The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Meaning of the Court Ruling: The Civil War Ends at Last To me, the Supreme Court's decision on segregation is something personal. It liberates my conscience from...
...Equality has been proclaimed where it is most vital to human happiness...
...We were busy developing the West, becoming industrialized and getting rich...
...They had never studied economics...
...From now on...
...Lynchings mounted up to about a hundred a year...
...I had two brothers serving in the thick of it, and most of my friends were the sons of veterans...
...For a long time, we knew little and cared less about what was happening to the Negroes...
...I am sure that my dear friend, Charles Beard, would not have rated it very high...
...Our Negro ghettos became so bad that many Negroes preferred to live in the South...
...But a great step forward has been taken...
...But, even today, they are forced to endure a degrading sense of inferiority...
...In seventeen states, school life must be reconstructed...
...Their knowledge of history was just what they could recall, and their theory about the great war was extremely naive...
...The first Negroes were brought to these shores in 1619, twelve years after the first Englishmen built their homes in Virginia...
...When I was a boy in a little town out in Ohio, practically all the youngsters my age were tied in with the Civil War...
...If I wanted to take a Negro friend to dinner...
...Education, they said, is a basic function of human society...
...the great war was forgotten...
...In time, we began to learn about the New South...
...I can look Negroes in the face without cringing...
...Even now, black citizens are prevented from living among white ones...
...They helped create everything which has gone into the making of this country...
...Often, toward the end of an evening, these bearded old soldiers would drift into serious talk...
...In their simple way, these chaps, some of whom stumped around on wooden legs, thought that they had enlisted to free the black people from slavery...
...The nine justices, in their unanimous decision, went deep into human nature...
...When lynch-law was finally abolished, compensatory forms of violence burst out up North in Chicago and Detroit...
...To separate children from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of race "generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone...
...But from about 1890 on the picture began to change...
...It liberates my conscience from a lifelong burden...
...the Southern landscape or ladies were praised...
...We were given figures on sharecroppers: we heard about peonage...
...the black were as good as the white...
...There was an Emancipation Proclamation, but no real emancipation...
...A time came when Negroes were not admitted to restaurants and theaters in New York and Chicago...
...A strange reversal set in: The North had won the war of guns and swords, but the South began to win the war of ideas and prejudices...
...Much remains to be done...
...Perhaps they should have reasoned better...
...The old soldiers died off...
...People of all shades of color were beginning to realize that the war had not accomplished its popularly advertised objective...
...But the point of my story is that people all over the North believed in this theory...
...I have always felt guilty whenever I looked a Negro in the face...
...Finally, we went down to Georgia and Alabama and saw the desperately dilapidated wooden shacks which served as homes...
...it is the patiently borne and unvoiced pain...
...But, thanks to this decision, this evil is now to come to an end...
...But the worst feature of this inequality is not the occasional brute violence...
...What those nine men—two of them Southerners—did has set me and millions of others free, or almost free, from this weight...
...Indeed, in many Northern states the liberation theory was justified, for in those days Northern Negroes were actually equal to whites...
...Involved here is the sort of history that is never written down in books...
...it has...
...In I he North, we got interested in other matters...
...Even without any profound theorizing, they should have been able to figure out that people do not change their opinions and attitudes because they lose a war...
...It does...
...The war had been worthwhile, because this piece of business was finished...
...I had to conceal my embarrassment and lead him to some private club...
...When the men of the town met in front of a saloon or grocery store, it was the war they talked about...
...In many places, we have not yet learned to live and work together...
...Slavery was ended...
...Battles were described, generals were criticized...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 22
