American Notebook: The Negroes Find Their Own Way

...Item: The Kentucky mother who, when her 7-year-old son begged to go to the nearby all-white school, said: "If you've got the guts to go, I've got the guts to send you...

...The Negro even in the deepest South is not going to stop now with the mere ending of bus segregation...

...The significance of Debs' mistake, which he shared with almost all Marxists, has never been so clearly revealed as by the recent events in the South...

...Yet one cannot but feel he missed the essential point...

...Moreover, the new tactics (new only in the sense of still being experimental in the U.S...

...White supremacist pressure, stupidity of officials, and just plain inertia in the majority of Southern towns and municipalities will force some kind of struggle...

...Or the example of the Birmingham minister who drove up to the police in his own car, asked to be arrested for his deliberate violation of the segregation ordinance and was handed a ticket for driving without a license...

...It is true that the economic condition of the Negro has improved and that this, in turn, has provided new possibilities for struggle...

...Their position has never been weaker...

...Not only have many whites lost confidence...

...Writing from deep in Louisiana, Debs had some colorful observations to make and ended with a statement of the classic socialist position: "There never was any social inferiority that was not the shrivelled fruit of economic inequality...

...One of the main factors in this development has been the imaginative use of techniques of non-violence which have dramatized the movement and given it a freshness such as that attained by no other mass action on the American scene since perhaps the great sit-down strikes of the '30s...

...WHAT BEGAN as a minor skirmish has now become a symbolic and rapidly widening struggle...

...The politicians and big wigs of the South who want both to keep segregation respectable and to enforce it where it counts are wincing at the blows which they very well know are threatening the whole Jim Crow edifice...

...When an ex-Columbia student, Greenwich Villager and ersatz racist, who is apparently a political disciple of Ezra Pound, has to go down to Tennessee in order to get the pot boiling, the native rabble-rousers are really in a bad way...

...But this is clearly a case of "too little, too late...

...they no longer believe in the virtuousness of their "cause," even if they still continue bitterly to uphold it...

...or that the "Voice of America" beam some of its liberty-inspiring programs this way...

...I have said and say again that, properly speaking, there is no Negro question outside the labor question—the workingclass struggle...

...Disgusted by the manhandling of the civil rights issue at the Democratic National Convention and the softpedaling (often back-pedaling) not only by Stevenson but also by such "friends of the Negro people" as Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey and Harry Truman, from four to seventy-five per cent of the voters in predominantly Negro areas switched from the Democratic to the Republican column...

...Since the election, the complete silence on the part of the White House in face of the flaunting of the courts by Southern racists has intensified the Negroes' sense of political resentment...

...Evidence is mounting that thousands of them are fed up with the whole sorry mess and would like, to use a good old Southern expression, "to get shut of it...

...This display of quiet determination, courage, good humor, discipline and plain common sense brought to bear on a clearcut issue by ordinary men and women operating under the frightful pressures of the Deep South is something that every Negro can appreciate and understand...

...One can contrast with the latter those Southern white judges who, to the surprise of the Negroes and perhaps even themselves, are ruling in the Negroes' favor...

...Social injustice has been fought and rectified by the Negroes themselves without waiting for labor's "economic emancipation" or for the guidance of various "vanguards of the proletariat" who so regularly denounced the very tactics that are bringing major victories to the Negroes...

...Contrast this, if you please, with the sneaky subterfuges of the opposition, such as declaring a bus out of order and removing it from its run when Negroes enter to take seats in the forward section...

...One can concede that the Montgomery bank teller (white) quoted in Time has a point when he says of his colored fellow-passengers: "They'll find out all they've won in their year of praying and boycotting is the same service I've been getting every day...

...And while there are no doubt many causes for the emergence of this new Negro, ranging from the industrialization of the South to the Supreme Court decision, it had better be said that the "ripening of class consciousness," or the leadership of any Marxist faction, is scarcely among them...

...When the time seemed ripe for a test case on segregation in Atlanta buses, the Rev...

...No qualification or special talent is needed for getting on a bus...

...I could not have faced myself and my people if I had moved...

...Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that this shift marks any real trend among the Negroes toward conservatism...

...What we are witnessing is not just an extension of the type of activities that have been carried on and directed primarily by progressive Negroes from the North...

...The whole Southern Negro population is beginning to stir from its decades of lethargy...

...In what adds up to an attempt to contain the movement, twenty-one Southern and border cities have quietly done away with bus segregation laws...

...It was signed by Eugene V. Debs...

...The brilliant victory in Montgomery has given the American Negro community a confidence and hope such as no other event in years...

...It's very important that everything goes as planned...

...An amazing proportion of Southern whites are showing themselves ready to accept desegregation with good grace, even good humor...

...Rosa Parks, the quiet seamstress whose arrest over a year ago precipitated the Montgomery affair, touched upon it when she gave her reason for not moving back in the bus: "It was a matter of dignity...

...This is reflected in some interesting demands such as that President Eisenhower deliver a major speech in a Southern city urging all Southerners to abide by the Supreme Court's decision...

...Any one who has toured the South years ago and then revisited it recently, as has the writer, could not fail to be impressed by the tremendous changes that have taken place there and the general improvement in race relations that has resulted...

...In dealing with "the Negro problem" there is always the danger of letting one's indignation rip and leav ing the impression, particularly on sensitive Southerners, that one would change the color of our prevailing racial chauvinism from white to black...

...seem to have confounded and above all demoralized those white supremacists who understand little but violence...

...Even when these laws are dropped voluntarily, however, pressure for segregation often is effectively maintained (as in many of these twenty-one cities) and can be broken down only by organized action...

...Item: The minister in Birmingham who crawled out from under the wreckage of his bombed home to tell reporters: "I'm going out now to lead my people on those buses and I'm going to sit right up behind the driver...

...Back in the age of innocence (November 1903 to be exact) the International Socialist Review devoted a leading article to "the Negro problem...

...The Montgomery victory has given a tremendous push to what in long range terms is much more important —the struggle for integration in the schools...

...THE 1956 presidential election marked the first major shift in the Negro vote in twenty-five years...

...James L. Hicks, writing in the Negro paper, New York Amsterdam News, declares: "One of the great surprises of 1956 to Negro leaders themselves has been the fact that they suddenly found that the Negro masses were far ahead of them in their willingness to demand their freedom and to back up their demands with sacrifice...

...William H. Borders, one of the most respected Negro leaders of the South, told reporters: "We could get thousands of people to take the first rides...

...But the essential impetus to the awakening we see down South is best expressed by the Negro ministers when they tell us that there is a new Negro...

...As this journalist says, the new Negro "just isn't scared any more...

...As the Chattanooga correspondent of the New York Times points out: "Unlike the public-school issue, bus integration is not hedged with complex administrative problems and legalistic maneuvering...

...The Negro, given economic freedom, will not ask the white man any social favors...

...Next to the growth of assurance among the Negroes, the most remarkable fact about the Southern situation is the manifest sense of guilt among the whites—the virtual acknowledgment that they are defending an immoral point of view...

...nor the spinelessness of leading Northern liberals, who are such energetic champions of Negro rights that they cannot even dear the hurdle of the I80 Senate filibuster, more apparent...

...or that Vice President Nixon, whose concern for freedom carried him all the way to the AustroHungarian border and more recently to the African Gold Coast, swing South in the same cause...

...it was primarily a reflex of protest...

...If the struggle radiating out from Montgomery had served no other purpose than to segregate publicly the segregationists, it would have justified itself many times over...

...But we have to hold them back...

...Item: The Atlanta minister who, on his way to jail in a patrol wagon for violating that city's bus segregation law, remarked: "There's no segregation on this bus...

...and the burning question of 'social equality' will disappear like mist before the sunrise...