A NEW SOUTHERNER

...I am saying that the Southern Negro now begins to look like a Southerner...

...What does need explanation is that after a hundred years the South is still confused and upset by that defeat...

...Not a James Eastland Southerner...

...The South today, driven and guided largely by its Negro citizens, may be on the verge of exhibiting that balanced and, in the best sense, worldly wisdom, that quality of being at home in the world, which once it almost possessed before its own exploitative lusts and the pressures of the North corroded and embittered it...

...What of the courage of James Meredith...

...The Negro Southerner today is telling the fundamental story of the South better than it has ever been told...

...This is a new use of the past...

...He told better than anyone else the stories everyone was telling...

...He had to be...

...Not that all the past is debris...

...he does not understand it, and he finds it hard to accept...

...But what shall we say then of the courage, especially of Negro students—and an increasing number of whites—during the last two years...

...Its inclusive society, from slave to aristocrat, demanded an inclusive church...

...I do not think the Negroes themselves recognize it...

...But in their voices, their gestures, their attitudes, they carry the past with them—a past, however, so changed by its transition into the modern world that few people yet recognize it...

...but if I may speak like the Presbyterian I am, the Negroes were predestined to reveal to themselves, to the whites, and to the world what that something is...

...If they recall the past at all, it is usually to tell themselves they must forget it...

...But they had rested their society upon a group, the Negroes, who were supposed to remain fixed amid these changes...

...He knows the people he is struggling with, for he has lived with them for a long time, and is indeed, far more than he and they know, one of them...

...The Negro has been part of the South from the beginning, close to its heart...

...And, like a Southerner, he is acting it out, not just talking about it...

...He has not yet gained positions of power—not many of them—but he makes the move, and the white responds...

...they are going forward...

...He is no Utopian, no abstract idealist...

...There was really no traditional church left to teach them this courtesy...

...I think not...

...This foothold in the past has been one of the distinguishing marks of the Southerner from his American beginnings...

...Some of the best of the gentry revealed near the hard core of their being a stoicism reminiscent of ancient Rome, while many of the uneducated resorted to a raucous revivalism, which though it shouted about the grace of God did not reveal that grace in the shouting...

...It ain't too late to git a crop in the groun...

...we thought we were...

...The whites did too...

...Harry Ashmore wrote recently, and somewhat prematurely, I believe, an Epitaph for Dixie...

...shadowy forms of Southern attitudes...

...You fit bettern you ever knowed how...

...A people who draw their power from the past, who have suffered history and who now begin to read its lessons...

...probably that is the last thing they want to do...

...Whether the white South has the humility and such an appreciation of its own history as to be proud of it—this is another question...

...out of a past rich in experience, the only wealth that finally counts...

...Yet it is clear what the South was trying to do...

...He is largely a public, a social, figure...

...there was sufficient force to defeat it...

...He is one of "our people," our kind of people...

...The white Southerner is further confused by the myth of a splendid past, a myth woven during the dark decades from 1865 to 1900, and now, though our minds begin to warn us, still believed in our hearts...

...I am not saying these young Negroes are trying to act like Southerners...

...The Middle Ages had had such a church...

...But the whole creation was unstable, not only because it was set in a country that increasingly determined to go "whole hog" into the modern world, but also because its own people were moving, though more hesitantly and with more backward glances, into that world...

...As Tate suggested, the explanation is that the South did not have a religion to undergird and crown its social order...

...But mainly the white Southerner reacts, hurling at the mythical Negro the slogans of the past...

...But it was only a late—I hope the last—skirmish in the Hundred Years' Civil War, with the antique cry of state overeignty and the fairly new cry of the reserved powers of the Tenth Amendment without benefit of the Fourteenth, as if the whole nation had been playing when it fought the bloody battles of a hundred years ago...

...The strange and exciting thing in the South today is that in the new approaches the Negroes are making to their—and democracy's—problem, we can distinguish, deep down, the JAMES McBRIDE DABBS is president of the Southern Regional Council and author of "The Southern Heritage...

...and Ross Barnett the best show-man, and in one sense at least the most Southern...

...For the Southern Negro is basically a Southerner in his relationship to space and time...

...If all white Southerners responded, taking into consideration the complete situation, the South would move rapidly forward...

...Consider the dramatic quality of the sit-ins...

...that is, to create the modern world...

...maybe God did have a hand in it...

...Christian courtesy and justice...

...We are both inner and outer...

...The strict Puritan might say that the South did not hate the world enough...

...The public appearance is what counts...

...The South tried to unite these opposing attitudes...

...This is one reason politicians cut such a wide swath in the South: They are out there in the open doing what everybody wants to do...

...A Southerner does not amount to much until he appears in public...

...maybe the white people trusted too much in politics...

...It never is...

...So we had a people who were not only bound to the past time and to certain places made dear by tradition, but who were also, like other Americans, driving into the future and the spacious frontier...

...The Old South knew its own struggle for rights, it knew courtesy, it knew even justice, though a rather arbitrary, personal, and concrete justice...

...Anyway, we failed, and have been failing for a century...

...It may well be the mission of the Negro Southerner to cut this tangle and give back to the South its early balance between past and future...

...It is fairly clear that the Negro has assumed the true leadership of the South...

...Recalling faintly the mood of feudalism, the slave-owner spoke of the Negroes as "our people" and gave them a certain place within the society...

...Romantic in some things, like all Southerners, he is of all Southerners the most realistic...

...The strange thing is that the white South never intended this...

...Who combined these varied forces...

...But these convulsions took place because something was being born, a new life was appearing...

...It is a deep sense of belonging to the community, of being bound up with it...

...According to this myth the South was once a complete, perhaps a perfect, creation, envied by the North, and out of envy attacked, defeated, and crippled...

...Men can never throw away all the past and begin with a clean slate...

...What made Shakespeare great...

...Politics was for the white people, religion for the colored...

...the wise man is he who is able to weave these two aspects of life together, keeping them from opposing each other, causing them to support each other...

...In a way he has always belonged...

...the world is both inner and outer...

...Whereas in the Old South the courage of the Southerner and the compassion of the Christian were usually separate, here they are fused...

...Is this simply prudence...

...The old life is moving in new channels...

...The Negroes are not going back...

...I think it is, with some modifications, what the South sought for but failed to achieve...

...I am happy that Negroes, through their sojourn in the South, learned something...

...More than other Americans, all Southerners, white and black, face the problem of what to make of their racial and regiopal yesterdays...

...The South has often been foolhardy, but who will doubt its courage...

...This emphasis upon display is related to the Southern emphasis upon manner: how you say and do a thing, how you hold your mouth...

...Even the gentry, though they understood and practiced the courtesies of ladies and gentlemen, did not understand the courtesy of Christ...

...Courtesy in the service of justice...

...And if ol' Abe's folks offer you a mule, take it and come home...

...The Southern Negro is becoming a Southerner...

...For the most part they are not even thinking of the past...

...But then, what I call failure has for him a faint touch of success, for about the Oxford affair hangs the dimmest fox-fire reminiscence of that sundown charge at Gettysburg, the most splendid failure in American history...

...Yet he drives toward that future with an energy derived from the past, and in ways suggested by the past...

...The Southern Regional Council was saying some two years ago that the white leaders of the South had largely forfeited their authority, and it was the Negro who was taking the South wherever it was going...

...All men have courage, but some societies value it more than others...

...Emblazoned upon the pages of history by the Civil War, it has unfortunately blinded many of us to less apparent virtues and made us forgetful even of our own simple moral courage in the face of hardship and failure—like the courage of the backwoods mother who, after Appomattox, wrote her son, "Don't be shamed by losin...

...The Southerners who are the driving force in this movement are mainly Negroes...

...What is the essence of the movement...

...From the white point of view it may be regrettable that the Old South could not create a stable and continuing culture...

...Both...

...as a Southerner, I should say that we did not love it enough...

...Courage which depends entirely upon moral stamina...

...We had a people who were certainly as individualistic as any Americans, yet also highly social, bound together by ties of tradition, of kinship, of neighborliness...

...But he has been severely limited in his belonging...

...For sufficient reason, the South has always had a military and an aristocratic tradition, and has therefore valued courage...

...As a general thing, the Southerner is burdened by his unhappy past...

...This makes extremely difficult the problem of the past which all Southerners face...

...Indeed, as Allen Tate pointed out years ago, it had an inner flaw that had to crack under pressure...

...I am saying they are acting like Southerners, but with a difference...

...I doubt if Alabama's Patterson can beat him...

...he has shown a tremendous capacity for making himself at home...

...And now, after centuries of quiet during which the Negro was hardly a person, being so quiet and unobtrusive—now he appears in public and takes political action and so becomes a man...

...but mainly we were trying to do something about the Negro...

...But sensing also the urgent need of the modern world for manpower to shape its vast resources, he thought of them as chattels to be exploited, and made the place he gave them fixed and limited...

...The heart of the South, of the total South, of all its people, is involved...

...But whatever they tell themselves and however much the future shines in their actions, the light of the past still glows within those actions, giving them a depth and power they would not otherwise have...

...But in the widest sense, he is seeking to belong...

...Who taught the South its manners, the white or the Negro...

...The white South recognized this when it used the ambiguous phrase, "our people...

...We have spent most of our time planning for him, or against him...

...This is the cause of his present power...

...To Ross Barnett, what I call success is failure...

...What he is is mainly what he looks like, what his actions look like, his style...

...In my book, the South is at last beginning to succeed...

...The ability to be so rooted in time and place as to project one's community against the backdrop of space and eternity...

...Southerners have always liked to live in public, to sit on piazzas, to act their parts, to fill their places, to play a role in the Big Show...

...The Battle of Oxford was grievous, pathetic, in a sense tragic...

...Note how concerned they are not to push people too hard, and always, if possible, to leave open a face-saving way of escape...

...What is it...

...We had seen it before: at'Little Rock and New Orleans...

...but the trouble is, when a man gets an individualistic religion, he is likely to get this-worldly, and inquire about voting and wages and education...

...Well, maybe religion was what counted...

...The danger of stressing manners is that you try to substitute them for morals—or even for religion: the persuasive word for the true deed...

...Since the South was built upon the frank exploitation of the Negro, it would be impossible for any informed, self-respecting Negro today to find in any moment of Southern history a model for his actions...

...Indeed, what we learned we learned together...

...I still think this is the only way to live...

...Believed in and desired...

...A strange and exciting thing is happening in the South...

...It is the ability to live in two worlds at once...

...even if they wanted to, there is no assured model for them to go back to...

...So far as circuses go, Ross Barnett's will probably keep the laurels...

...Consider now the recent non-violent demonstrations in the South: the quiet courtesy, the good manners of the participants even under insult and violence...

...for the long run, what matters is that out of history something comes, that we learn something, make some advance...

...Where the light falls, death falls," and the light that is falling today upon the hearts of the Negroes of the South is death to men like Ross Barnett, who stumble among the debris of the past...

...The truth is that no one, Negro or white, can find such a model...

...The trouble with this picture is that it is not so...

...This their religion encouraged them to do...

...Let me be specific...

...Such creative action had to wait until a new Southerner stepped onto the stage, a man who at his best is both the soul of courtesy and, because of long injustice suffered, a passionate seeker for justice...

...Neither to be abstracted from the world, alienated, uprooted, like typical modern man, nor yet to be entangled in place, defensive and chauvinistic, and stuck in past time, like the white Southerner of the last century...

...What the Southerner has always sought: a physical and social place...

...As to time, his eye is on the future, as in earlier days the eye of the South had been...

...This is social creation...

...Even though we grant it a certain splendor, the South never was complete...

...We had a people most of whom had a strong sense of social manners, a few of whom set a standard perhaps as high as the world has seen, yet a people in whom religion did not generally cultivate the inner graces to match the outer...

...Now he seeks to belong as other men do...

...The courage of the fighting Southerner, now imbued with a Christian passion for social justice, and indeed with Christian courtesy...

...taking care of him, or being careful about him...

...I know he is also seeking meat and bread and a roof against the rain, and political power...

...The South, on the contrary, was finally dominated by individualistic, exclusive Protestant sects, composed of men who were out to make the most of themselves and for themselves...

...A people who live in this world of place and time, however wistfully they sing of another...

...So, like any Southerner, the Negro Southerner learns from his past how to seek his future...

...And so here we are, and that man to whom the South has paid the greatest attention has at last come into public view and therefore even in Southern eyes into a kind of manhood, and is now assuming leadership in the South...

...Or reacts...

...A new Southerner, in process of creation for some three hundred years, always close to the heart of the South, indeed in its blood stream and therefore its deepest concern, but appearing publicly now for the first time...

...The contemporary events I have referred to rise out of the South's happiness and unhappiness, its success and failure...

...Not that the fracas at Oxford was an evidence of life...

...The sense of drama they reveal is Southern to the core...

...The ability to unite the social and the religious, as the South until now has failed to do...

...Not a Ross Barnett Southerner...

...Oxford was the biggest show, and in one sense the best...

...for a century now the white Southerner has been entangled in the past...

...All men face the problem of what to make of their personal yesterdays...

...It was trying to live both in this world and another...

...It is not surprising that the South was defeated...

...It is the realization that to destroy community is in the end to destroy oneself...

...We said we were raising cotton, tobacco, rice, indigo, hemp, and sugar cane...

...Of course these remarks are not fair to Mississippi, a good many of whose citizens I know and admire...

...Consider these Southern Negro leaders, these Southern students, in action...

...It is the Southern sense, gone to seed in that invidious phrase, "the Negro in his place," that every man should have a place, not arbitrary and mechanical but vital, where he may live and grow...

...But now, in the 1960's, we are beginning to succeed again...

...Only to a slight degree is he the deep, silent, secret struggler with himself, with fate, with God...

...It created a social order that had some appeal for most of its members, and great appeal for the influential few...

...How we shall attain this goal is perhaps the basic problem of democracy...

...It was rather an evidence of death, of dying, of the last convulsions of fever...

...Of course, we taught the Negroes an other-worldly, individualistic religion, which should not have caused any trouble...

...It is going toward a Southern destiny...

...Southern whites and Negroes suit one another remarkably well, and in happier times will live happily together...

...And what is he seeking...

...This betokens a living culture...