Progress Reports from the South
LOMAX, LOUIS E.
Progress Reports from the South DIARY OF A SIT-IN By Merrill Proudfoot North Carolina. 204 pp. $5.00. NEGRO LEADERSHIP IN A SOUTHERN CITY By M. Elaine Burgess North Carolina. 231 pp....
...6.00...
...His themestory is the progress of the sit-ins from the day they began until the local lunch counters were integrated...
...The Knoxville ministers have been a flat tire in the whole desegregation movement," Proudfoot quotes an associate as saying, and he himself clearly agrees...
...The lay reader will not understand what Miss Burgess is about...
...The other and far more significant story is that of his own growth: a compelling account of a Southern white clergyman arriving face to face with his conscience...
...Negroes often use their "sub-cultural" groups as power levers to win concessions from white people...
...Nobody, including ourselves, believes us...
...For he is among the few Southern white ministers who have faced this issue and openly said, "either we practice what we preach or we may as well stop preaching...
...For this very reason Proudfoot's book ought to be required reading for all Southem Christians, Negro and white, but particularly the latter...
...Negroes and whites have different views of Negro leadership...
...He wound up as one of the leaders of the sit-in movement...
...Her book is larded with tables and charts, most of which are all but impossible to read in a manner that relates them to the text...
...What shall it avail us all if the key to eternal wisdom is couched in a turgid tome we cannot read...
...Reading Proudfoot's diary and following him into deep doubts about the future of Christianity, a glimmer of hope stirs...
...What is rewarding, indeed, is the very fact that Proudfoot arrives at the point of doubt...
...But neither book delivers its message with enough clarity to keep the reader going from one page to another...
...Perhaps what we need is a foundation that will underwrite courses in simple writing for our college faculties...
...Mediocre as literature, his book contains a towering spiritual message...
...Both authors are university professors, yet they are of that wide class of educated Americans who seem unable to clarify their thoughts and state them simply in language people can read and understand...
...Her Negro Leadership in a Southern City attempts to study the social structure of the Negro community and to determine how this structure functions as a power force to deal with the white community...
...This has not always been the case, and had she begun her study with this change of white attitude and gone on from there to give us an insight into the new transition that has come over the South her book would have been a valuable work...
...But the Reverend Proudfoot's message is worth the effort...
...The two books move me to make one final observation about the state of clear thinking and good writing in our country...
...As it is, the book is too bland, too involved with, itself—how it decided to approach the subject in a given way and why certain preliminary notions had to be abandoned—to make the reader really care...
...Proudfoot started out as a member of the Mayor's committee charged with finding some way out of the impasse produced when students from Knoxville College staged sit-in demonstrations at local lunch counters...
...One keeps wishing he could sit in church and hear all this from the lectern...
...On the printed page, the sermonizing becomes flat...
...M. Elaine Burgess has written a sort of minor Middletown...
...Reviewed by LOUIS E. LOMAX Author, "The Reluctant African," "The Negro Revolt" The Reverend Merrill Proudfoot, a white man, is a member of the faculty of Knoxville College, a Negro church-related institution in Knoxville, Tennessee...
...Here are two books, each eager to say something terribly important, both written by persons of good minds and spirits...
...His moving book, Diary of a Sit-in, is an account of one soul's bout with the city fathers and, ultimately, with itself...
...Of course Proudfoot is a preacher, not a writer, and his book is difficult to read...
...Miss Burgess' best find is the disclosure that the white power structure of her town—she calls it Crescent City—is ready to talk terms...
...The result is interesting but difficult reading, more a scholar's research book than a volume for general consumption...
...Proudfoot tells two stories, both moving, one shattering...
...Even when one toils his way through these charts, they tend to prove things we have all known since Gunnar Myrdal's The American Dilemma: Negroes and white people, particularly in the South, have different value structures...
...Miss Burgess also discusses the white community's response to the Negro thrust, but her main concern is with the Negro decision-making machinery...
Vol. 45 • July 1962 • No. 15
