The Race Dilemma

...The pattern of change is not even, nor is it likely to be...

...I do not think so...

...they still do not regard the Negro as their equal...

...Bringing practice into conformity with policy is one of the ultimate tests of democracy, which must protect the declared rights of the minority while it is bound by the will of the majority...

...The gross abuses and the calculated exploitation that were cloaked by legal segregation are an essential part of the record...

...Yet, they are the attitudes that have colored the current conflict—the attitudes to which the advocates on either side give angry voice...

...But there is another of equal importance—the fact that in its overall implications the Southern white attitude toward the Negro is not substantially different from the prevailing American white altitude...

...Does this mean that the evolving pattern of desegregation by law is bound to fail...

...To some degree, every American has felt the thrust of the horns...

...Ironically, it is in part these advances—economic and political—that complicate the American Negro's existence today...

...If I had to cite the single most significant fact in American race relations today, I would say that it is the fact that the city of Chicago today contains more Negroes than the entire Confederate state of Arkansas —and that this vast change has taken place in a single generation that saw millions of Negroes not only change their place of residence but their way of life, exchanging the values of their agrarian background for those of an urban people...

...Much of the Southern political leadership remains formally committed to working out a pattern of race relations within the old "separate but equal" concept, despite its rejection by the Supreme Court...

...This, then, is the first truth in the dilemma of race relations...

...The most extreme actions of the new Citizens' Councils fall far short of the outright reign of terror undertaken by the Ku Klux Klan a generation ago...

...this estimate of the alternatives before the region is emotional rather than rational...

...He is still in his time of horizontal migration from farm to city, and from south to north...

...The new, militant Negro leadership as a matter of principle opposes segregation in any form—legal or extra-legal, voluntary or enforced —as a mark of inferiority...

...Inside the South and out of it, the Negro has come by a long and tortuous road to the point reached before him by previous generations of immigrants...

...This, I think, is the essential distinction...

...The late Howard Odum, the great student of the Southern region, once undertook what he called a sort of hidden poll of the great mass of Southern folk and found at the heart of the Southern credo this central theme: "The Negro is a Negro and nothing more...

...They were and are indefensible—and because of this they provided the cutting edge that has removed the legal underpinning of segregation...

...Most Southerners see them thus: to comply with the requirements of the Supreme Court at the cost of severe dislocation of the existing social order...

...Equality of person is not a fact of American life and never has been...

...The walls of prejudice are perhaps harder to scale than those that confronted any of the other minorities who found their place in this conglomerate nation of ours...

...It remains, however, the prevailing view and therefore the reality with which any consideration of the dilemma in race relations must begin...

...If it denied the Negro certain rights granted to whites, it also guaranteed him certain privileges and immunities at a time when he was not equipped to compete on an equal footing with his white neighbors...

...Both these deeply-held ideas will survive for the foreseeable future...

...In the march of generations, the condition of the American Negro has been steadily improved—in recent \ ears by his own efforts, and earlier by the assistance of sympathetic whites...

...They will provide the rallying point for those who, in Ralph McGill's phrase, are now engaged in guerrilla fighting among the ruins of the old segregated society...

...The Race Dilemma The Negro struggle for equality, and the white rejection of it, are charged with emotion—which is not confined to the South By Harry S. Ashmore The dictionary defines "dilemma" thus: "An argument presenting an antagonist with two or more alternatives, but equally conclusive against him whichever he chooses...

...the lines in Chicago, for example, are if anything more sharply drawn than they are in Atlanta...

...But noblesse oblige was part of the system, too—the recognized obligation of the strong to protect the weak—and this, too, is disappearing in the transition that is now well under way...

...oversimplified...

...The dilemma, then, may be reduced to this summary statement which applies with equal force in every community where Negroes have congregated in considerable number: The American white is not yet ready to accept the Negro as his equal, and the American Negro is no longer willing to accept anything less...

...They will continue for some years to shape political decisions and social customs...

...He outlined these views at a dinner of B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League before the Little Rock crisis began...

...In the Deep South, there is not yet any perceptible break...

...The issue is emotional—on both sides...

...But his forward progress lias not yet significantly altered the basic attitude of the American white...

...So it is with the prevailing white attitude toward this "visible minority...

...Equality of opportunity is the goal...

...He is set apart as were the Jews, the Poles and the Irish before him—huddled into the worst housing, assigned to the most menial jobs, beset by his own inferior background...

...To the South, the "unsatisfactory alternatives" appear to have been clearly drawn by the steady development of a public policy which now forbids legal segregation in any activity prescribed by law or sustained by public funds...

...It has always been so...

...His sights are higher, his demands are greater, and his patience has grown thin...

...The other is the belief that any separation of the races is inherently discriminatory and therefore morally wrong...

...Yet, a closer look at the general scene shows signs of significant change everywhere...

...it is not less so now that we argue over second-class citizenship...

...Southerners translated their viewpoint into the legal barriers of segregation, which are now being systematically struck down...

...So it is with the notion that segregation has always been discriminatory...

...In many ways, his problems are special...

...The practice, however, is not now significantly different from that which prevails in all the great cities where Negroes have arrived in late years to take their place in the ghettos vacated by earlier generations of immigrants...

...There is not one South, but many souths— each significantly different in the racial composition of its population and in its tradition...

...The immediate conflict centers now in the sensitive area of public education, but its implications go far beyond the classroom...

...It is not unusual to find the declared public policy in conflict with the public attitude in this area...

...Yet, already an increasing number of Southerners are groping for new accommodations—not because the old attitudes are necessarily changing, but because they are beginning to understand that the shifting racial pattern is only part of the great change that is sweeping over the region—and by no means the most important part...

...the Plessy doctrine called for equal public facilities in the days when separation was legal, but discrimination prevailed...

...One is the belief that any association between whites and Negroes beyond that of master and servant inevitably leads to intermingling of the races...

...Non-Southerners did not, in most cases, but, faced with a rising tide of Negro immigration, they have erected extra-legal barriers that have attained the same end...

...We are, in fact, called upon by the new public policy to re-order our society in many important ways...

...First of all, the physical violence which many hotspurs predicted and many sober Southerners feared has not developed except in isolated cases...

...Now, in the wake of the great redistribution of the Negro population in a single generation, every major American community must face it in practical terms...

...The other two were the one-crop agrarian economy —made possible by the slave, and necessary by his emancipation—and the one-party political system, brought into being as a means of disfranchising the freedmen...

...And it offers this secondary definition: "A situation involving choice between equally unsatisfactory alternatives...

...But its resolution is at least as certain as the survival of the democratic concept in a nation which has never attained its goal—hut lias never considered abandoning it...

...Every Southern city has grown steadily whiter in recent years—while every major non-Southern city has witnessed a sharp and continuing increase in the proportion of its Negro population...

...This, surely, was the concept embodied in the Supreme Court decision in the public-school cases...

...All three of these institutions are so closely interrelated as to be virtually one, and none can survive the others...

...And Odum added in his last formal advice to his people: "It was of the utmost importance that Southerners face the plain assumption that thev did not appraise the Negro as the same sort of human being they themselves are...

...Thus, the Southern leaders who are working, with marked success, to industrialize the region are undermining the system of segregation many of them so passionately defend...

...This trend will continue, I believe, in the upland countries of the Southern states proper—the counties where the Negro population is sparse and the practice of segregation has never been buttressed by unyielding social sanction...

...The horns are sharp...

...On the basis of all the evidence, I think, rather, that it is bound to succeed...

...The dilemma is real...

...he, too, will break out of his ghettos and gain greater acceptance as his improved opportunities enable him to earn it...

...The concept is negative rather than positive...

...or to defy the national government at the cost of disrupting the judicial process, calling clown the moral condemnation of non-Southerners, incurring political penalties, and handicapping the late-blooming economic development of the region...

...In the meantime, the great out-migration of Negroes from the South continues, literally changing the complexion of the region year by year...

...Powerful forces are working to preserve segregation, but in every significant test for the last twenty years the forces working against segregation have proved stronger...

...In historical perspective, the separate-but-equal doctrine may be seen as a necessary bridge in the transition from slavery to citizenship...

...But time is working on his side, and the law—and the moral force which has made him a burden on ever) white Americans conscience throughout our national history...

...These polar attitudes which I have described do not preclude compromise—they demand it...

...Most observers give the Negro voters credit for cracking the solid Democratic front in such slates as Louisiana and Tennessee...

...The only widespread intermingling of the races occurred in the days of the Negro's enforced degradation...

...Public policy forbade the mistreatment of bondsmen in the era of slavery but did not effectively protect them...

...I have myself como perilously close to being trapped by one of the oversimplifications I have been deploring...

...The attitude of the white citizens of Louisville has not changed...

...He has been the principal figure in a great moral crusade that has run through all our history, a crusade that had its roots in that part of the nation where, until recent years, the Negro did not live...

...Even cursory reading of the record should dispel both notions...

...Put another way, we are called upon to make changes in the patterns of our everyday life that the great majority of white Americans are reluctant to undertake...

...But, under the pressure of the law and the prodding of a few wise men, they have accepted the necessity of granting him a greater measure of equality of opportunity...

...With only rare exceptions, Negroes everywhere in the United States live in segregated communities...

...Frequently, we are trapped by the catch-phrases that have had long currency in this great debate— the terms that carry with them emotional overtones of the old moral argument...

...This was so when the debate was couched in terms of human slavery...

...These are the polar attitudes, and there is a great range between them among the members of both races...

...There have been shocking examples of denial of such basic civil rights as the franchise, yet even in the Deep South the participation of Negroes in the 1956 election was the greatest in history...

...The tradition in the South is different...

...Legal segregation was only one of the three peculiar institutions that set the Southern region apart through most of its history...

...Yet, it has been obscured by two false notions widely and stubbornly held—one on each side of the central controversy...

...The horns are sharpest, however, for the South—still the home of the majority of American Negroes, and the only region whose social structure has been largely shaped by their presence...

...Tlio Southern view appears vastly HARRY SCOTT ASHMORE, executive editor of the Arkansas Gazette, is author of the Ford Foundation study, The Negro and the Schools...

...it has declined almost to the vanishing point with the general social improvement of the minority race...

...what we seek to guarantee our children is not a certain place in society, but a clear field on which no child will be especially handicapped by his race or religion...

...But his vertical migration is beginning, and it will accelerate...

...Segregation in education is already a dead letter in more than half the states that required it prior to the Supreme Court decision in the public-school cases...

...The white citizens of Louisville have accepted the principle of integration in their public schools and have begun the transition on a limited scale...

...But he has also received sympathy and support in his long struggle from those who have always been his neighbors—the Southern whites...

...In a philosophical sense, the problem of accommodating our Negro minority has always been, as Gunnar Myrdal termed it, an American dilemma...