National Reports
LARNER, JEREMY
NATIONAL REPORTS The Negro in the South: HALF A LOAF IS ASHES' By Jeremy Lamer THE NEGRO MOVEMENT in the South is centered on the spoken rather than the written word. The oratory is masculine,...
...You had better think it over, and be guided by cooler heads...
...One by one they rose and delivered sober, articulate speeches...
...Those who do read seem to be just coming to life as individuals and trying on ideas for size...
...We are the balance of power in Atlanta...
...But apparently this was not enough...
...Protest meetings on campus were prohibited, and whenever a group of five or more students left the campus together a police car would follow them...
...Furthermore, they drew no connections between their activities and national or international politics...
...His current cause celebre is voting registration: The voting commissioner of Birmingham has begun to disqualify Negro voters on the grounds that either they or their mothers were pregnant before marriage, which, according to the commissioner, puts prospective voters in the category of "bad citizens...
...In 10 years I'll own this store...
...IN CONTRAST TO industrial Birmingham, Atlanta is a commercial city...
...The oratory is masculine, sincere, passionate, arousing the Negro to stand up with dignity and take his place in the world...
...Many of the students were not aware of this requirement, and Trenholm took advantage of the technicality to send 300 of them— mostly demonstrators—home...
...We are getting reports now of white policemen beating up Negroes on the street—something we had put a stop to before you came along...
...Despite the fact that he has been severely beaten up several times (once with tire chains) and narrowly escaped death when his home and church were bombed, he is absolutely fearless...
...Augustine Colleges in Raleigh, North Carolina (two of the first to start sit-ins), young men display scars of Greek letters burned deep into their arms...
...We've reached the point where a blood-bath means very little to us," said one leader...
...We won't let them stop us...
...The march was a disturbing event to the merchants of Atlanta, who felt their, business ventures jeopardized hy the possibility of violence...
...It is hard for Montgomery Negroes to forget the mounted vigilantes who rode into town to head off the 500 people who tried to cross the street from the Dexter Street Baptist Church and hold a prayer meeting on the snow-white steps of the capitol...
...To a man, the students replied that they knew their rights and would not be moved...
...Most of the leaders are pastors in the Baptist Church, where hell-fire preaching is traditionally the measure of a pastor's hold on his congregation...
...If you desire your flesh-pots of Egypt, go ahead, get your flesh-pots, but we got to go to the promised land...
...Nothing he can do can stop us...
...And if you're not going, for God's sake don't you hinder me...
...I have never seen so much fear in this community," says Abernathy...
...The sit-ins seem more daring than ever when one witnesses the tameness of campus life...
...We are working for a community based on love, peace and brotherhood...
...Tempers rose and there was some shouting...
...While the students wore slacks and sportshirts, their elders were dressed like New York bankers...
...No I guess not, boy...
...in Birmingham, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) has been meeting for nearly as long—over four years...
...But, in speaking of their movement, the average Negro student in the South uses terms of practical tactics rather than the religious terms of Martin Luther King...
...Their faces were somber and the atmosphere was somewhat like that of an emergency meeting of the General Motors board of directors...
...But the fear that grips Montgomery is not the ordinary fear of terrorism— it is the fear of economic reprisals to the Negro middle-class...
...Shortly after, Trenholm—on orders from Patterson—expelled nine student leaders and placed many more on probation...
...Or, in the words of Shuttlesworth: "If you can't take it, you can't make it...
...They went straight to a meeting to make plans for the next campaign...
...Most of the faculty are afraid that everyone will lose his job, and their fear has infected a large part of the Montgomery black bourgeoisie...
...It would seem the educators are hoist with their own petard: For, when asked why they rebel actively where their parents did not, the students reply, "You can't keep an educated man down...
...Accordingly, Trenholm has cooperated with Patterson and the police to keep the student movement stillborn at his college...
...Martin Luther King was raised in Atlanta and has his new pastorate there, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is located there also...
...The people are with the students and so am I." He walked out of the meeting...
...One student couldn't resist adding, "If you really control the police force, you'll be able to stop the violence without consulting us...
...For your own protection...
...Is the community ready...
...Negro teachers have long been in a peculiarly vulnerable position: While teaching is the only profession readily open to Negroes, most of the jobs are at public schools and colleges, where positions are granted at the pleasure of the states...
...While this generalization is qualified by a handful of exceptions on every campus, the atmosphere of the Southern Negro college is permeated with super-respectability...
...Half a loaf is ashes in the mouths of the new generation...
...Every student I asked, without exception, answered, "All my life...
...The student stood outside the store and looked back in at the clerk...
...No one can staff us...
...This phenomenon is especially vivid in Birmingham, the most feudal city of the South, where the economy is based on huge Northern-owned industrial plants and the Negro community is even more than usually impoverished...
...Fraternities are rife and claim fanatic loyalty...
...The Negro community is one of the most self-conscious in the country...
...Weekly collections of this sort could not exist without the religious discipline...
...Rednecks had come into Atlanta from rural districts and were massed around the capitol waiting for the 2,000 marchers, some armed with clubs given them by state policemen...
...There'll be more of us next year, and every year . . . 'till we get what we want...
...We are the leaders, all of us...
...Over and over again they revile what they call "second-class citizenship...
...We'd hate to see your movement backfire and spoil the things we've worked so hard for...
...The state capital is there, and Governor John Patterson—typical of the state administrators of the South—has decided to meet the Negro movement with head-on terror...
...The real-estate man put in the kicker...
...Bull Connor, knows whether his mother was pregnant with him before or after she was married...
...Only 11 professors chose to support the students, and these, in addition to being in imminent danger of losing their jobs, have been ostracized by their fellow teachers...
...Every candidate comes light here, in this room, to make his pre-election promises...
...Aber-nathy calls it "preaching the social gospel...
...Most of the pressure is generated from Alabama State Teachers College, where the Negro president, H. Council Trenholm, is a pawn of the State Administration...
...We've got to protect that $80 million...
...Maybe that's because it's the only place he owns lock, stock and barrel...
...The Montgomery Improvement Association (MTA) has held mass meetings of over 1,000 people every Monday night since the beginning of the bus boycott in December 1954...
...They communicate a tremendous excitement precisely because each one thinks of himself and his group as the crucial unit of action...
...I was impressed by the absence of Southern accents, and later discovered that they sent their own children to Northern universities...
...Abernathy talked about Ike playing golf on "the Jim Crow course at Augusta...
...Are you ready for reprisals...
...Feeling that violence was likely, city police turned the marchers away three blocks from their destination...
...Despite the fact that Birmingham is a garrison city (where a Negro can be jailed for playing checkers with a white), the Negro community has picked up Shuttlesworth's fighting spirit...
...The same thing happened in the sermon: the preacher bucking and weaving in eyes-closed rapture, chanting prose poetry of Moses and the Israelites, Joshua and the walls of Jericho, his phrases rounded with "Amens...
...They were not so polished as the pillars, but much briefer...
...Every leader is an orator, and the leader of leaders, Martin Luther King, is the finest orator in the South...
...Students like these are the most vital part of the Negro movement in the South...
...Yet, proud as they are of their new brick colleges, the students are no longer content to thrive on handouts from the white community...
...Dwight David Eisenhower has sat down on the stool of do-nothing...
...He was furious and everyone else got furious too...
...The police chief consults with us before he makes a move...
...The meetings take place in church, and are combined with prayers and hymns...
...No one can be spared...
...The first few speeches were designed "to acquaint the students with what our group has been doing in Atlanta...
...But a great change is coming over these churches: Otherworldli-ness is being turned inside-out with visions of earthly paradise...
...So long, boy...
...Talk like this may sound strange in church, especially a Southern Negro Baptist church, where the theme has always run something like: Just give me my sweet Jesus and you can have all the rest of the world...
...They await directions from no one, pride themselves on their readiness to act whenever they see a good opportunity...
...In a meeting with a group of leaders from Virginia State, one proclaimed: "We have no intellectuals, we read no books...
...tersburg, Virginia, on a Wednesday night so stifling that the standing-room audience was a mass of waving paper fans, I heard Abernathy begin his speech with a typical statement of principles: "Black supremacy is just as bad as white...
...From a high table in front, the meeting was presided over by a man with a pleasant face and remarkably light skin who spoke and looked like President Eisenhower...
...A student went into a drugstore to make a purchase, and had the following exchange with the clerk: "Can I help you, boy...
...We have elected every mayor since the war...
...Trenholm also posted an inconspicuous notice requiring students to register for the spring quarter by a certain date and on a certain form...
...The upshot of this electoral power, it turned out, was that peace could be maintained between the races...
...They preach The Movement at week-night mass meetings all over the South...
...Shuttlesworth is the most down-to-earth of the preacher-leaders...
...The Alabama State faculty, however, was more easily intimidated...
...The group's most imposing claim was that it could deliver the Atlanta Negro vote...
...When questioned about King's leadership, the reply never varies: "Martin Luther King is not our leader, he is our symbol...
...He drew a laugh from even the two white detectives Connor has stationed in the ACMHR meetings...
...at either end and the people all shouting-stamping-crying every step of the way...
...One incident struck me as typical...
...Also disturbed was the sizeable minority of Negro business and professional men in Atlanta, who had gained personal concessions from the whites over the years by pursuing a program of moderate racial advancement...
...Everyone dresses like the pictures in Sunday magazines—pressed pants, shined shoes, ivy shirts and flouncy dresses...
...Do you think you have the right to assume that responsibility...
...Taking place right in the South...
...A woman got up in a front pew and began a singsong speech about how the Lord and the Devil fought for her soul, the audience goading her to a frenzy...
...Since the professors and administrators have lived in just this way, they come in for a good deal of contempt...
...they began a series of sit-ins in March, and climaxed them with a march on the state capitol May 17, the sixth anniversary of the Supreme Court school integration decision...
...For the most part, the students are religious in habit, but do not connect religion with the sit-in movement...
...Though their political outlook is incomplete, confined as it is to their personal desire for civil rights, they may very well make a bigger impact on American life than they mean to...
...Yet, paradoxically, their willingness for self-sacrifice is rooted, to a large extent, in personal material desires...
...A fight for freedom...
...Come on out and hit me," the student said...
...It is rare, for example, to find a student who is familiar with the writing of the best-known exponents of civil disobedience...
...Despite their shrewdness in planning practical political moves, they display a remarkable unworldliness in intellectual matters...
...So you see, kids, we've been in this thing a long time...
...In PeJEREMY LARNER, a young free-lance writer, has just ended a six-month tour of Southern Negro communities...
...The desire for respectability is reflected not only in the curriculum, where courses in "orientation" and "adjustment" are commonly required, but also in the amazingly docile habits of the college community...
...The community is ready," he said...
...And believe me, they had better be good...
...Now listen: We're the ones who have laid the base for Negro progress in Atlanta, and we've laid it solid, with $80 million of capital invested on Auburn Street...
...Girls, as a rule, must be safe in their dormitories by 10:30 PM—even on weekends—and to be caught drinking is cause for expulsion...
...Whereupon the Montgomery Fire Department entered the church and blasted the meeting apart with fire hoses...
...Absolutely no forms of rebellion exist: no bohemianism, no orgies, no riots, no radical discussion groups— not even walking on the grass...
...While some of them send contributions to the town's Negro leaders on the sly, the Monday night mass meetings are made up almost entirely of what Abernathy calls "the masses...
...Nine out of every 10 students to whom I put the question replied that, to them, non-violence was purely a matter of strategy...
...He went from universal non-violence to the situation in America...
...At Shaw and St...
...This means that Northern capital sends in managers as well as money, the tone of the city is Chamber-of-Commerce progressive and the city Government is relatively liberal...
...The Negro will never be free in America until he is free of his desire for materialism...
...There's violence in this town, and it's getting worse every day...
...He ended with an appeal for unity: "We have no privileged groups in our ranks...
...That's like a man who's choking someone asking the man he's choking for 'just a little more time' so he can 'ease up gradually.' The Negro in the South will never adjust...
...The evening that I attended, the congregation sang interminably long, wierd, wailing hymns of a completely different style from the "spirituals" that commonly pass for Negro folk music...
...About 20 minutes from the center of town by segregated taxi is a neat, well-tended campus where the red brick buildings house six Negro colleges with a total enrollment of over 4.000 students...
...These students are among the most intelligent and ambitious in The Movement...
...As children of America's most underprivileged people, they are hungry for their share of the spoils...
...Each one said practically the same thing: "We are continuing our movement as best we know how...
...A student leader from Virginia State College told me, "The church has always been a kind of public forum for the Negro...
...Now if you kids keep on the way you're going, there's going to be war in this town and God knows what will happen...
...Guess I'll be leaving now, boy...
...You've started out fine, but what are you going to do for a second act...
...It was even announced that it was this group who, by consultation with the police chief, had decided that the marchers would not be permitted to reach the capitol...
...Finally the chairman got the meeting under control and made a pleasant speech complimenting the students and assuring everybody that they could reach agreement on a program...
...One by one the students got up and replied...
...Good-bye, boy...
...How can that man go to the summit to work for peace when his own country is a lighted powder-keg...
...It is said that, if it weren't for pressure from the red-neck state Government, the city of Atlanta would have integrated its schools long ago...
...Almost every day he puts in a personal appearance at the municipal buildings to demand fair treatment for himself or one of his parishioners...
...The social gospel takes strongest root among the poorest and most religious Negroes, precisely the people who were previously lulled into resignation by their religion...
...On one occasion students meeting in a church were informed that the police had surrounded the premises and ordered them to disperse because they were creating a "fire hazard...
...Don't see anything you'd like, boy...
...I'll be blunt with you, man: We're conservatives...
...The clerk's face was a bright red with fury...
...Shuttlesworth replied from the pulpit that "neither our voting commissioner nor our honored mayor nor even our wonderful chief of police, Mr...
...He was flanked by an Episcopalian minister, a banker, a realtor and a lawyer...
...You need guidance, and we hope you'll have the vision to accept it...
...And everywhere Negro communities are putting together organizations modelled on these two...
...It's our experience that you have to work slowly to get lasting results...
...He was afraid there was no point in going on that day, but he wanted everyone to know that a program committee had already been appointed...
...Still the students went on demonstrating, and on March 1, 1,800 of them marched on the capitol...
...A fight to save America for freedom...
...They are making the ultimate demands on American democracy, demands which imply a challenge both to the values of our society and the power-structure these values rationalize...
...Here the meetings of the ACMHR are hardly distinguishable from revival meetings...
...A man who makes his way to the high-status position of president of a state college for Negroes is in no position to bite the hand that feeds him...
...You can't expect much help from the outside...
...After the meeting the student leaders were grim...
...There is a strong liaison between wealthy Negroes and city hall, based on the fact that in the past the black burghers could assure resignation and quiet in their brethren...
...There can be no such thing unless every man is granted his worth and dignity as a human being...
...Partly because their high schools and colleges operate on an extremely low academic level, these young people are not in the habit of reading...
...One cannot gauge their mood better than by asking: How long have you been planning this...
...Unlike their teachers, the students who have taken part in the outbreak of sit-ins which began last February have displayed absolute personal courage...
...Hardly an idealogue, he seems to revel in a good, hard (non-violent) fight...
...If you ask them why they are not afraid, they will say, "Things couldn't be worse...
...There was a fight, he said...
...Due to the exertions of the group, Negro policemen had been added to the force...
...I was in Atlanta shortly after the march, when an imposing Negro power-group called in five of the top student leaders for a showdown meeting...
...But he can't stop us...
...We hope you will join us...
...There is no freedom at all unless there is freedom for all...
...At the very least, the students are already living a style of life by which the individual takes personal action to secure the things he believes in, and that in itself is a radical innovation in America...
...On May 13, representatives of demonstrating schools all over the South met in Atlanta to set up a "Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee," and under the influence of such adult leaders as the Reverend James Lawson of Nashville, drafted a "non-violence creed" which reflects high religious and moral purpose...
...A young lawyer got to his feet and demanded the floor...
...Nor the mobs armed with wooden clubs who patrolled downtown streets during this spring's student sit-downs...
...But after the sermon, the Reverend Fred Shuttles-worth stood up and marched the audience row by row past the pulpit, where he collected two dollars from every man and one from every woman...
...We want the same things you do, but we know by now that they can't be gotten overnight...
...The students sat in a row facing a semi-circle of their self-appointed community leaders...
...We have nowhere to go but up...
...Guess not, boy...
...They are more likely to quote you Harry Golden than Gandhi or Thoreau...
...Next to King, the speaker most in demand is the Reverend Ralph Aber-nathy, also of Montgomery...
...They tell us to adjust...
...They are not pacifists, and mention of Martin Luther King's political pacifism usually draws a blank...
...BUT IN Montgomery, a 100 miles to the south, fear is rife...
Vol. 43 • September 1960 • No. 35
