Paperbacks on Segregation

...some of them even became critical of their friends outside the projects who retained their prejudices...

...The two books complement each other beautifully...

...In quoting the vicious pronouncements of the most outspoken segregationists (pronouncements offensive to many moderate Southerners) and in focusing on the unwillingness of all but one of the Council leaders to reveal either salaries or the way in which Council funds are expended, Martin points up fundamental weaknesses in Southern opposition to integration...

...And it will be a long time going in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi...

...Butcher's book sets the record straight...

...Woodward chronicles the rise and fall of the Jim Crow laws...

...We know it: These six books lend only the support of facts and figures to the knowledge all of us have...

...In seeing its citizens, white and Negro, as individuals, Warren, it seems to me, presents the more accurate picture of the South...

...Martin reports what he sees and hears with admirable objectivity...

...He also, in giving a behind-the-scenes account of two television interviews, shows vividly why it is difficult for Northerners to get an accurate idea of Southern points of view...

...Rayford W. Logan in a more ambitious book attempts a brief history of The Negro in the United States (Anvil, 11.25...

...We have been pleasantly surprised to find that some of the white tenants who were loudest in their objections to living next to Negro families have come to accept as neighbors the Negro families living next to them...

...Though most Southern citizens can't remember a time without segregation, their grandfathers found it an innovation both startling and—in many instances—unwelcome...

...Lay it on the line...

...35, paperbound...

...But the supposedly pro-segregation Negro disappointed the television crew, too: "No, the Negro, he is a growing people and he will strive for all the equalities belonging to any American citizen...

...Though his survey is perhaps a little too brief to present more than a very superficial picture, he does offer in the second half of his book a very interesting set of documents bearing on the legal growth of Negro rights...

...It is difficult because the Northerners don't want accuracy...

...The Northern journalists went away unhappy...

...this study compares the attitudes of housewives in two New York unsegregated and two Newark segregated housing projects...

...Though few studies have been made to document this disappearance of prejudice in integrated situations, one good one is in print...

...Formerly prejudiced white women in the integrated projects developed friendships with Negroes...

...John Bartlow Martin's The Deep South Says Never (Ballantine...

...The second interview fared just as badly...

...He indicates precisely how integration helped eliminate prejudice when it was put into effect in Newark: "Even in this short time [since integration] we have already observed significant changes in attitudes, as a consequence of which we shall undoubtedly find that as we break down the physical barriers between Negroes and whites in our projects, many of the social barriers will also disappear...

...It is, I think, ironical that those Southern leaders who in recent months have so eloquently celebrated the rich cultural contribution of the South have failed completely to see that among its very richest gifts are the Negro (and white) literature of protest and the magnificent musicianship of Negro performers and composers...

...Printed in American Social Patterns (Anchor, $.95...

...Neither Negro had proved true to type...

...Woodward's point, of course, is that the segregationist who uses an argument based on tradition is simply talking through his hat...

...Most of them came into force neither immediately after the Civil War nor immediately after Reconstruction but rather in the Nineties and just after the turn of the century...

...Though Martin demonstrates convincingly that the gradualistic Supreme Court school integration decision gave the then-none-too-solid South time to solidify into hard-core Citizens' Council groups, he shows how the opportunistic competition for leadership in the Councils has considerably reduced their efficiency...

...Not only are the laws a relatively new invention, but they also met, at their inception, a great deal of Southern resistance...

...As Woodward points out, the Jim Crow laws are of considerably more recent vintage than many Americans would like to believe...

...In integrated situations, Negroes and whites have discovered that the cliches of prejudice are simply, in fact, meaningless...

...The first interview had been with a Negro businessman who was supposed to oppose segregation and who, in seeing it as a complex problem, irritated the Northern journalist: "Now you're supposed to tell them . what a lot of hogwash this separate but equal stuff is...

...But the Negro businessman wanted to state his own case...

...That it is going is the theme of the six works I want to consider in this article...

...As the Negro's legal rights grew, he began to exert an increasingly strong force on the artistic and intellectual development of America...

...The evidence of the interviews is spectacular...

...Women in segregated housing, on the other hand, not only kept such prejudices as they had but in some cases developed new ones...

...That segregation is doomed is most vividly demonstrated in those once-tension-ridden segregated neighborhoods which, integrated, relax into harmony and understanding...

...When we outgrow prejudices—the next step—we shall have taken a great forward stride in becoming that America we have always dreamed of...

...As Deutch and Collins discovered, segregation keeps prejudices alive...

...This one," Warren quotes the Northern reporter, "is supposed to be the Uncle Tom...

...2.50, cloth-bound) is, in spite of its title, a record as much of the soft spots in the Southern resistance as of the strength of that resistance...

...Martin's project is to concentrate on the leaders of the major anti-integration groups...

...Warren cuts beneath it to talk to the man in the street...

...they want reproduced the imaginary scene they have constructed for themselves...

...C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford Galaxy Book, $1.50) is a carefully written and eminently readable account of the development of the Jim Crow laws...

...That is Morton Deutch's and Mary Evans Collins's report on "Interracial Housing...

...Robert Penn Warren's approach in Segregation (Modern Library Paperback, $.95) is to record a series of casual interviews with typical Southern citizens, white and black...

...He is a growing people...

...Make it simple and direct...

...The Negro in American Culture (Mentor, $.50), Margaret Just Butcher's reworking of the manuscript materials left at his death by the brilliant Negro scholar Alain Leroy Locke, surveys Negro accomplishment in each of the arts...

...A postscript to the report by Louis Danzig, executive director of the Housing Authority of the City of Newark, is well worth quoting...

...We are outgrowing segregation right now...

...Wherever integration has been backed up by firm local action, it has worked not only well but infinitely better than even its most ardent supporters expected it to...

...But eventually it will go—not because it is immoral, impractical, uneconomical or illegal, but because as a nation we have become wise enough to recognize that a caste structure is not only unnecessary but positively unnatural...

...Warren, implicitly in the beginning of his book and explicitly at the end, takes a stand in favor of ultimate integration...

...The survey so convincingly proved its point, incidentally, that the Newark projects were subsequently integrated...

...The Emancipation Proclamation, Plessy v. Ferguson, Roosevelt and Truman's executive orders which opened the way for integration in Government service and in the armed forces, and some twenty other critical documents are given either in full or in sufficiently long excerpts so that the student is able to trace for himself the Negro's long struggle for first-class citizenship...

...Martin presents the "official" resistance line...

...But as schools, transportation and housing are integrated, as people come to know one another as individuals rather than mythical racial types, they will learn to hate or admire one another as men rather than as variously pigmented skins...