The Anxious South
Reddick, L. D.
In the South these days everybody's world seems to be falling apart. People float about in uncertainties. Old landmarks are disappearing. The new ones do not bring assurance. There are calls...
...He himself had suffered a heart attack...
...Verbal violence is the order of the day...
...The out-migration has been considerable...
...A few days later, he was struck by shots mysteriously and cowardly fired into his store...
...At that time the South feared that social equality for Negro soldiers, who were overseas in France, and for Negro workers who had gone North for war jobs, was "ruining our colored boys, who have always known their place...
...the crooning and contented Negro servants...
...Opposition would have been futile...
...The small boy reluctantly resolves that he himself must fight...
...Old landmarks are disappearing...
...This dream picture may have never existed in life for more than a few but in a segregated society it was possible to make believe, to imagine...
...They are as nothing in the light of the joy-through-strength that is manifest at the weekly mass meeting...
...Compassionate social action, whatever may be its limitations, has surely fascinated a generation sick of war and conflict...
...Remnants of the organization may be found in a few states...
...Liberalism has all but vanished.Communication between whites and blacks has broken down...
...After the first weeks of the bus boycotts, no white churchmen or civic leaders dared say openly that the boycotters were justified...
...But what are those limits...
...Gus Courts of Mississippi told them to their faces, "Damn the Citizens Council...
...At most, the conscience-stricken liberals will meet in semi-secret session and deplore the horrible condition of man...
...At first they greeted the Supreme Court decision as the long looked-for voice from Washington...
...The Federal Government would have done us all a favor if it had clearly and firmly, yet with all its dignity and restraint, declared that the rulings of the Supreme Court are the law of the land and thus would be enforced...
...still, who would have taken on an Uncle Sam that obviously "meant business...
...The world outside of the South, tends to agree...
...Today the main task of the legislatures in the hard-core states is to preserve racial segregation...
...To their relaxed yet determined people their cause is vivid...
...some are worse...
...Despite all the misleading editorials and slanted stories, these Southern papers must report that the Court is knocking down anti-integration subterfuges about as fast as the politicians erect them...
...their heroes, real...
...The logical recourse is to violence...
...In sum: the anti-equalitarian whites are, apparently, in command of the South today...
...They assumed that quite naturally the Government would stand behind its own decrees...
...If the executive branch of the Government had given its immedi ate backing to the judiciary, the people of the South would have had only the difficulty of adjusting themselves to a fait accompli...
...A judge, who headed a law school and has written law texts, wrecked his national legal reputation by coming out in the local paper as a simple-minded racist...
...He knows that the principal may never come...
...Negroes (and others, too) spoke of young Till as a brother...
...It fitted the "military" or power situation admirably, for the "enemy" had numbers, the police, the militia and the whole machinery of local lawmaking and law enforcing...
...But on May 17, 1954 the United States Supreme Court rudely shattered this dream world...
...If so, he could do with a little help...
...We all know that facing up to a reality that has been dodged and camouflaged for so long is most painful...
...In politics we see the most obvious manifestations of irrationality...
...This release of energies of Southern Negroes in their struggle for equality has given a rationale to life in this land of irrationality...
...For example, urbanism and industrialism have just about washed away the plantation...
...It was now the summer of '55...
...Organizations, families, even individuals have been torn apart, truncated...
...Another judge, who had been a "decent and respected liberal all his life," was convinced that race-baiting was necessary in order to be re-elected...
...And so the Negroes of America withdrew their hopes from Washing ton...
...Posterity may be luckier or more durable...
...In small towns and in some of the personal relationships, the lines have hardened...
...From Richmond to Atlanta to San Antonio there is not a single editor of a daily paper-excepting the Negro Atlanta Daily World-who stands, without apology, for the full and immediate implementation of the Supreme Court's desegregation edicts...
...but will the proposals make things better or worse...
...This Negro lad from Chicago was murdered in Mississippi for "wolf whistling" at a white woman...
...The NAACP-that old, conservative civil rights organization-has been fined $100,000 in one state and outlawed in five more...
...He talked about his illness and his chances of recovery...
...It has eased, if not freed, them of inner conflict...
...Millions of others, despite the politicians, the WCC and the newspapers, stand in silent admiration of their fellow Southerners who happen to be Negro...
...SOME FANTASTIC FORMS have taken shape in the psychological fog...
...Nobody is for sure...
...In the South these days everybody's world seems to be falling apart...
...This has made the South unhappy and anxious...
...At Clinton, at Montgomery, at Birmingham the inconsistencies have bred further uncertainties...
...The rupture of the old legend that Southern Negroes do not want an integrated sociey has been complete...
...It is a big job...
...They expected momentarily a strong statement from the White House or the Department of Justice...
...Now they had the law on their side...
...They let him go...
...One Governor has been candid enough to say that the "interposition" of state's rights versus national laws was like a hound" dog "baying at the moon...
...Some feel that merely to meet in these times is an act of courage...
...It was no longer possible to look away from the fact that the Southern caste system was done for, that Negroes were not contented to be subordinates and that desegregation was upon us...
...We can only guess...
...All this, of course, is the ageless problem of men caught up in social change...
...High faith and courage are contagious...
...Despite its apparent bashfulness, there are limits beyond which the federal authority will not be pushed...
...Most of the newspapers reflect and intensify the current extremism...
...Anti-Negro propaganda became worse than it had been since the first World Wear...
...The religious traditions of the people, their own cultural forms, have been merged with the philosophy of Gandhi and Thoreau...
...A sensitive Southerner, who would live in the modern world, finds himself pushed back into a ghetto, if he remains in the South...
...Could it be that a reluctant South will be coaxed, pushed and dragged by the Negro into the modern world...
...While the world was reeling from this example of "Mississippi Jus tice," the President of the United States went on the air...
...But are even they sure of themselves...
...Once again there appears the maddening contradiction which inhibits action: the bombing of churches and homes that has taken place frightened South-bound industry more than it did Negro bus boycotters...
...This was eminently practical and functional...
...the moonlit evenings under the magnolias...
...For those who cannot or will not face forward, the indefiniteness, contradictions and paradoxes strengthen the hope that maybe the change is not inevitable...
...Grimly, they realized that they themselves would have to act...
...These publications carry great weight...
...Glacier-like transformations toward a more integrated society have been taking place in the South for a generation...
...Where are they now...
...Negroes kept waiting on Washington, for the long year, from the spring of '54 to the spring of '55...
...Yet there are those who wish to continue to live in a world with the pattern of human relations that was created by the plantation-centered economy: the elegant and leisurely white folks...
...Elsewhever, the knife of economic pressure has cut both ways and the politicians have not thought up anything that could stop the federal courts from whittling away the limb on which Jim Crow is perched...
...Negroes everywhere will tell you that these favors are expendable: small losses that are gladly taken...
...The intellectuals, too, have crawled into their holes...
...Thus, the politician and other aggressive actionists, who telephone, write poisoned letters and otherwise threaten, have driven the more enlightened forces from the field...
...It was too much for him: he committed suicide...
...This was legitimate...
...Perhaps, some say, it is wiser to sit quietly, trusting that the storm will, in time, blow itself out...
...H. H. Hubbard of Alabama that they ought to beat him or...
...WHITE LIBERALISM has virtually disappeared from the South...
...But can the WCC deliver...
...There are millions of other Southerners who seem to be indifferent to social issues, living out their individual lives, feeling nothing deeper than the daily routine or the TV drama...
...He knows that he can not remain human while running and hiding each day...
...Now, any village drunk can win applause by calling the Chief Justice a dirty name...
...The bottom was reached with the Emmett Till case...
...Nevertheless, this Governor's own state and a half dozen others have passed resolutions "nullifyng" the federal power to desegregate public schools...
...A few years ago, the largest interracial organization of the South received a generous grant from one of the foundations in support of a program of public education, to aid in smoothing the way for acceptance of integration...
...Only here and there has it clone so-notably in Mis...
...Maybe the Negroes will not take away the good life from anyone...
...It is especially true of transitions that are jerky, uneven and frequently obscure...
...It was as though a small boy, cuffed daily by the playground bully, finally gave up believing that the school principal would make the bully be have...
...Positively, the Louisville Courier-Journal shows what can be done...
...Maybe there is another side to the familiar story...
...There are calls to action...
...White Citizens Councils began to dot the landscape...
...Even in Mississippi, where desegration has made the smallest gains and thought control has been most effective, the college students have repudiated academic Uncle Tomism and have defended the principles of the NAACP...
...And so it goes .. . THE NEGROES, too, have had their great frustrations...
...The forward look has lost Negroes some good will...
...The head of this organization found among his board members and others so little will to push such a program that he has resigned and gone abroad...
...Rapid and deft surgery, we are told, is the best...
...Nothing was done about about this killing of a 14year old youngster who was behaving as countless white youth in the South and elsewhere behave daily...
...Spirits sank...
...All television and radio networks were at his disposal...
...Negro children, whenever they can get a court order giving them the legal basis to do so, will walk through a corridor of hostile white adults into a classroom of white children and teachers...
...This was unforgivable...
...Some of the small town weeklies, representing a more personal journalism, are a bit better...
...It was considered daring in some places not to denounce such mass movements...
...Dissidents may have puttered a bit...
...At one time there were interracial committees all over the region...
...But the failure of Washington to take a firm stand gave heart to those who did not wish to embrace the newer order...
...sissippi...
...Physical violence erupts and is alternately damned...
...There would have been pain but it would have been the lesser pain of the healing stitches...
...The novelists and historians helped perpetuate the myth...
...They did not accomplish much but they did verbalize the "oughts" and other moral imperatives...
...a side but dimly reported in the press...
...He did not say one word about Emmett Till, di rectly or indirectly...
...He will not fool himself...
...None came...
...The Governor of Mississippi, when he had to give in to integration in order to get a veterans hospital for his state, remarked that fighting integration is a "losing battle...
...Everyone could ignore the quiet evidence that belied the illusion of graceful, generous white supremacy...
...Moreover, this particular enemy could not be depended upon to "fight fair...
...The respectable elements among them prefer the White Citizens Council to the Ku Klux Klan...
...throw him into the river, he calmly replied, "I wouldn't advise you to do that...
...all other problems are secondary...
...Still no sound from the White House...
...Many middle class white persons who were promised protection against integration, without bloodshed, feel let down...
...THE DECISION to act, has made all the difference to the Negroes of the South...
...Rosa Parks refused to "move back" on a Montgomery bus and thus set off a mass upsurge that has caught the fancy of the civilized world...
...The continued silence and indirection permitted at first the challenging, then later, the defiance of the Court...
...The "reactionaries" are in uncontested control of the South today...
...In those communities where some racial crisis has occurred, the articulate white liberals of yesterday are conspicuous by their silence...
...When a gang told Rev...
...the cankerous tumor would have been out...
...The politicians themselves betray signs of weariness...
...They carry on an anti-Negro, anti-Yankee, anti-federal government war with varying degrees of finesse...
...Little favors that a white woman was wont to grant to her underpaid maid servant are doubtless fewer...
...More over, Negro leaders have moved forward with a sense of strategy and creativity...
...possibly it can be avoided, or at least held back for our day...
...An editor who is bold enough to oppose indirectly the more strident racism wins a Pulitzer prize...
Vol. 4 • July 1957 • No. 3
