MODERATION ISN'T IT
DABBS, JAMES McBRIDE
Moderation Isn't It Go South to Sorrow, by Carl T. Rowan. Random House. 246 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by James McBride Dabbs EVEN THOUGH I am a white Southerner, I find much to praise and little to...
...Along with this goes a frank recognition of his own uncertainty: the question, for instance, as to whether he is more concerned for the South and the nation than for the Negro...
...He knows that though the South is the main locus of this problem, the problem itself is national, and the nation, not merely the South, advances or retreats as we face it or fail to face-it...
...As a Negro he might well have been tempted to bitterness...
...But Rowan's objectivity is even more notable...
...Forget this past and the white Southerner is indeed a monster...
...His dominant emotion is compassion, even more for the whites than for the Negroes...
...It is suggested, ominously, in reference to some younger Negroes, especially veterans, that they may not find, or may not accept, such quiet leadership as King's...
...I dare say Rowan remembers it but lacked the space to include it...
...It is indeed "A Time for Weeping" when we, who have so much, lack the leaders to tell us what we have...
...Especially good are the stories of Gus Courts and of the bus boycott in Montgomery...
...The unreasonableness of the white South today is the product of three hundred years...
...If I have any criticism of Rowan's book, it is in connection with the first of these factors...
...I don't know that the author could have avoided this in a fairly brief book...
...The author presents the tearfulness and confusion of the white South and says truly, "It is the white man who enslaves himself...
...Aj Rowan says, men have to struggle both to attain and maintain freedom, and today's "moderation" is hardly enough...
...He reveals the basic problem...
...The man who wrote this book is a man with a good heart who is still seeking to learn not merely the facts but also their meaning...
...But the recognition of our sorrow does not relieve us from action...
...Rowan has been to India since he wrote South of Freedom, and he speaks now with urgency of the need for this nation to attack resolutely its own color problem...
...And then there is the world...
...Reviewed by James McBride Dabbs EVEN THOUGH I am a white Southerner, I find much to praise and little to blame in Carl Rowan's recent book on his region and mine, Go South to Sorrow...
...He does not show it...
...A crack reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune, and the author of two earlier books, South of Freedom and The Pitiful and the Proud, Rowan had to write interestingly of recent trips through his native South...
...It was to be expected that the book would be interesting...
...He exhibits a faint scorn for certain liberals, those moderates who want to move so slowly that even the direction of their movement is doubtful...
...This is the new, compelling factor in Rowan's book: the billion and a half colored people of the world and their rising demand for freedom and respect...
...The main factors seem to be three: the tearfulness of a great number of Southern whites, the increasing determination of a great number of Negroes, and a dynamic world situation energized by communism and color...
...The new, resistant spirit of the Negro appears in many of the pages...
...It is especially apparent in the stories of Gus Courts and Martin Luther King...
...In the eyes of the world it is America which hangs in the balance...
...I have the feeling, however, that this white man may appear to one who does not know him as somewhat of a monster: his actions and attitudes, which Rowan describes accurately, seem so unreasonable...
Vol. 21 • June 1957 • No. 6
