WANTED: A SOUTHERN STATEMAN

...And the regional chauvinism of even the most enlightened of Southern spokesmen, the pleas for tolerance and gradualism, the partial identification with extremists and hot-heads, stems, it seems to me, from a little residue in all of them of irrational resentment and shame...

...Bull sessions in bars and club-cars and on college campuses regularly get around to it...

...apparently, attitudes have some relation to age...

...and honored with a two-column editorial in a Montgomery, Alabama, paper which says that, as a "pro-Negro propagandist," I have no business teaching law...

...maybe, then, different degrees of education and intelligence help create different white Southern attitudes toward segregation...

...What these add up to is an assurance that any real attempted enforcement of the Supreme Court's desegregation decrees, at least in the deep South, must lead to widespread rebellion backed by violence...

...last |EtteIt opposition to integration.—is actually the attitude of a relatively small though very vocal group of Southern citizens...

...For the suggestion that two wrongs don't make a right carries no weight to any Southerner who believes that segregation, by law or not by law, is right and normal—and who is merely using attack as the best defense...

...As a result, and far more meaningfully, 1 have had to do a lot of reading and listening too...

...I have been accused a dozen times of hating Southerners (I don't) and asked a dozen times how I would like to have my son go to school with "niggers" (he does, and has for ten years...

...And Southerners everywhere would feel the surge of a new type of regional pride—a pride based on victory instead of defeat, an emotion rooted in reason...

...When I speak of "the Southern attitude toward segregation," I am deliberately mimicking—just to show how easy it is to slice into such slipshod analysis—what I am convinced is one of the two major blind spots in the talking, writing, and thinking of many Southerners who ought to know better...

...And always, if I question any of this, comes the slow and sympathetic shaking of the head and "You just don't understand those people...

...They are—not exclusively but essentially—the white, uneducated, old-or-middle-aged denizens of the Deep South who have never, in the services or elsewhere, had the occasion or the wish to associate with Negroes except as "niggers who gotta be put in their place and kept there...

...So when a white Southerner refers to "the Southern attitude," what he means is "the white Southern attitude...

...Fourth and finally—though I could go on—white Southern boys who fought and ate and slept side-by-side with Negroes in the unsegre-gated armed forces, in World War II or in Korea, usually express a higher opinion of Negroes and a correspondingly lower opinion of color-lines than do their age-mates who did not share their experiences...

...Could it be that they don't understand...

...Confronted with such a Southern Alliance, the die-hards would fast fade away...

...And most idiotic of all is the fact that so small a group of antediluvian die-hards has sold its inhuman, hysterical slant to the whole nation, South and North, as "the Southern attitude toward segregation...

...For, of course, there is no such thing as a "Southern attitude" toward segregation...

...Such a statesman could call to his banner the Negroes, the white men and women of the Southwest and Border states, the white youth of the whole South, the educated oldsters, and the men from even the deepest South who got the feel—and lost the fear—of unsegre-gation during two wars...

...Third, wherever ex-white Southern colleges or universities have admitted Negroes, too often grudgingly, these Negroes have been welcomed and accepted by the bulk of their white fellow-students...

...It does no good to reply that this is not discrimination by law, that it is done privately, not governmentally—nor to reply, as I do, that I nevertheless deplore it almost as much...

...Front pages and editorial FRED RODELL has written widely of the law and public affairs...

...Or why, seeing this, do they half-defend it, half-justify it, urge its acceptance as one of the ineluctable facts of life, even though it leads to open defiance of law...

...The answer, I believe—and as I hinted earlier-—is that, no less than the "poor whites" with their explosive fury in word and deed, the intelligent, liberal Southerners who speak softly in their compatriots' behalf are dictated in' •' their own reactions, though on quite a different wavelength, by emotion rather than 'reason.' (I do not include-among Qiese the' Southern politicos, from Eastiahd and Talmadge on up, who use the segregation issue both rationally .and cold-bloodedly for the simple, practical purpose of getting votes...

...Without stretching the metaphor (I hope), the South, like Germany, once lost a war and has never forgotten it...

...I wonder...

...pages of newspapers, North and South, are full of it...

...the Autherine Lucy disgrace was sparked by townsfolk, with a comparatively few students following along—and it was student pressure that forced the Georgia Tech authorities to let their football team play against Pittsburgh, Negro halfback and all...

...Hardly an issue of a national magazine—including this one—appears without an article about it...

...Why then can they not see that the hard tooth-and-nail core of Southern resistance to racial integration is strictly emotional and utterly irrational...

...apparently, there must be some difference between the attitudes of Southern Southerners and those of Northern or Western Southerners...

...But again, there is no such thing as a "white Southern attitude"—as many facts bear eloquent witness...

...It is not only idiotic but potentially suicidal that such an issue should overshadow and directly make more difficult (most of the men and women on earth do not wear white skins) the paramount problem of keeping world peace in a nuclear age...

...I have been called all the names in the book— from "nigger-lover" to "Communist" to "Pope-lover" (a nice twist, stemming, I take it, from the courageous anti-segregation stand of Southern priests) to the unprintable...

...Most of these Southerners understood well enough that it was a latent emotional insecurity, a neurotic need to be better than the next fellow (or the next nation), that Hitler seized on and whipped to violent action in the German people...

...his article on desegregation in the April 3 issue of Look has aroused national attention...

...Most of the letters have come from South of the Mason-Dixon-Yates line, and most of the Southern letters have been, at their mildest, indignant...

...past living habits can shape attitudes too...

...Second comes the fact, demonstrated here and there throughout the whole South, that young white Southerners—and the younger the truer— find nothing strange nor offensive about mixing freely with young black Southerners in classrooms and play-yards...

...On the more moderate side, I have been called to task constantly, by way of the old mote-and-beam approach, for Northern discrimination against Negroes in Detroit, in Chicago, in New York, elsewhere...

...Ever since that fateful Supreme Court decision of barely two years ago, the A-bomb and the H-bomb and the B-K balm have fallen far below Segregation on the political-palaver hit parade...

...First comes the fact that school integration is already working—and working well and peacefully—in many Northern and Western sections of the South...

...Could it be that in their very inability, or unwillingness, to understand, no less than in the enraged rantings of some of my Southern correspondents, lies the key to an understanding of the Southern attitude toward segregation...

...What is it that leads decent, intelligent, liberal Americans to urge that a whole section of the nation be allowed to flout the law of the land—and in an illiberal, antidemocratic way...

...They are the murderers of Emmett Till and the jury who approved the murder...

...Indeed, I've been wondering—and thinking hard about it— for some time...

...He would be wrong...

...What causes rational and highly articulate men to fall back, in the course of reasoned discussion, on such a childish escape from reason as: You don't understand...

...And with international affairs almost forgotten in the process, the plans and the campaigns of both political parties are already centered on it—from the agonized efforts of the Democrats, especially their White-House hopefuls, to please the North without losing the South and so splitting the party in two, to the none-too-subtle Republican wooing of Northern Negroes on the basis of what was done by "a great Republican Chief Justice" (who was backed, incidentally, by six Democratic Associate Justices...

...For if the man from Mars should learn our language, he would discover that the issue which dominates the serious talk, the press, and the politics of most of the nation is the simple and basically silly question whether ter-restrians who happen to have skins of different colors should be allowed to go to school or ride to work or play or eat or live together...

...They are the old "pore whites"—though many of them aye not so poor today—who see in the prospect of desegregation a threat .to their emotional self-esteem, a self-esteem founded neurotically and precariously on the feeling that the color of their skin makes them automatically superior to their Negro neighbors...

...And herein lies the second big blind spot in the thinking of those Southerners who say: "You just don't understand...

...that, by clear implication, flat disobedience of the law of the land would be a lesser evil than the violence attendant on enforcing it...

...What is needed today is a Southern statesman (no interfering outsiders, please) to rally together the diverse forces of law-abiding decency that encompass within their separate ranks the bulk of our Southern citizenry—and put the segregationists to rout on their own home ground...

...not even a Ku Kluxer would deny that they are Southerners...

...WANTED: A Southern Statesman By FRED RODELL TF A real live Martian in a really flying saucer, or even in a multiple guided missile, were to land on the earth today, hedge-hop around it without any regard, of course, for that old-fashioned iron curtain, and take a good objective look at what goes on on this neighboring planet, he might well suppose that the chief concern, the chief issue, the chief crisis that worried and weighed on the United States would be the possibility of nuclear war and the consequent obliteration of terrestrial man...

...That emotion-bred unreason, whether mild or wild, should be allowed to create a national crisis in which high government officials— Senators, Governors—defy the government of the United States, in which sensible citizens plead for non-enforcement of the law, on which may hinge the selection of the nation's next President, is literally idiotic...

...monly and irrationally called "the Southern attitude" toward segregation —that is, unreconstructed, bitter...

...few if any of those Southerners condoned the inhumanity that resulted or clucked: "You just don't understand those people...

...His most recent book is "Nine Men: A Political History of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1790 to 1955...

...Further, the emotion of the decent and educated Southerner is removed only in degree, not in kind, from that of his less restrained partners in protest...

...There are many attitudes and many variations of each, and no examination of what it is all about can begin to make sense unless it takes account of those different attitudes and the groups which they roughly represent—and why...

...There are, by way of obvious example, the Southern Negroes...

...The man from Mars could not but laugh—or weep...

...I have been labeled a "Supreme Court idolator," "worshipper," "reverer" (they should read my recent book on the Court, Nine Men—advt...

...To all this spate of writing and talking and thinking about an issue which should not, by rational standards, be an issue at all, I have contributed—and am obviously still contributing—-my own small share...

...that therefore desegregation should not be attempted now...

...and despite the stupidly wishful statements of some Dixie demagogues that most "Ni-" grahs" enjoy their separate and inferior status, there is little doubt today that Southern Negroes are close to unanimous in their attitude toward segregation: they are against it...

...My mail, from the few pieces I have published about segregation, has been tremendous...

...On the still more moderate side, I have read the soft arguments for gradualism of such responsible and bravely liberal Southern journalists as Hooding Carter and Ralph McGill...

...I have listened patiently to the troubled explanations given me by intelligent and progressive Southerners now up North (including a former friend and college classmate of rabid Senator Eastland of Mississippi) and, on a recent visit to Dixie, by intelligent and progressive Southerners down South...

...Put all these facts together and it begins to look as though what is com...