Transforming Dixie
Ashmore, Harry S.
Transforming Dixie An Epitaph for Dixie, by Harry S. Ashmore. W. W. Norton. 189 pp. $3.50. Desegregation and the Law, by Albert P. Blaustein and Clarence Clyde Ferguson, Jr. Rutgers University...
...With All Deliberate Speed, edited by Don Shoemaker...
...What of the shape of things to come...
...Thus, the reader passes directly from the trenchant analysis of Edgar L. Jones' "City Limits," where the influence of urbanization on the desegregation crisis is skillfully sketched, to W. D. Workman's "The Deep South," which only barely manages to transcend the bounds of polemical partisanship...
...Ashmore is not always explicit on the matter, but he clearly feels that the default of leadership is among the most important causes of the South's troubles...
...He is the author of the definitive work, The Negro and the Schools, which by happy coincidence was published on the very day that the U.S...
...But this, I hasten to add, is a hope, not a prediction...
...And it includes the highly dubious statement that the Supreme Court is "the ultimate guardian of American civil liberties...
...It shows little recognition of the fact that the legal process is but one aspect of our multi-faceted, closely articulated political process...
...Shoemaker's contributors, no less than Blaustein and Ferguson, seem agreed that the Negro must ultimately win educational equality through continued legal disputes...
...and here and there it shows provocative insights which this reviewer wishes had been explored in greater detail...
...It is a documentary summary or "wrap-up" of desegregation developments in the South and the border states since 1954...
...He has no illusions, however, about the lack of enthusiasm with which integration will be received, nor does he feel that the South will suddenly transform necessity into opportunity...
...Executive editor of the Arkansas Gazette, Harry Ashmore has long been the most liberal, dynamic, and audacious of those Southern journalists whose moderate voices have sometimes been too glibly equated with the Voice of the South...
...Race is an important motif of the book but not the only one...
...But the strengths far outweigh the defects...
...The keenest insight offered the reader in Epitaph for Dixie is probably this: The present desegregation controversy is not so much an isolated phenomenon as it is a symptom of the revolution that is now transforming the South from a Closed to an Open Society...
...The frenetic segregationists will continue to resist all change, but he feels that the South's innate conservatism and its growing materialism will ultimately put the lawless mobs to flight...
...The reader is then brought face to face with the full meaning of Brown v. Board of Education: the fact that on May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court decided that all state segregation statutes, based solely on racial classification, are per se discriminatory and thus violative of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment...
...It is rather a broad picture of the changing contours of the South, sort of an up-to-date version of Cash's trail-blazing Mind of the South...
...But rapid decay in Dixie has definitely set in...
...The "good people" are quiet...
...All but two of the contributors are members of the staff of Southern School News, which means they are working reporters...
...Of course, there are many in the South today who still refuse to admit that the Brown decision voided all state-supported segregation in whatever field...
...The scope of the judicial process is pithily analyzed...
...Much has been done already...
...This book, despite its many virtues, raises a host of fundamental questions about the nature of the Southern School News...
...Desegregation and the Law by Blau-stein and Ferguson, accurately subtitled "The Meaning and Effect of the School Segregation Cases," could scarcely have been more timely...
...though still young, they have had distinguished careers in public service, teaching, and scholarly writing...
...it must recognize that documentary reporting is of slight value unless related to conceptual analysis...
...and the economics of segregation-desegregation...
...yet continued silence can only harm what could be, but is not yet, "an experiment unique in the history of journalism...
...it contains a splendid if not exhaustive bibliography...
...What is the prognosis to be gleaned from the evidence in With All Deliberate Speed...
...It must cease believing in the chimera of tabula rasa objectivity...
...Thus, the Old South, which survived the ravages of the Civil War and Reconstruction, has outlived a hundred Cassandras who predicted its demise...
...What we now need are desegregation studies that are analytical rather than descriptive, interpretative rather than merely prescriptive...
...Reviewed by Francis M. Wilhoit Old regions, like old soldiers, often refuse to die—or even to fade away...
...Because his reporters have been enjoined to be utterly disinterested, they often succeed in being merely uninteresting...
...The authors are professors of law at Rutgers University Law School...
...and it must re-structure its entire organization in order to use fewer reporters and more expert consultants in such fields as law, political science, and psychology...
...239 pp...
...Before getting to-the quintessential meaning of Brown v. Board of Education (the first of the five school segregation cases), Blaustein and Ferguson give the reader a brief summary of the background of the cases...
...Some of it is dangerously sensational...
...With All Deliberate Speed bears the sub-title "Segregation-Desegregation in Southern Schools" and was prepared by staff members and associates of the Southern Education Reporting Service, under the able editorship of Don Shoemaker...
...The book is a useful repository of statistical data relating to Southern schools...
...The Civil Rights Act of 1957 may turn out to have been even more revolutionary and valuable than the Brown dedsion...
...yet the disparity in quality is often shocking...
...The literature on this national culture crisis is vast but far from satisfactory...
...the "bad people," besides doing all the talking, run the state governments...
...and, indeed, death now seems so certain that one of the South's most distinguished contemporary sons has felt justified in setting down an obituary that is only slightly immature...
...While the editor and his staff succeeded in covering a lot of subjects fairly well in a small space, I looked in vain for such topics as the role of religion in the present crisis...
...My criticisms of the book are few: It is too brief...
...it ignores certain significant socio-cultural variables such as religion...
...It is sharply analytical, achieves considerable interpretative depth, and is utterly devoid of that clumsy jargon which has long been a stylistic characteristic of even our best writers on legal subjects...
...Epitaph for Dixie is required reading for all thoughtful students of American civilization...
...Americans in increasing numbers are waking up to the fact that desegregation is the greatest moral and political issue facing the nation today...
...333 pp...
...Few observers of the Southern scene are so well qualified by temperament and professional experience as Ashmore to describe the collapse of the Old South and the traumatic birth pains of the New...
...the attitude of Southern Negroes toward state action aimed at indurating segregation...
...I have only three quibbles with Desegregation and the Law: It ignores the arguments against the year's postponement of the implementation decision (this was the year in which Southern fatalism changed to militant defiance...
...Supreme Court handed down its historic desegregation decision...
...What is the cause of the present crisis in the South...
...The strength of the book lies in its unfailing luminosity, its felicitous style, its warmth of feeling, and its clear perception of the nature of those forces now transforming the South—urbanization, industrialization, mechanization of agriculture, unionization, and increasing social mobility...
...The unevenness of the contributions is but a natural result of plural authorship...
...Every day the old symbols look more tattered and faded, but they still, alas, disgrace the gonfalon of Dixie...
...In order to realize its full potential, the Southern School News must be something more than a clipping agency...
...and parts of it are written with perhaps a little too much unblushing sentimentality...
...and the Fourteenth Amendment is reviewed at length...
...Rutgers University Press...
...The full implications of this new standard were not clear—even to specialists—until 1956, when subsequent decisions of the Court clarified the matter...
...Ashmore feels that the achievement of an Open Society in Dixie is inevitable, but so is continued massive resistance...
...All the writers seem agreed that progress will come, but most seem to feel that it will be painfully slow...
...It is not even chiefly or exclusively a study of the present desegregation conflict in the South...
...far more could be done in the future with more realism and less journalistic self-restraint...
...Because scholars in the field of race relations have benefited from the paper's service, they have hesitated to criticize it...
...During the recent Little Rock tragedy, he took his stand fearlessly for law and human decency and is still suilering the consequences of his decision to stand for the right whatever the cost...
...much more is depressing-ly narrow and naive...
...For this reviewer the answer lies elsewhere-through enfranchisement of the Negro and direct political action through bloc voting...
...Harper...
...Ashmore believes that industry will soon utterly transform the face of the South and that the federal government will ultimately force token integration upon all Southern states...
...Shoemaker is an admirable journalist, and all scholars appreciate the fact that he has to walk an "objective tightrope" between the Fund for the Advancement of Education and his board of directors, headed by the arch-segregationist Thomas R. Waring of Charleston...
...And some would probably state that the South is proceeding with all deliberate speed—away from desegregation...
...while virtually all of it is confined to the narrative-impressionistic level...
...The obituary is An Epitaph for Dixie, and the author is Harry S. Ashmore...
...the clock is turned back to earlier cases...
...an analysis of the genesis of segregation and desegregation voluntary associations...
...Moreover, when the editor says that he "asked only that these contributors park their opinions at some convenient curb and essay the role of reporter," he is begging the question of just what is and should be the role of a reporter in our society...
...Although something of a journalistic requiem mass, Epitaph for Dixie is not a dirge of despair nor does it pipe the minstrelsy of doom...
...it must learn that facts do not speak for themselves...
Vol. 22 • March 1958 • No. 3
