Crumbling Wall in the South
FOLLIARD, EDWARD T.
Crumbling Wall in the South by EDWARD T. FOLLIARD THEY USED to tell a story on Capitol Hill about the late United States Senator Ellison D. Smith, a South Carolina Democrat, and it could...
...We have allowed the advocates of racial and economic reaction—the very ones against whom we have had to struggle on a local and state level for every inch of progress we have made—to speak for the South, simply because they have made the loudest noise...
...They've outsmarted us," he said...
...He wanted to talk about only four things—improvement of the South's economic position, promotion of trade with Latin America, scientific and technological research, and states' rights...
...It is economics, or, as Northern politicians would say, the "pork-chop issue...
...in fact, they are, in many cases, begging to hear it...
...I began my Southern tour in the Magnolia State, specifically in Jackson, its capital...
...And lowest of all of the states was Mississippi, with a figure of $1,173...
...The business and professional men he had in mind were not bored by the racial problem because they thought it of no importance...
...The rest of the country is ready to hear our story...
...Today, our region is coming out of that blind alley in which it was trapped for so long...
...Police Chief Herbert T. Jenkins was drawing up extraordinary plans to prevent violence at the schools...
...I was wrong...
...In Atlanta I just missed a rally of the Georgia States Rights Council, at which there was more talk of lining up help in the North...
...In this Barnett said that antiintegration groups were springing up all over the North, from New York to California, and added: "The fact is that white people of the North don't like the NAACP and other leftwing organizations any better than we do...
...W. J. Simmons, national coordinator of the Citizens Councils, told me how his outfit was using radio and television in forty-five out of the fifty states...
...Naturally, as I waited in an ante room at the state capitol to see Governor Barnett, I thought I was in for a tirade on the racial question...
...And he senses that it has at least one serious weakness: the wall against which the segregationists have their back is beginning to crumble...
...You'll find that they are bored by all this talk about segregation and desegregation...
...Barnett, who is a member of the Citizens Council, evidently was among the first to conceive of the idea...
...The fact is that the average white American, wherever he lives, doesn't want integration...
...The NAACP has had the press as well as the government on their side...
...Collins acknowledged something else...
...Department of Commerce on per capita personal income...
...You go around this city and talk to business and professional men," he said, "and you'll make a discovery...
...I was interested in talking to Governor Ross Barnett because he had described himself as "a Mississippi segregationist and proud of it," and because his state was one of three that was still defying the Supreme Court order on school desegregation (the other two are Alabama and South Carolina...
...It was in Jackson, at the headquarters of the Citizens Councils of America, that I learned of something that was, for me at least, news...
...Then, he said, the South could make "a deal," or "just sit there and keep them from naming a President...
...They need our moral support...
...In New Orleans, a city that lost tourist business because of trouble stirred up by racial fanatics, the Chamber of Commerce adopted a resolution insisting on tranquility in connection with the desegregation of four additional schools...
...Like all the other segregationist leaders I talked to, Roy Harris was opposed to the formation of a third political party in the South...
...From a regional standpoint, the Old South (listed as the Southeast) was at the bottom of the heap, with an average per capita income of $1,607...
...There is a rival issue in the Deep South now, a burgeoning and demanding issue, that even the racist office-holders and office-seekers dare not ignore...
...It is up to the Southern states to join hands and carry this fight to the country...
...At the time I was in Atlanta, the city was preparing for "token integration"— that is, for the enrollment of ten—later nine—Negro pupils in the white high schools...
...There are still a lot of politicians like "Cotton Ed" Smith in the South, men who bellow against the Supreme Court, promise a last-ditch fight against school desegregation, and demand that "the Nigra be kept in his place...
...Crumbling Wall in the South by EDWARD T. FOLLIARD THEY USED to tell a story on Capitol Hill about the late United States Senator Ellison D. Smith, a South Carolina Democrat, and it could very well have been a true story...
...Harris is almost startlingly frank and outspoken...
...It is something that transcends the racial question and has to do with the regeneration of a large and important area of the United States...
...Senator," the newsman said, "you are coming up for reelection pretty soon...
...James McBride Dabbs, president of the Southern Regional Council, takes the classic view that a nation's greatest wealth is its people—and he means Negroes as well as whites in the South...
...He expressed anger over the fact that the white high schools were about to take in ten Negro pupils and that the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech were to enroll five Negroes between them...
...But it should not be thought for a moment that Southerners are solidly behind such men, or that the race issue takes up their thinking to the exclusion of everything else...
...Even with all its new-found industrial balance," he said, "the South remains the nation's own largest underdeveloped area...
...Truly, this was an odd twist in American history...
...Typical of the South's new go-getters is LeRoy Collins, former governor of Florida...
...I do not believe the South is in any way a land slipping back into the past, afraid of change and hostile to new ideas, as so many critics portray it...
...And we cannot—we must not—let them down...
...We are getting into the middle of the national economy and not just feeding off it from the edges...
...I'd say that eighty per cent of the newspapers of the United States are wide open against us...
...It stopped blaming Appomattox, Thaddeus Stevens, and the carpetbaggers for its backwardness, and decided that it was time for a renaissance in Dixie...
...In retrospect it seems clear that he has to be concerned about a better life for his people—he and every other governor in the South...
...They want to make money...
...Police Chief Jenkins was, of course, reflecting the concern of Atlanta's leading citizens, including business and professional men...
...Yet he bluntly acknowledged that the NAACP had run rings around him and the other segregationist leaders of the South...
...Roy Harris told me that if the Negroes of his region keep pressing for integration, there was only one thing to do about them: "Fire them from their jobs...
...Let's take a look at the South," Collins said...
...But shrouded behind these dismaying headlines is the story of Southern progress...
...Well, had he really , provoked the uproar that caused former President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send troops to Little Rock...
...To get back to the South and its economic welfare, there are two views about what should be done about the Southern Negro...
...A hundred years after the start of the Civil War, which freed the Negro from slavery, the vanquished South was looking to the victorious North to help it keep the Negro in his place...
...And they're ready to do something about it...
...He laughed some more in telling how it had been said of him in 1957 that by making a speech in Little Rock, Arkansas, he had "triggered" the rioting outside of a high school there...
...Presumably, he detests the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People...
...It is this story, so often unseen, which demands that all of us put aside the widow's veil and roll up our sleeves and meet our opportunities...
...they were bored because they had accepted a beginning of integration in Atlanta's schools, stores, and restaurants, and they were tired of listening to white supremacists trying to head off the inevitable...
...That's fifteen too damn many," he was quoted as saying...
...Let's be honest about this...
...This speech offered an exciting picture of material gains in the South...
...The average per capita income for the fifty states in 1960 was $2,223...
...He repeated this when I flew u p to Augusta to interview him in his law office...
...Somewhere along the line, the South—or, at least, some of its more enlightened people—stopped feeling sorry for itself...
...And Senator James O. Eastland, Mississippi Democrat, was quoted as telling the rally: "We've got to resort to newspapers and television...
...To be more precise, Southern segregationists were hoping to line up Northern allies to help them head off integration below the Mason-Dixon line...
...After my return to Washington from the South, the Wall Street Journal published the results of a survey in that region, and said: "Business leaders, who feel the impact of strife in lost business and on their efforts to attract new industry, are joining with parents and church leaders in demanding law and order...
...In the course of my visit down that way, I picked up one of his speeches that was being distributed in pamphlet form by the Southern Regional Council...
...He proposed a two-point program: (1) a long-range campaign to "sell the people of the nation" on racial segregation, and (2) an immediate campaign to organize the South so that it can better emulate the NAACP and play "minority politics...
...They're tired of having their political spokesmen bowing and scraping for the left-wing vote...
...It also held out a promise that the South may one day recapture the position of national leadership it held in the time of Washington and Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Madison, and Monroe...
...That sounds crass, but the Atlanta editor didn't intend that it should...
...he said...
...Too many of us for too long have allowed the South's own worst enemies to speak for it...
...Why a Northern governor would want to help improve the South's economy, especially if it meant losing more Northern plants to the South—this was something that Barnett failed to make clear...
...But, strangely, he laughed when he said it...
...Collins was critical of the South's critics, but he also acknowledged that they had some grounds...
...Evidently all of them remember the chagrin they experienced in 1948 when Harrv S. Truman won in spite of the States Rights ("Dixiecrat") Party, which carried four states...
...In advance of one of his campaigns, a reporter dropped in on him for an interview...
...The group called for "a climate of calm, dignified acceptance of desegregation...
...The Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions, and Civitan clubs had joined with others in forming "Organizations Assisting Schools in September" (OASIS...
...The man who presided over the Atlanta rally was Roy V. Harris, rabid segregationist and old-time Dixiecrat, who is president of the Georgia States Rights Council...
...The importance of Governor Barnett's emphasis on economics, and his reluctance to talk about the racial problem, escaped me at the time...
...Something like 300 Freedom Riders had been there ahead of me, and had landed in jail...
...A newspaper editor in Atlanta first made me aware of it...
...What are you going to use for an issue this time...
...If one merely consults the newspaper headlines, he is likely to conclude that doom days have descended upon the people of the South—that decades of painful progress have been swept away, returning us to the bitterness and blindness which set the South aflame a century ago...
...Harris said the whole South ought to do in 1964 what Mississippi did in 1960, withhold its electoral votes from both major Presidential candidates, and thus try to throw the election into the House of Representatives...
...He says that the South must "show how the white and colored races can advance together into a brighter future than man has yet known...
...They've had the organization and the money, and we haven't...
...What was Harris going to do about it...
...He said that in spite of the great economic strides in the South— the bringing in of thousands of new industrial plants, the improvements in agriculture and cattle-raising, and the opening of atomic power plants— the South "still has a long way to go...
...We in the South must capitalize on this feeling before it is too late...
...A traveler in the South, listening to Roy Harris and others talk about lining u p help in the North and playing "minority politics," gets the feeling that it is a desperate, back-tothewall campaign...
...Barnett told me that he hoped to bring about a conference between conservative governors of the South and conservative governors of the North to push his four-point program...
...I learned this on a recent tour of some of the states of the Old Confederacy...
...He had made a study of what happened at Little Rock and New Orleans, scenes of rioting or tumult that became news all over the world, and he was determined that Atlanta would get no such black eye...
...I don't know whether I did or not," he said, chuckling, "but I hope to hell I did...
...Simmons gave me a pamphlet containing a speech the governor made in 1960...
...Senator Herman E. Talmadge, Georgia Democrat, was quoted as saying that it was important "that we set up a counterforce in every one of the fifty states...
...EDWARD T. FOLLIARD is a staff writer for the Washington Post who recently completed a fact finding journey through the South...
...Of course the economic issue in the Deep South is bigger than the fear of merchants that racial violence will hurt business...
...Cotton Ed," as he was called, was elected to six terms in the Senate...
...Issue," Senator Smith repeated, somewhat incredulously, "why the Nigra, of co'se...
...This is confirmed by figures recently put out by the U.S...
...Barnett, a big, grimvisaged man, felt so strongly about the civil-rights planks in the Democratic and Republican platforms in 1960 that he arranged to have Mississippi's eight electoral votes cast for Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, who was going nowhere...
Vol. 25 • October 1961 • No. 10
