Reverberations in the North

...No doubt, if she had come in a rickety wagon and paid in pennies tied up in an old stocking, that would have shown the humility proper to a n...

...Is the cry of "moderation" directed against the North Carolina police who arrested Clarence Mitchell, NAACP leader, for ignoring the segregation "rules," or is it directed against Mitchell for insisting that he is a human being...

...Is this not what all of us—whatever our differences of ideology or opinion —have been waiting and hoping for...

...Finally, Mr...

...II Well, nothing much more can be expected from the official voices of American society, but surely, one might suppose, on this matter the liberals would speak out clearly...

...Indeed, a few decades from now the Montgomery action may be looked upon as a political and social innovation of a magnitude approaching the first sitdown strikes in the Akron rubber plants during the mid-thirties...

...One citation should be enough...

...partly as a result of the decades of effort by those very Northern radicals and liberals who (one increasingly hears) are constitutionally incapable of understanding "Southern institutions," and even more, by the effort of the Negro organizations that have fought and suf fered in and out of public notice...

...they are acquiring new self-confidence and coherence...

...One rubs one's eyes: the NAACP, the middle-class NAACP, always known for its caution, even for an excessive caution—an extremist organization...

...What has been most depressing, and at times downright infuriating, about the recent discussions of the problem of integration is that the terms of discourse tend increasingly to be those of the Southern enemies of equality for the Negroes...

...Everyone, from President Eisenhower to most of the liberal journals, cries "moderation...

...And this has been true even for many liberals who sincerely think of themselves as opponents of segregation...

...It did not seem to occur to the NR that Stevenson might be playing for the Southern vote...

...Writing in the New Leader, he granted that we can hardly blame Negroes for being impatient with the counsel of patience...

...I had originally intended to write a piece tracing in detail his shameful twists on the question of integration...

...But they have not...

...What is happening is of extraordinary importance to our entire national life, and I wish merely to indicate it here, without even pretending to a rounded analysis: the Southern Negroes, after decades of humiliation, are finding their political and social voice...

...1 A major social and political revolution is taking place in the South...

...But Mr...

...The issue is not whether federal troops are to be sent into the South or any other such irrelevancy...

...When Senator Kefauver, who is a politician from Tennessee and not a statesman from Illinois, took a more forthright stand on integration than Stevenson, the New Republic complained that Kefauver was playing for and with the Negro vote...

...Stevenson, as he squirmed between his apparent Southern commitments and his disturbed liberal admirers...

...It is simply whether a substantial beginning is to be made toward integration, whether the Supreme Court order is to be obeyed or not, whether the Negroes of the South will be granted their rights or not...

...That the mute should find their voices, that from the silent depths of the oppressed there should arise the claim to justice and dignity...

...but I confess to no longer having the heart, or the stomach, for it...

...The fact that it is not very appealing to the victims of a current injustice does not make it any less the course of wisdom in overcoming historic injustices...

...Stevenson that slavery too was a tradition older than the Republic while segregation is a great deal younger than the Republic...

...Is it directed against the Mississippi legislator who publicly advocated bashing in the heads of "uppity" Negroes or is it directed against Autherine Lucy who had the gall to drive up the University of Alabama in a Cadillac and pay her entrance fee with a $100 bill...

...But even more: to speak of the NAACP and the White Councils as equally "extremist" is to lump together the oppressors and the oppressed, those who suffer discrimination and those who impose it...

...I cannot forego quoting, as an instanceof how the impulse to political equivocation leads to sheer double-talk, a sentence from Stevenson's recent book...

...the clips lie on my desk...

...The New Republic in its infatuation with Adlai Stevenson—surely one of the great romances of our time!— has been visibly suffering in its efforts to evade recognizing the fact that its candidate has irrevocably disgraced himself on the Negro question...

...But if you inquire what "moderation" means in the circumstances, it is impossible to get a precise answer...

...Speaking to a Negro audience in Los Angeles, Stevenson had the presumption to say: "We must proceed gradually, not upsetting habits or traditions that are older than the Republic...

...And does he not realize that, whatever his excellent intentions, he has here, from motives of political expediency, slipped into the vocabulary of the racists, those who try to work up a home-made anthropology or sociology to justify their prejudice?* III The issue is very simple, and those intellectuals who habitually worry about the dangers of oversimplifying might here trouble themselves about the dangers of undersimplifying...

...The magnificent discipline and selfrestraint of the Negro boycotters in Montgomery ("We love everyone," one minister is reported to have said, "but let's keep walking") is surely one of the most encouraging events in 20th-century American life...

...But to expect a response of unambiguous support for the Negroes is to forget the quality of contemporary American political life, it is to forget that the grey dye of conformity has sunk so deeply into the fabric of our behavior that even the question of Negro rights evokes moral bewilderment and opportunism...

...the same lines, one is appalled to notice that in the Northern press, and in liberal journals too, a legend has grown up that the NAACP is an "extremist" organization, so that in the Christian Science Monitor, not the worst of our papers, the NAACP and the White Citizens Councils are paired off as almost equally objectionable "extremists...

...And it is an issue that cannot be evaded...

...Emphasis added...

...but it would also have meant to banish the most important issue of our national life from the political campaign...

...Nor is it here a question of being a socialist or a liberal or anything but a human being...

...For us there is not a moment of hesitation: we stand unambiguously with the NAACP in its struggle, with the Montgomery Negroes in their courageous boycott...

...And then, to top it off, the New Republic proposed that the "emotional race issue" be dropped from the political campaign...

...No doubt, this would have made life more comfortable for Mr...

...Niebuhr has developed a marvelous intellectual system— the world being necessarily evil, perfection being unattainable, man being inherently sinful—by which his theological right hand does know and proceeds to approve of what his worldly political left hand does...

...But it does want the Supreme Court decision to be enforced—and what short of that can any Negro organization want...

...Has it not occurred to Mr...

...His record is so clearly opportunistic, so patently appalling that even his most ardent supporters are now a little apologetic...

...Surely, one might expect something a little more forthright—a little more moral—from the foremost exponent in the United States of the Protestant "crisis theology...

...The Negroes are making unprecedented gains in political and economic power —partly as the result of a belated industrialization which, in its need for skilled and literate labor, tends to break down caste lines...

...I have been reading very carefully during recent weeks the NAACP literature and can only testify that far from being "extremist" it is almost unbelievably restrained and moderate in its demands...

...Stevenson...

...Prudence is as necessary as courage...

...In the long run," he writes, "segregationand discrimination.., will yield quickly to the general advance of education...

...on the natural gas bill, the Till murder and Israel," while Stevenson had confined himself to "highlevel" speeches...

...Kefauver, the magazine admitted, had taken a "stand-up-and-be-counted posture...

...Yet, Stevenson is right [in offering such counsel...

...And then Reinhold Niebuhr, a man of God...

...This is on a par with Governor Dewey'sfamous prediction that 'the future liesbefore us...

...partly as a result of the political needs of the United States in the cold war, which makes it mandatory that some genuine improvements be made in the conditions of Negroes...

...they have become or are on the verge of becoming an independent political force in the South...