Going Back South

...The northern liberals and other whites who want to help would do well to take cognizance of this when they, whether intentionally or unconsciously, speak about the "role of liberal whites" in bringing about changes in the South, and when white southerners offer the hand of "friendship" to black youths...

...So, I too took a trip back...

...The only significant social innovation that the South has finally instituted on a broad scale is desegration...

...Nothing happens to them intellectually as a consequence of geographically coming North...

...Except for the current change in the morale of southern Negroes regarding their oppression, the fundamental life or world outlook of blacks in the South is strikingly similar to that of southern whites...

...They do not do anything, they have nowhere to go...

...Over and over again, I discerned, smoldering beneath the breath of the young blacks, a terrible hatred for southern, and some northern, whites who now—since the "revolution" seems to be unarrestable—offer their friendship, as if this would wipe out all the years of the Negro's toil and suffering...

...He therefore must suppress it, thereby intensifying his agony to the point where it explodes in the most violent hatred for the forbidden object...

...They had leaped out of the psyches of whites and blacks alike, and stood there in the station as firmly as if they had never been torn down but reinforced...

...0 From White Papers for White Americans, by Calvin C. Hernton...

...The fact that many ex-southern and southern Negroes are ashamed of the South or of some of its aspects reveals that they love it so much...

...There are those who are completely ignorant or semiliterate, as well as school teachers, doctors, social workers, skilled laborers, and technicians...

...On the train going from New York, once we were out of Washington, D.C., I noticed a sight familiar to passenger trains in the South...

...Formerly the Negro was handicapped by his own attitude regarding his status in the South...

...It is a fear in the mind, a fear of the psycheself, a fear, if you please, of pain that will havoc the entire personality structure as a consequence of becoming involved with people of another color...

...It goes against my emotions, but it seems to me that the cessation of centuries of being hated cannot wipe out overnight the welled-up desire to hate back...

...Up and down the train a Negro "conductor" followed close behind his white counterpart in goose-step fashion...

...I was going back to try, as best I could, to resolve a conundrum...

...They will have to die off or be killed...

...Their experiences in a desegregated atmosphere seem to be counteracting many of the prejudices and hateful emotions that they had internalized from a southern upbringing...

...The South is the mother-matrix out of which and in which the Negro's mind has been fashioned...

...In all the major southern cities (excluding those in Mississippi) , desegregation is noticeable in the schools, in interstate transportation facilities, in the larger hotels and some eating establishments, and even in certain areas of employment...

...The stereotypes of "crackers" and "niggers" are much more than stereotypes...

...The young blacks do not want to shake hands and forget...

...In a rural South Carolina town I witnessed an incident where a group of white youths, who were waiting outside a supermarket, came over to a Negro youth, who also seemed to be waiting for someone, and began a friendly conversation...

...The philosophical why caused them to stand and gaze at us with curious and puzzled faces...

...Now that the physical barriers are coming down, Negroes and whites alike find it difficult to define their fears...

...His flesh is beaten and violated in a most intimate and pornographic fashion, as if by a lover who has gone mad...

...Charlie...

...They want revenge...

...I felt alone, out of place, alienated...

...The Negro now has a new morality...

...At one point I grew angry and made a sarcastic retort: "What do you think is going to happen to the poor white children, trying to get used to those black ones...

...Specifically on Sunday, some Negroes in Newark act the same as others do in, say, Huntsville, Alabama...

...Copyright 1966 by Calvin C. Hernton...

...There are children among them...

...Their souls and minds remain chained to the Down-Home Country...

...Characteristic of the South, however, is the tendency for southerners to separate the technological aspects of their world from its social or human morality, especially with reference to the Negro...

...IV Whites down South do not leave Negroes alone even when the Negroes, so to speak, remain in their place...

...There are women, young, old, pretty, ugly, fat, lean, short, tall, and of all sizes and shapes...

...Throughout the day there is quartet singing, "battles of music," gospels and spirituals...

...Segregation is at least as much a psychosomatic phenomenon as it is objectively physical...

...They will be alienated not because they hate each other so much but because they love one another with such unspeakable guilt...

...Just as frequently, however, the southern way of life has rendered the Negro incapable of ever making a philosophical transformation regardless of where he might go...

...Published by Doubleday & Co., Inc...

...I observed, for instance, that, with the exception of the state of Mississippi and a few more isolated places, the physical barriers in interstate and some local traveling facilities are completely down—there are no signs, no partitions, no separate baths or ticket windows...

...On the one hand, the Negro is the exclusive product of ghetto life in the South—on the other hand, he is a general product of southern folkways...

...Put away the sociological theories, all of them, and examine the South as a thing...

...They are terms which describe and involve an interchangeable reality— the "southern way of life"—which constitutes, however separate, a shared history that is embedded in and has shaped the personalities of whites and blacks alike...

...God, along with Dr...

...The fact that many couthern Negroes and whites go to great lengths in asserting their "differences" is an indication of the contrary...

...Hatred for Negroes in the South is riot a theoretical or an impersonal thing...

...Much of the change in attitude is taking place in, not all, but a great many of the white youth, noticeably in those who might have been or who are in the Armed Forces and those who attend schools outside the South...

...more frequently than they used to, and that, "Us Negroes are getting where we can talk back or speak up to whites like men and women without the crackers wanting to bash in our heads or asking us, 'What did you say, Nigger?' and we'd have to drop our heads and mumble, 'Nothing,' to Miss Ann or to Mr...

...The hate is still there, and so is the fear...

...Yet, almost everywhere, blacks and whites huddle together in separate bundles...

...Us black folks are getting where we don't have to do that any more...

...some are very black, others very light, and still others of all the shades and hues in-between...

...They are not chained to the land because they have no land...

...The southern way of life, here meaning Negro oppression, is the single, most important factor upon which the majority of southerners base their self-esteem...

...How can white people possibly know or understand, in the face of the much publicized anti-Negro bigotry in the South, the secret longings in the hearts, souls, and minds of Negroes that pull them back down to that terrible place, year after year, season after season...

...But, I am afraid, before significant numbers of contemporary black southern youth (not to mention those in the North) can ever love, they will first have to hate...

...Of course, on one level, they represented the traditional symbols of "Mr...

...More than one Negro told me that it was perhaps not a good thing for one or two Negro children to attend integrated—no, desegratedschools because...

...Modern structures, housing projects, and office buildings shone bright and as yet unsoiled in the winter sun...

...Despite the continuing disappearance of agrarian life and the rise of cities, along with other industrial or technological changes, the southern people, black and white, are to this day still a rural-minded, anticosmopolitan, morally primitive type of people...

...In the city where I was born I saw Negro women working as cashiers in a local supermarket that formerly employed only whites, except in the most menial jobs...

...But there, the similarity between me and them ended...

...This is changing...

...It is a well-established principle in modern psychology that when hatred becomes so personal, so carnal and intimate, the rage and fury of the hater is not only generated by revulsion for the hated but also by an alien desire to "love" the hated...

...All except a very few of the Negroes I had known and seen in the North were exactly like those in whose midst I was now standing...

...Racism and Jim Crow are, in this context, simply attempts to obliterate that part of the South, its true history, without which there would be no terror in our hearts when we speak of having a cup of coffee in a desegregated restaurant...

...They just mill around, being "sharp" on Sunday, and whistle at girls and passers-by...

...The men put on their suits and ties and their shined shoes, the women put on solid white or black dresses...

...On important holidays and especially at Christmas, the buses and trains leaving the North and heading South are heavy-laden with what seems like an infinite assortment of black people...

...Specifically, in Selma, Alabama, as elsewhere, the desire for intimate contact with Negroes is perversely fulfilled in and through acts of tussling with and beating colored people...

...It is not so much the fear of intermarriage...

...They migrate physically but do not migrate spiritually or culturally...

...There were new bridges and freeways and turnpikes, and more were under construction...

...Essentially I was a little afraid...

...Rather than jubilant, or vainly proud, I was melancholy and pensive...

...It was uncanny when I walked into the Greyhound station in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and saw no racial barriers whatever, to find blacks and whites sitting as far from one another as possible, like scared chickens...

...In my opinion, the most objective response would be to let them march, ignore them...

...To remove the concrete barriers is but half the job...

...I had not thought of dressing up...

...Last Christmas, I too found myself in Pennsylvania Station, standing in line, waiting to purchase a ticket that would take me back, deep into the recesses of the "Down-Home Country...

...and "Mrs...

...Standing there in that long line, I realized something I had never thought about before...

...Wipe out the system of Negro oppression in the South and you automatically destroy the racist's sense of well-being...

...Isolated incidents of token integration, human respect and kindness from whites are not yet the rule but the exception...

...Their tongues suffused the lofty dome of Penn Station with what I knew to be the conversation content, syntax and speech pattern of down-home Negroes...

...There are sufficient indications to assert that white southerners are, if not "in love" with Negroes, definitely emotionally involved with or "hung up" on the black people who are bodily and psychologically in their midst...

...When they reach the northern environment, instead of expanding and shedding the old baggage and reorienting themselves to a new life, they, in many instances, tighten up and look for the familiar, and what they find is nothing less than a replica of the Down-Home habitat, the northern ghetto...

...As I walked the streets, I was aware of not being stared at with as much hatred and as frequently as in the past...

...it is at the same time the festering ache in the republic of his heart...

...III On the train down from New York, a white youth seated behind me touched my shoulder and extended his hand with obvious warmth, explaining that he was a Columbia University student and that he had been in the audience during a poetry reading in which I had participated...

...Entering Chattanooga, I was struck by the degree to which the city had changed...

...He moved up and sat with me and we talked...

...Historically the South has been described as a rural, tradition directed society with a culture rooted in the past and determined more by folkways and blind customs than by law or technical innovations...

...There are strong, intimate and terrible forces, factors and conditions in the South which bind whites and blacks together as one people just as the racist system so painfully keeps them separated...

...They were, like myself, migrants from the South...

...They are not chained to any material structures of the South because they have no access to material structures except the bleak facades of the ghetto...

...The greatest change in the South is not a significant innovation in the sociopolitical status of the Negro...

...Contrary to what we are used to hearing, contrary to most sociological and psychological thought on the South, it is the similarities of blacks and whites, rather than the differences, that serve as fear-triggering mechanisms and prevent them from coming together under one moral and human order...

...He has both worlds inside him, and he is loyal to both although he has only participated in one...

...By alien, I mean a desire that is socially and morally forbidden but which the person cannot rid himself of...

...Long before I reached the Tennessee town where I was born, I knew that what I saw, with both my mind and my eye, would determine whether or not this visit would be my last...

...Those who hate the Negro, hate him carnally...

...They might work with and move in and among whites and even exchange polite words, but in all of this they maintain a rigid sociopsychological distance...

...Ii The overwhelming majority of southern Negroes who relocate in Newark or Harlem or Chicago or Washington, D.C., never really leave the South...

...He actually believes that he himself can wage a gradually successful fight and, indeed, overcome...

...the Negro children are going to have to spend a year or more getting used to all those white children, and they won't have time to concentrate on their learning and will waste time...

...They were busy talking...

...Most of them might as well still be living in South Carolina or Georgia or wherever they have come from...

...The two men must have been working together for decades...

...Psychoculturally, most southerners are creatures of the folkways where ingroupism, blind loyalty, and fear supercede openmindedness and preclude change...

...After all, any sensible person knows that the mere fact of Negroes marching is not going to achieve very much...

...Baptist, Methodist, and Holy Roller...

...I wore corduroy trousers, a workman's flannel shirt, and my favorite leather jacket on the back of which the crooked, illegible lettering of a four-year-old child was barely visible...

...To speak realistically of "the southern mind" is to speak not only of the white, but of the black as well...

...The existence of the racist or bigot is bound, is indeed condemned, to this system...

...They must have known where we were going, but why must have been the question...

...I think of Newark, New Jersey, where the round of daily life for the mass of Negroes is impossible to distinguish from that of Negroes in any ghetto south of the Potomac River...

...At that moment I was engulfed by a terrible sadness...

...Largely, he believed that he was helpless, that protests and demonstrations and fighting back were useless, that "we Negroes just can't stick together...

...I looked down at myself...

...They hate him biologically: his smell, his color, his genitals, his features...

...For southern society, it was and still is a positive system...

...Upon reflection and deep scrutiny, it was amazing how similar these two men were—their stances, their faces, the skin of their chins, toughened from years of shaving, their mannerisms, their hands...

...This, more than anything else, is why they go back...

...Streets within the city had been widened...

...He is, therefore, wedded to the entire South just as certainly as the white southerner...

...Their posture, their gestures, their stance, despite attempts at being hippy-dippy, were those of southern Negroes...

...The Negro youths know that they have been immeasurably crippled by centuries of racism in America, and, when freedom comes and even after, they are aware that the effects of racism will still be a hideous ghost taunting their minds, their souls, and their egos...

...Those who own or who have the use of automobiles ride through the ghetto, picking up girls and joking with those hanging out on the block...

...Three out of four persons were Negro...

...In department, drug, and food stores, I discerned an attitude on the part of some whites which approached authentic respect for me as a human being...

...The old bigots and the new young racists are incapable of mastering such pain...

...The barriers were the people themselves...

...The Negroes were dressed up...

...This ambivalence is strictly a manifestation in the Negro of the internalization of the "hate-love syndrome" with which whites are afflicted regarding their emotions toward black people...

...The explicit and essential function of the southern way of life has been and is, with reference to human relations, the maintenance and promotion of systematic oppression of the Negro...

...Make no mistake, they will be alienated for a long time yet...

...it is a deep intimate emotion which constitutes a vital part of the everyday life of "white folks.' Contrary to much contemporary sociological theory, the Negro is not an abstraction, not merely a generalization...

...Observe, for instance, how three historical experiences—religious fundamentalism, racism, and economic exploitation by the North—have wrought in the personalities of both blacks and whites a distorted, if not guilt-ridden sexuality, a hate-and-love syndrome toward each other, and a pathological attitude regarding northerners...

...Their eyes were aglow as if they were putting something over on someone...

...I saw that old factories and plants (for Chattanooga is mainly an industrial center) had been demolished and sharp new ones had taken their places...

...Equally important, if not more so, is the beginning of change in the personal as well as public attitudes of whites toward the Negro...

...The Negro's body is attacked and maimed...

...If the technological changes in the South were as slow and incomplete as those needed in the area of human relations, there would be but half of a turnpike, a fourth of a bridge, a third of a new plant, and so on...

...It was as if the physical barriers were still there and, indeed, they were...

...Martin Luther King, might absolve the white folks...

...They had on suits, ties, nice shoes, new dresses, smart-looking coats and, no doubt, clean underwear...

...The fact is, southern whites and Negroes are more alike in every way, save skin color, than most of us are accustomed to believing...

...In a way it was no surprise, for one is aware that as industrialization and city life become more of a fact in the South, broad technological innovations are the necessary concomitants...

...Some of this is due to the fact that in the North Negroes are often forced to live in ghettos and are actually, however subtly, denied the pursuit of a new life...

...Charlie" and "Uncle Tom...

...In my hip pocket was a notebook and in my notebook was a sharpened pencil...

...Although I did not abhor the idea, I was not really going back to have a ball...

...While one must recognize these and other changes in the South which indicate that the trend will continue on a more broad and in tensive basis, I must also emphasize that the actual social status of the Negro in general is in fact the same as it was ten years ago...

...Rather than the physical twoness of Negro and white in the South, it is their historical oneness that serves as the secret volcano of fear behind the visible and invisible barriers erected between them...

...All day long they go to church...

...The Negro is torn between self-love and self-hate...

...The South will change but the bigots and racists will never change...

...He had a thick southern accent, but not once did I discern the overt or hidden disrespect for the Negro that usually accompanies such an accent...

...They appeared excited and enthused about their journey homeward...

...They go to Sunday school, stay for the morning service, then return home and eat southern fried chicken, collard greens and corn bread, and at night they attend service again...

...They are young and old, good, bad, indifferent...

...On the Negro radio stations, and some white ones that cater to the Negro market, there is gospel music all day, and the announcers with their thick Negro dialects are difficult to understand if one is not from down South...

...Except for a better job and perhaps a more adequate house in which to live, they remain southern Negroes even unto the second generation...

...Make no mistake, the great percentage of southern Negroes, especially the youth, know damn well that if some changes are taking place, it is almost solely because of their valiant struggle, of their bloodshedding and deaths, and not because of any goodwill or change of heart on the part of "white folks...

...Rather, it is the ethos of the southern ghetto and the folkways of the South in general that southern Negroes have internalized and which they seem to be incapable of purging from their psyches...

...Both groups enjoy a slow pace of life, both are possessed by a regional psychology which tends to make them indigenous-minded, semi-ignorant about the world, suspicious of "outsiders" and whatever is new...

...It is not a matter of "cultural lag...

...Rather, it is the philosophical transformation, the morale, of a large portion of southern Negroes toward allieviating their oppression...

...On the human level, as sociocultural products, they were twin brothers...

...This is Newark, New Jersey, where thousands of Negroes who have migrated from the South are still down South...

...The underlying magnets between whites and blacks in the South are the dynamics of fear that alienate them...

...I was not going back down South to impress anybody...

...But everything else remains the same, they do not change...

...I began to wonder to what extent the human aspects of their lives had kept or were keeping pace with the inspiring technological changes I saw everywhere...

...The teenagers get "sharp," and after church they throng the sidewalks and street corners...

...Every year they go up and down the country like refugees of some dark and embattled republic, like an endless caravan of ambivalent migrants torn between homeland and newland, continually returning to see loved ones and friends and relatives, returning to memories that ache and yet somehow warm the heart...

...For most southern Negroes and whites, associating with the opposite color constitutes an exotic experience fraught with nameless fears...

...it is HOME, the only home they will ever really know...

...Almost invariably the killing or mistreatment of a Negro by southern whites is not done in an objective, impersonal manner...

...The mother of the Negro youth explained that more and more of this is taking place, and that such a thing would not have happened a year ago...

...Rather than explaining or providing a frame of reference for meaningful understanding and analysis of the South, the cultural lag formula serves to obfuscate the issues and mechanically to excuse the South for its reactionary institutions...

...Thousands and thousands of southern Negroes come to various parts of the North with their woes and their children...

...It is not so much the fear of violence—both groups are accustomed to violence...

...Nor is it any appreciable mitigation of southern hatred and inhumanity in the hearts of whites or in their actual behavior toward black people...

...They still think and speak categorically of white people as "crackers...

...The Negro's hopes and fears, his embarassments and guilts and sore spots, are southern...

...Some of them were, although quite well-behaved, a little tipsy...

...I had to find out if I was through with the South, if it was through with me, if I was through with my relatives whom I love, my mother, my in-laws, my grandmother sauntering towards a centennial of life and joy and struggle on this earth...

...They bear more children, and their children bear children...

...The fact that Negroes are alienated from the broader sociocultural life of the South and its deeper mysteries does not frequently pull them away, but binds them ever more closely to the bosom of Down-Home...

...For most Negroes, the South is a psychocultural region of mixed personality determinants whose conflicting vectors completely immobilize the flexibility and continued growth of the psyche...

...By and large Negroes are still without the ballot, still denied equal job opportunities, still the victims of Jim Crow and bigotry...

...This pain must be undergone and mastered...

...When, over the years, the interlocking structures of Negro oppression became institutionalized into an ongoing system, that system was a fait accompli, never to change or evolve out of itself, but only to grow stronger within itself...

...No matter how many objective barriers, political or economic, are brought down by the present strife, there will be no peace in the South until the corresponding subjective barriers in the personalities of blacks and whites are assailed, uprooted and flung to the ground...

...The young whites who are sympathetic toward the Negro struggle constitute only a small fraction of the total white population, and they are neither statistically nor qualitatively in a position to uproot the intricate system of race hatred and human oppression that has been and is still one of the foundations of the "southern way of life...

...In a very literal sense the racist, in ideology and in fact, needs "the nigger...

...Why, for instance, during the current flurry of civil rights demonstrations in the South, are whites so eager to provoke physical violence...

...Existential pain...

...I saw that many slum areas had been leveled and cleared...

...Everywhere, at all the ticket windows, at the information booth, in the snack bar, on the benches and throughout the entire station there were hordes and hordes of black faces...

...She further stated that whites in general were referring to Negroes as "Mr...

...It is similar to removing the bandages and leaving the sores to fester in pain...

...As I stood there in the station like that (naked, so to speak) , an existential insight took possession of my imagination...

...How strange this must have seemed to the few whites who were scattered among us...

...I saw them glancing and staring like perplexed puppies—"Where are all these Negroes going...

...I was impressed to find that even in the smaller towns and hamlets far more bus and train stations have dropped all visible signs of enforced segregation than one would expect...

...But there is very little integration...