sides”? If this

“fact” has in truth been so positively established, discussion of the

subject is wholly pointless; nothing remains to be said, and those

readers whose minds are closed to reconsideration will flee from

these pages and soothe their wounded sensibilities with the balm of

Ashley Montagu’s hairless prose.

But those who are agreeable to pursuing truth, _wherever the

quest may lead them_, will stick around; they will keep their

minds open; they will acknowledge at least an outside possibility

that the disciples of Boas and Klineberg could be in error; they

will formulate questions, and they will insist upon honest and

straightforward answers to them. And if intellectually satisfying

answers to their questions cannot be adduced, they will honestly

acknowledge at the end: _The question is still open._

Now, that is all the defense can ask. Few Southerners have made

any serious attempt to read up on anthropology or to acquaint

themselves with the results of intelligence tests. Their judgments

and attitudes--or if you please, their prejudices--are based largely

upon personal observation, instinct, upbringing, the cumulative

experiences of a lifetime, stored up day by day and hour by hour.

An advocate for the South does not wish to be dogmatic. He does not

insist that the South has all the right answers. He does not say,

“the _fact_ is, _of course_.” But the South does suggest that it

raises some of the right questions.

Even to raise the right questions has become an almost impossible

undertaking in today’s emotionally charged atmosphere. For the

past twenty years at least (I write in 1962), a systematic and

well-financed campaign has been under way to obliterate the entire

concept of race. This calculated perversion of honest scholarship has

drawn a rebuke from Dr. Carleton S. Coon, one of the world’s foremost

anthropologists, who himself believes that classification by race “is

a nuisance.” In _The Story of Man_, Coon departs from his masterly

narrative long enough to register a serious protest against the

activities “of the academic debunkers and soft-pedalers who operate

inside anthropology itself.”

“Basing their ideas on the concept of the brotherhood of man,”

Coon comments sharply, “certain writers, who are mostly social

anthropologists, consider it immoral to study race, and produce book

after book deploring it as a ‘myth.’ Their argument is that because

the study of race once gave ammunition to racial fascists, who

misused it, we should pretend that races do not exist. Their prudery

about race is equaled only by their horror of Victorian prudery about

sex. These writers are not physical anthropologists, but the public

does not know the difference.”

Typical of the doctrinaire Liberals who shrink from the very notion

of race are the scientists who make up the Group for the Advancement

of Psychiatry. In their disdainful view, race is no more than a

“myth.” In particular, the Group denounces the “myths which have

grown up about the Negro.” These “myths,” it is said, serve merely

to rationalize and to justify the white man’s disparaging attitudes,

because he cannot clearly recognize or understand the real source of

his prejudice. We should realize, says the Group, that such “myth

formation” psychologically seeks to protect individual and group

security; and if we realize that, we can better understand why the

“myths of prejudice” are so resistive to logic: The powerful need

for safety, which “the myth” is created to insure, explains why it

is clung to despite facts and logic to the contrary. Moreover, the

damaging consequences of “racial myths” are misconstrued as evidence

to support them.

Ashley Montagu has suggested, in _Human Heredity_, that the very

word _race_ be struck from the English language. There is, he says,

“sound sense in the argument that the long-standing abuse of the

meaning of a word constitutes the best reason for its total exclusion

from common usage.” Unsound words make for unsound ideas, and the

unsound ideas tend to result in unsound action: “The word ‘race’

is a horrid example.” To Dr. Montagu, race is a notion, a myth, a

fallacy, an error. In the sense that the term suggests distinguishing

characteristics on the part of a particular people, “the word is

beyond rescue and it had better be dropped altogether.” He suggests

that the term “ethnic group” be employed instead, and the most he

will concede is that “slight differences may exist between some

ethnic groups in the frequencies of certain genes underlying mental

capacity.” This is possible, says Dr. Montagu, “but in spite of all

attempts, no one has, in fact, ever demonstrated that they do.”

Otto Klineberg, who cannot bring himself to write the words _race_

or _racial_ without putting them in quotation marks, says the same

thing: “In all probability, inherent intellectual differences between

Negroes and whites do not exist.” Other writers--Kenneth Clark

and Ruth Benedict, for example--are impatient with such academic

impedimenta as “probabilities.” More in anger than in sorrow, they

denounce the bigoted Southerner, who dares to suggest that in terms

of his capacity to adjust fully to Western values, the Negro may be

innately inferior. The very idea! And any recourse by the Southerner

to history, as Miss Benedict puts it, is mere “special pleading.” All

good historians know of the greatness of Negro achievements. To doubt

this truth is to substitute for historical processes “an unashamed

racial megalomania.” This is a “travesty of fact.”

In 1960, a group of distinguished anthropologists, psychologists, and

social scientists, rebelling against the obstinate attitudes of the

Benedict-Montagu school, launched a small publication in Edinburgh,

_The Mankind Quarterly_. They ventured to suggest that some of these

questions of “race” are not altogether closed; they commented that

it was a pity to see responsible scientists so influenced by emotion

and political bias that they had closed their minds to objective

inquiry; and the editors proposed to publish occasional monographs

exploring aspects of these issues that were banned from exploration

elsewhere. _Mankind Quarterly_ scarcely had raised its mild voice

before shrill cries from the Liberal left united in a ritual chorus

of denunciation. Late in 1961, the chief editor, Dr. R. Gayre of

Gayre, replied to his assailants in an editorial that sums up so much

of the Southern view on these matters that I should like to quote

from it at some length. He began by expressing regret that persons

who do not slavishly subscribe to egalitarian dogmas should be

denounced automatically as “racialists” and their teachings condemned

as “racism.” He continued:

The fear of being so abused has for the last one or two decades

been sufficient to silence many, if not most, scholars and prevent

them from writing what they believed and thought to be the facts in

connection with anthropological subjects. They have, in the main,

confined themselves to negative action, such as protesting when the

notorious UNESCO pamphlet on race was produced, and being happy

to gain, as a result, some modification of the more extreme and

nonsensical assertions of the a-racist egalitarians.

That there has been such a clearly marked reactionary influence,

if not domination, over our studies, is so patently obvious that

it hardly needs to be stressed. Even those who have not subscribed

to any form of political doctrine have felt it safer to make

interpretations of the facts of race and heredity in such terms

that they can bear a clearly egalitarian interpretation.... The

anxiety which is shown to suppress publications and expositions

which do not support egalitarianism is entirely consistent with

this political direction of, and domination over, science....

[W]e wish to state categorically what are the views of the

editors on the matter of racial equality. While rejecting racial

egalitarianism as having no warranty in honest scientific

expositions and investigations, we do not, on the other hand,

subscribe to doctrines of racial _superiority_ or _inferiority_.

We believe that just as all individuals within a particular stock

are different, so is one racial group in relation to another.

In respect of some characters, various stocks will be superior

to others; and in other cases inferior; but in many cases no

perceptible differences may be apparent. While environment, both

physical and social, may influence these characters, we believe

that heredity is by far the most important single factor, and

the current fashion to eschew the significance of heredity is

a definite disservice to the understanding of what makes for

differences in the various characters which distinguish one group

from another.

Furthermore, we do not presume to judge what is desirably superior

or not. We think that within the ambit of the type of civilizations

erected by the White-Brown stocks or the Yellow races, the

Black, which has shown no natural predilection to that form of

organization, will be at a disadvantage in any competition--and

is _in that sense_ inferior. After all, a _priori_ considerations

alone would lead to this conclusion, and if modern science thinks

this is not the case, it has yet to show why and how the Melanoids

have remained technologically backward compared to both the

Mongoloids and the Caucasoids. For the Egyptian civilization,

which was basically Caucasoid (Mediterranean, Atlantic, Nordic,

and Armenoid strains being the basis of that nationality), abutted

on the Negroid world of Africa, and its ideas were there to be

accepted and copied, so that urban technological civilizations

could have been erected in Africa, if that way of life had appealed

to the inherent Negroid genius and temperament. It is only within

this last millennium that certain ideas generated in Egypt four

millennia ago began to reach West Africa--long after the Nile

Valley civilization had decayed and disappeared.

H. L. Mencken once remarked that the most costly of all follies,

which he viewed as the chief occupation of mankind, is to believe

passionately in the palpably not true. The aphorism applies with

special force to the Negrophile social anthropologists who are so

passionately determined to propound that which is palpably not true,

or at least palpably not demonstrable, that in their zeal of advocacy

they lose all sense of proportion. Thus, in their raptures, the most

primitive mud-hut cultures of the Congo must be praised for their

“sophistication” and “complexity.” Crude works of art tend to be

equated with the sculpture of Periclean Athens. In the rhythmic thump

of an African tom-tom, they find black Beethovens at work. Miss

Benedict, in _Race: Science and Politics_, is fairly transported.

Her technicolor illusions of African history produce “great kingdoms

of wealth and splendor ... great political leaders ... men of wealth

... the spread of higher culture.” In seventeenth-century Nigeria,

she sees “prized cultural achievements,” and of these African tribes

she girlishly cries that “their elaborate and ceremonious political

organization, the pomp of their courts, the activity of their

far-flung economic life, with its great market centers and tribute

collected over great areas, their legal systems with formal trial of

the accused, with witnesses and with prosecutors--all these excite

the admiration of any student.”

Well, one is reminded of Mark Twain’s comment that there is something

fascinating about science: “One gets such wholesale returns of

conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” Let it be

granted that there is much of archeological and anthropological

interest to be found in the obscure and sketchy “histories” of

various African kingdoms and empires. One might wish, abstractly,

to know more of the Ghana Empire, the Almoravid Empire, the Mali

Empire, the Songhai Empire; the teachers and the curriculum and the

libraries of the Universities of Timbuktu and Sakoré might usefully

be contrasted with those of the Universities of Paris and Bologna; we

should like standard reference works that offered full and scholarly

expositions of the kingdom Miss Benedict terms the “culmination” of

African civilization, the “great empire of Bornu.” It is an empire

not even mentioned by Herskovits in _The Myth of the Negro Past_ and

barely touched upon by J. D. DeGraft Johnson and W. E. B. DuBois in

their works on African civilization. (DuBois does say that Bornu, a

Northern Nigerian kingdom, had in the tenth century a civilization

that “would appear to compare favorably with that of European

monarchs of that day.” It is an assessment that leaves very little

to the Carolingians, and it is the sort of tossed-off grandiloquence

of the Negrophile propagandist that leaves the ordinary student more

mystified than informed.)

In terms of enduring values--the kind of values respected wherever

scholars gather, in the East no less than in the West--in terms of

values that last, and mean something, and excite universal admiration

and respect, what has man gained from the history of the Negro race?

The answer, alas, “virtually nothing.” From the dawn of civilization

to the middle of the twentieth century, the Negro race, as a race,

has contributed no more than a few grains of sand to the enduring

monuments of mankind.

One finds no pleasure in rendering such a judgment; one finds no

more than the cold comfort of truth, and even that chilly companion

is made the less attractive by the disdain in which this unappealing

truth is held. Yet the serious students of the South’s position, like

the serious pathologist examining an especially distasteful object,

ought not to be deterred. If the South is wrong in this appraisal

of the contributions of the Negro race (or “culture,” or “ethnic

group”), then evidence of this wrongness should be readily attainable

in standard works of reference; such evidence should be convincingly

documented, objective in its nature, susceptible of proof by accepted

tests of scholarship.

Well, then, where is this contrary evidence? What library houses the

works of a Nubian Thucydides? Who was the Senegalese Cicero? One

plows in vain through the works of a score of apologists. In the

volumes of the most sympathetic Negrophile writers, one finds little

but conjecture, surmise, vague assertions that thus and so “must

have been true.” What are the contributions of the Negro culture

to enduring art, or music, or literature, or architecture? To law,

jurisprudence, government? To science, invention, mathematics,

philosophy? Here was a race, if the horrid word may be used (or a

culture or subculture or ethnic group), that lived for thousands of

years in effective possession of one of the richest continents on

earth. Here were a people who lived by the sea, and never conceived

the sail; who dwelled in the midst of fantastic mineral deposits,

and contrived no more than the crudest smelting of iron and copper.

The Negro developed no written language, not even the poorest

hieroglyphics; no poetry; no numerals; not even a calendar that has

survived. Even so skilled a defender as Toynbee has to conclude,

after a desperate flurry of coughs and sighs, that the Black Race is

the only one of the primary races “which has not made a creative

contribution to any one of our twenty-one civilizations.” Breasted,

who wrote in a more objective time, before fashions of social

ideology tended to warp critical judgment, says bluntly that “the

Negro peoples of Africa were without any influence on the development

of early civilization.”

Franz Boas, the father of “modern” social anthropology, posed the

South’s question in this fashion in _The Mind of Primitive Man_:

“Have not most races had the same chances for development? Why, then,

did the white race alone develop a civilization which is sweeping the

whole world, and compared with which all other civilizations appear

as feeble beginnings cut short in early childhood, or arrested and

petrified at an early stage of development? Is it not, to say the

least, probable that the race which attained the highest stage of

civilization was the most gifted one, and that those races which have

remained at the bottom of the scale were not capable of rising to

higher levels?”

Boas’ answer to his own rhetorical question, needless to say, is

that most races have not had the same chances for development, that

“the claim that achievement and aptitude go hand in hand is not

convincing,” and that “the earlier rise of civilization in the old

world ... is satisfactorily explained as due to chance.” He finds

nothing to persuade him that “one race is more highly gifted than

another,” and besides, he insists, Western critics ought not to judge

other races by their own standards. For example, an “impression”

exists that primitive men, and the less educated of our own race,

have in common a lack of control of emotions; it is thought that they

give way more readily to an impulse than civilized man and the highly

educated. This impression, says Boas, is entirely unjustified. Too

often the traveler or student measures fickleness by the importance

he himself attributes to the actions or purposes in which primitive

men do not persevere, and he weighs the impulse for outbursts of

passion by his own standard. The white traveler, to whom time is

valuable, is impatient and irritated at Negro porters, to whom time

means nothing. The proper way to appraise the Negro, Boas tells

us, is to consider his behavior in undertakings which he considers

important from his own standpoint. So considered, the differences in

attitude of civilized man and of primitive man tend to disappear.

This line of defense has a certain plausibility and merit; divorced

from reality, it provides a fine topic for a sophomore’s term paper.

But the American South is an inheritor of Western civilization; the

South’s values are the values of the West, and it understandably must

be concerned with the capacity of the Negro people for contributing

to these values. The Ubangi’s mud huts may be the most artistic

mud huts ever set out in the sun to bake; by tribal esthetics of

the African bush, the Ashanti may be vastly more cultured than the

Yorubas, and the Balubi superior to the Mogwandi. Or vice versa.

These critical judgments are interesting. They are irrelevant, too.

The question that never seems to be convincingly answered is _why_

the Negro race, in Toynbee’s phrase, is the only race that has failed

to make a creative contribution to civilization. What can account

for the singular failure of the Negro people, alone among the major

divisions of man, to enter the mainstream of political, cultural, and

economic history?

The first rationalization that is given is that the physical

conditions of sub-Saharan Africa imposed such fearful disadvantages

that the development of a “civilization” was patently impossible.

The argument simply will not hold up. As many geographers and

anthropologists have observed (in a day before such observations were

reviewed as blasphemy), parts of Africa were perhaps “uninhabitable,”

but other parts were not. In any event, the jungles of the Congo

imposed no obstacles to Negroid peoples greater than those faced by

the Mayans in the jungles of Chiapas.

And consider the Mayans: They carved out of the rain forests of

Yucatán--out of an area Van Hagen has termed “the least likely place

one would choose for developing a culture”--a civilization that

can be identified, and studied, and photographed to this day. They

raised great temple cities: Tikal, Uaxactun, Calakmul. They built

roads and reservoirs. They developed complex ideographic writing, a

twenty-day lunar calendar, a code of laws for crime and punishment,

a flourishing industry in dyeing and weaving. To compare the crude

phallic fetishism of Negroid tribes with the highly developed art of

the Mayan and the Incan civilizations is to engage in a travesty upon

critical judgment.

It is complained of the early Negroes that they were “isolated,” that

no maritime access was possible to the African interior, hence that

they had no opportunity for contact with the cultures of Europe and

the Mediterranean. This is a specious argument, too. Every standard

history of Africa makes plain, implicitly or explicitly, that early

Negroes did indeed have contact with the outer world. Phoenicians,

Arabs, Libyans, Hamites all found their way across Africa. Romans

came, and Persians, Chinese, Turks, Berbers, Indians, Portuguese.

Nothing aroused the Negro from his primitive sleep. He did not adapt.

He did not copy. He did not profit.

In 1525, when Pizarro invaded Peru, he found a magnificent Incan

civilization flourishing in the almost impenetrable fastness of the

Andes. Here, indeed, was isolation from the currents of European

thought! No maritime access here! Yet the Incas had built temples and

labyrinths and massive palaces of stone. The palace at Cuzco offered

fountains, heated pools, intricate goldwork, and polished stones.

There were public granaries, a three-hundred-mile road, a decimal

system, an advanced astronomy. European explorers who sought trade in

Africa found nothing there to compare with this. As Nathaniel Weyl

has written, the decisive fact is that centuries of intermittent

contact with the growing culture and technology of the West “did not

serve to stir the Negroes from their millennial torpor, to quicken

their minds and prod their curiosity, to induce them at least to

borrow if not to invent.”

Franz Boas has sought earnestly to explain all this away. So has

Basil Davidson in _Lost Cities of Africa_. So has W. E. B. DuBois

in _The World and Africa_. So has Johnson in _African Glory_. But

when it comes down to evidence acceptable to rational appraisal,

their romantic conjectures fall pitifully short of the minimum

requirements of objective scholarship. It is possible to accept

Boas’ judgment that some African wood carvers and potters have

produced work “original in form, and executed with great care.”

Coon’s slightly more enthusiastic appraisal is that Africa’s Negro

tribes “developed social systems of considerable complexity and a

high art, the quality of which the white world is just beginning

to appreciate.” There is merit in a thoughtful appraisal by the

Oxford anthropologist, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, of the complex system

of witchcraft, oracles, and magic that he found among the Azande

tribe of Central Africa. _Granted certain postulates_, he says,

inferences and actions based upon a system of witchcraft are sound.

But is Western civilization really prepared to “grant the certain

postulates” of witchcraft in order to find a rationale for praising

African culture? No. Let it be conceded that certain African arts and

crafts reached a tolerably interesting stage of development. Modern

dance and contemporary jazz doubtless owe much to the instinctive

rhythms of ancient tribal rites. But south of the Sahara there was

no literate civilization, no intellects at work to comprehend and

solve the abstract problems; and Western Europe was not built by

basket-weaving.

Let us move along. The story is told of a conversation between

Boswell and Dr. Johnson, in which Boswell mentioned Bishop Berkeley’s

theory of the nonexistence of matter. Boswell said he was satisfied

the theory was not true, but he confessed he was unable to refute it.

Whereupon Dr. Johnson kicked a large stone until his foot rebounded

from it. “I refute it _thus_,” he said. There comes a time when the

common, uncomplicated observation of ordinary men makes better sense

than the partisan inventions of social anthropologists. Against their

gauzy dreams of African “civilization,” the obscenities of the Mau

Mau and the atrocities of the Congolese provide reality as hard as

Dr. Johnson’s stone. One refutes it _thus_.

In 1944, Otto Klineberg brought together in one volume several

of the monographs prepared by American students on the Negro as

background memoranda for Dr. Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish sociologist

whose subsequent _An American Dilemma_ was to be seen generally,

and influentially, by the Supreme Court of the United States. The

first paper in Klineberg’s collection was put together by Dr. Guy B.

Johnson, professor of sociology and anthropology at the University

of North Carolina. Dr. Johnson served for three years as executive

director of the liberal Southern Regional Council; he is a trustee

of Howard University. These credentials strongly suggest that Dr.

Johnson was picked by the Myrdal team to describe “the Stereotype

of the American Negro” on the assumption that he would summarize

the popular conception of the Negro only to say, in the end, that

there isn’t a word of truth in it. If so, the Myrdal associates must

have been startled by the blunt memorandum Dr. Johnson prepared. He

went through the works of thirty-one representative Negro writers

and forty-two representative white writers, covering the entire

spectrum of political coloration, and boiled down his findings under

twelve headings. His list, he emphasized, was not a list of “race”

characteristics. It was “a descriptive list, based upon a fair degree

of consensus, of the interests, habits and tendencies which might

serve to characterize the ‘typical’ Negro.” This list of “Negro

personality and culture traits” follows:

_Mental_: Relatively low intellectual interests; good memory;

facile associations of ideas.

_Temperamental_: Gregariousness or high interest in social

contacts; philosophical or get-the-most-out-of-life type of

adjustment; high aesthetic interests; love of subtlety and

indirection; adaptability.

_Aesthetic_: Love of music and dance; oratory and power of

self-expression; high interest in and appreciation of the artistic.

_Economic_: Relatively low interest in material things, such as

care of money, property, tools, etc.; line of least resistance in

habits of work; relative lack of self-reliance.

_Personal morals_: Double standard of morals and ethics, i.e., one

for his behavior toward Negroes and another for his behavior toward

whites; in sexual conduct, higher interest in sex, high sexual

indulgence, and larger sphere of permissive sexual relations.

_Family and home life_: Relatively low solidarity; high frequency

of common-law matings and separations; role of mother strong;

warmth of affection toward children; high rate of illegitimacy.

_Religion and the supernatural_: Rather high emotional

tone; personalization of God and saints; high interest in

“superstition”--i.e., belief in various supernatural forces and

ways of controlling them.

_Law observance_: Relatively high incidence of social disorder;

drunkenness, fighting, gambling, petty stealing, etc.; resentment

against the white man’s law.

_Public manners_: Tendency toward extroversion in public contact;

easy sociability, loud talk; relative carelessness in speech and

dress.

_Race pride_: Not yet highly developed; inferiority feelings

common; acceptance of white standards of physical beauty to a large

extent.

_Race consciousness and leadership_: Lack of cohesion; high

intragroup conflict and cleavage; distrust of leaders; lack of

strong race-wide leadership.

Now, what does Dr. Johnson say about this Negro “stereotype”? Insofar

as the list of characteristics has any validity, he comments, it is

more applicable to the Negro masses than to the minority of highly

sophisticated and acculturated Negroes. But how much validity does it

have? Here was the shocker. For Dr. Johnson himself noted that these

same characteristics had been attributed to the Negro by both white

and Negro writers; and this being so, “there is more than a slight

presumption in favor of the reality of the characteristics.” He

suggested that the Myrdal associates “assume that after all there is

_some_ truth or basis of reality to the traits which are persistently

mentioned in literature and in popular thinking.”

“It is true,” Dr. Johnson remarked, “that the whole trend of

scholarship at present is to look upon the traits which the dominant

group attributes to a minority group as nothing more than stereotypes

which have been invented for the express purpose of justifying the

position of the dominant group and controlling the status of the

subordinate group. These stereotypes are sometimes referred to as

myths, the implication being that they have no realistic basis

whatever. It should be pointed out, however, that it is probably not

necessary for a dominant group such as the white people in America,

to invent and perpetuate stereotypes which are wholly unfair and

untrue in order to maintain its own status of dominance.... The point

here being made, which is simple and which rests upon a common-sense

assumption, is that the stereotypes which a dominant group develops

concerning the traits of a subordinate group will be to some extent

based upon observable characteristics in the subordinate group, and

that while the stereotypes may be permeated with prejudice and with

the ideology of inferiority, _they may still reflect a certain amount

of truth concerning the subordinate group_. In other words, if we

can deduct from the popular stereotypes the moral judgments and the

implications of inferiority and the exaggerations, we may have left a

body of belief which affords considerable insight into the traits of

the subordinate group.” [Emphasis added.]