Southerner on Race
Wright, Marion A.
The Southern Heritage, by James McBride Dabbs. Knopf. 249 pp. $4. Reviewed by Marion A. Wright Much of what one has heard from the South in recent years—especially since the Supreme Court...
...Every factor occurring to an inquiring and uninhibited intelligence is dissected and its contribution to present day attitudes assessed...
...Its concern, like that of the Southern politicians, is with the problem of race...
...In a practical, industrial, hustling society, one seldom encounters leisurely thinking, or philosophical concern with the state of public morals, or Grecian speculation about right and wrong, or meditation upon religion's role in solution of social problems...
...It is a kindly, philosophical, urbane book, with its own brand of humor...
...They are all in this book, not done heavily or ponderously, but deftly, eloquently, and with rich imagery...
...Every man perforce writes of himself, what he has seen, heard, felt, experienced...
...Southerner on Race...
...But always in this book the individual has significance and importance only as institutions and customs affect him and as he creatively affects them...
...None may totally divest himself of the tug and pull of that massive force...
...The whole history of the relationship of the two races, from the arrival of the first slave ship to the entry of the first Negro child into a white school, has been a large part of the mental content of the Southerner...
...The end result of the interplay of such forces has been discrimination, the motive for which is the protection of the incompetent against the competent, with the result that the incentive to become competent is taken away...
...A whole panoply of forces comes under scrutiny—plantation life, slavery, law, custom, religion, education, industry, climate, soil, geography, the feudal system, economics, to mention only a few...
...Bitterness for the Negro...
...He has been able to do so because he understands the white supremacist far better than the supremacist understands himself...
...The Southern Heritage is autobiographical in the sense that the problem of race is seen through one pair of eyes—first, the eyes of a small boy born on a South Carolina farm, and, in later stages, of the college student, soldier, college professor, writer, farmer, and now president of the Southern Regional Council...
...This book gives an authoritative answer to the question...
...But, at least, it helps to know how we got this way, what eats on us...
...On the contrary, as the author makes clear, forces operative throughout the South for generations have combined to create the myth of white supremacy and to mold many Southerners into prisoners of that myth...
...Printer's ink and air waves have brought images of thin-lipped, strident, and frustrated men whose sole concern is to embalm a part of the dead Eighteenth Century within the living body of the Twentieth, to preserve a caste system within a democracy...
...Dabbs has accomplished the monumental feat of being tolerant of the intolerant...
...Reviewed by Marion A. Wright Much of what one has heard from the South in recent years—especially since the Supreme Court integration decision of May 1954—has been a mixture of bitterness and guile...
...Apparently, fully half of the time and energy of public officials of several Southern states—governors, legislators, school officials—has been devoted to contriving schemes to evade the law...
...But the scholarly and the political approaches to that problem are astronomically apart...
...Such a book as The Southern Heritage enjoys an added luster because it is silhouetted against this backdrop of the times...
...guile in methods to keep him in his place...
...The supremacist no doubt thinks of himself as a free, volitional being who has, independently, arrived at his present state of conviction...
...Scholarship is here to be sure, but brightly clad and delectable...
Vol. 22 • November 1958 • No. 11
