WHY THE RESISTANCE?
Golden, Harry
Why the Resistance? by Harry Golden When Marvin Griffin was gover-nor of Georgia, he had a favorite radio message for his constituents. He used to say the problem besetting the South as a result...
...Not the least of the tragedies is the denial of humanity, withholding from the Negro inherent rights which are not ours either to give or with-hold—the right to communicate his worth and the right to interchange ideas...
...The provocations of physical danger have been few and far between, but the social provocations occur daily...
...But toward the end of the 1930's, the Negro began to see a new world springing up...
...At the same time, the legislatures of two other Southern states declared the NAACP a "subversive" organization...
...and Let My People Go...
...Only a few embattled editors, college professors, and social workers have seen the racial problem for what it is: the need to continue the caste system of the South...
...I am reminded of the Negro doctor who traveled from Charlotte to Washington, D. C. As usual, the rail-road gave him a drawing room, even though he had paid only for a lower berth...
...Why do mobs gather to shout insults and threaten violence to a lone Negro student going in and out of his classes at the University of Mississippi...
...The paycheck itself may have been only $23.86, but for the first time in the history of the South, the Negro was receiving the same pay for the same job as the white man...
...I remember an incident in the early 1940*s...
...At the bottom of this tragedy, then, is the complete lack of communication between white and Negro...
...When the little uptown boy reached the age of seven, his mother called him aside and said, "The time has come for you to understand that you are not to play with the little boys 'on the hill.On the hill" was the cotton mill, and the white Protestants of the cotton mill went to separate schools and separate churches...
...and from the mother—"I suppose boys must sow their wild oats...
...To this extent the whites were themselves dehumanized, and the dehumanization deepened the dehumanization of the "happy Negro...
...You multiply sixty cents an hour by one million six hundred thousand industrial workers, and you will see there is much more to racial segregation than, "Do you want your sister to marry a Negro...
...In ordering the all-white University of Texas to admit the Negro students, Chief Justice Vinson ruled that the -separate Negro law school was not - equal because education also involves the reputation of the faculty, status of the alumni, prestige of the uni-versity, size of its library, and thej ability of the students to communi-cate with one another—to communi-cate, that is, with future lawyers, future judges, and future community leaders...
...There are no states' rights in segregation, only people's wrongs...
...The impracticable segregationist forgets that for HARRY GOLDEN, editor of The Carolina Israelite, is the author of a number of books, including "Carl Sandburg," "Only in America," and "Enjoy, Enjoy...
...The "happy Negro" tradition was the Negro's adjustment to his subordinate status...
...A Chinese comes from Hong Kong to Charlotte, and opens a chop suey lunch room...
...I asked him why he was mad at Roosevelt and he said, "That damn Roosevelt...
...What may have been pump-priming to the white population of the country was something much more to the Negro, who looked upon the New Deal as the legislation which abolished starvation as a general fate...
...decades the Negro was under duress to be "happy...
...The upper middle class of the South turned on the Negro after the Supreme Court school decision of 1954 for the same reason, but in reverse...
...The Negro found his way to Mount Nebo by a circuitous route...
...A Negro with a white coat and a black leather bow tie has ready access to every room in the hotel where the Nobel Peace Prize-winner Dr...
...asks the Southern politician, as though there were no intervening history since the end of the Civil War in 1865...
...from the father—"Watch yourself, son, you don't catch something...
...Why the need for even this token declaration for racial segregation, a policy that is not only irreligious and immoral, but also illegal...
...Many arguments have been advanced for maintaining the status quo of segregation, and they are all pretexts...
...States' rights" is the most common of these pretexts...
...When the white men got together to discuss the Supreme Court decision, they said, "The Negroes want white women," and when the Negroes got together to discuss the problem, they said, "When will we get a linotype machine...
...They have remained silent about the principle when it involved roads, hospitals, farm subsidies, school lunches, and the construction of airports...
...Most important of all was the Works Progress Administration (WPA...
...The politician gave something of value in return, because the segregation of the Negro provided psychological status to millions of white tenant-farmers and industrial workers, well aware they were at the bottom of the list of per capita earnings among all the workers of the nation...
...The segregationists love to em-phasize the role Chief Justice Earl Warren of California has played in this great civil rights movement...
...The low income white would say, "I am a doffer in a mill and I get a dollar twenty-five an hour...
...The economic measures of the New Deal were the first break in the racial solidarity of the South...
...There are some twelve million Negroes in the South, half of them only semi-literate, but all of whom have not made a single serious mistake...
...and in the North, to fight against the discrimination in employment and housing...
...Why should this "happy" man suddenly talk about civil rights—who puts him up to it...
...He gave the driver a bill and waited a few minutes as the cabbie fumbled with the change...
...The Negroes do not want integration," these Southerners asserted...
...That the evil is based almost entirely on the need for a caste system is proved every moment of day-to-day living in the South...
...They insisted the demand for civil rights, for equal justice under law, was a conspiracy against the South...
...Under the most extreme provocations, the Negroes have answered simply, "Let's go to church and pray for the fellows who threw the stones or bombed the house...
...Working under economic exploitation, the Negro conditioned himself to two modes of behavior, one representing his true self and the other the facade he presented to the white race...
...When Dr...
...Tuber-culosis, twelfth cause of death among whites, is second among Negroes...
...Southern housewives immediately began to circulate the myth that their colored maids were joining "Eleanor Clubs...
...World War II, with its military service and its veterans' benefits, brought him into the same economic arena with the white man and taught him that a life governed by equity offered him far more than a life governed by white paternalism...
...Thus did Eleanor Roosevelt, the New Deal, and World War II put the Negroes of America squarely on top of Mount Nebo...
...Only two months ago the Textile Workers Union lost another election in a Tennessee plant because management circulated a photograph of Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers handing a check to Roy Wilkins of the NAACP...
...When Jack O'Dowd, an editor in Florence, South Carolina, wrote "The Supreme Court Has Spoken," he was called a traitor and was forced to leave his home state...
...Indeed, when the conservative Southerner complained about "that man in the White House," it was nearly always in terms of "taxes" and "he's too chummy with labor...
...a movement generated by twelve million Negroes to end the status of inferiority imposed upon them by state statute and city ordinance...
...Even as Southerners flock to the cities from the hills and small farms, the stubborn ones insist upon retaining a few dreams of a more placid time...
...He used to say the problem besetting the South as a result of the Supreme Court decision to end racial segregation in the public schools was caused by "outside" influences and Northern "agitators...
...Election issues were simple and uncomplicated: "Hoiler nigger first and loudest...
...During fifty Negro meetings I attended between 1954 and 1958, I heard that linotype machine discussed fifty times...
...That develop ment is the use by the Negro of that part of the culture the Southerners pressed upon him most insistently— Christianity...
...Every hour or so, the conductor knocked on the door of the drawing room and asked, "Is everything all right...
...He fails to correlate the "suddenness" of the Negro's demand for political and economic equality with the parallel "suddenness" of the South's industrialization and equal "suddenness" of the urbanization of his culture...
...On the same day Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina spoke of the sacred-ness' of "states' rights" in opposing government aid for education, it happened to be payday for the farmers of South Carolina participating in the Federal government's soil-bank program...
...In 1956, the then governor of South Carolina told his state legislature that all would be well again if only the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People were outlawed...
...When the hell did a nigger ever have a ten-dollar bill...
...And the Negro wanted "in...
...When you are in Egypt you step off the sidewalk, smile, and tip your hat to the strangers you pass on the street...
...In my city of Charlotte in North Carolina, there was a linotype machine in one of the all-white high schools...
...The movie Hamlet with Laurence Olivier comes to town, and the Shakespeare Club at the local Negro college cannot go to see it, not even in the balcony, and his exclusion persists despite the foreclosure of movie house mortgages all over the South...
...I want to be where the people are...
...turban...
...I told the hotel manager that when a Hindu becomes a Christian, he lays aside the...
...Low income whites felt, and feel, that the Negro stands between them and social oblivion...
...This Christianity is undeviating and profound and sustains the Negro in the face of physical provocation, just as his profound humor sustains him in the face of social provocation...
...Why does he "agitate" now, why not forty, or thirty years ago...
...As long as they can say, "Stay out of our schools, parks, restaurants, and theatres...
...But the Roosevelt Administration itself was far from indifferent...
...in the South, to fight against the racial segregation sanctioned by law and public opinion...
...The depression need was so great, and so immediate, that the Southern politicians did not dare filibuster the Roosevelt welfare measures and public works programs into the pattern of racial segregation...
...Ralph Bunche cannot get lodging for the night...
...When Mrs...
...Even after the sit-in movement, which was really a "revolt" of Negro students who felt the NAACP was not moving fast enough, and even after Martin Luther King's nonviolent resistance movement in Alabama, Southern leaders still did not see the problem for what it was...
...My maid told me so...
...The first of these myths is the legend of the "happy Negro...
...Why is it necessary for Senators like Russell of Georgia, Ful-bright of Arkansas, Hill and Spark-man of Alabama, Stennis of Mississippi, and Ervin of North Carolina, men with good minds and kind hearts, to "holler nigger" every time they return to their states to run for re-election...
...The Negro men and women who pass the lunch room have lived in North Carolina for at least ten generations, but they cannot go into that restaurant to get the fifty-five-cent chop suey lunch from the recent arrival from Hong Kong...
...Because he did not communicate, the Southerner failed to see another development which future historians might conceivably consider the most important of the entire civil rights struggle in the South...
...Sit in the back of the bus," they have achieved some degree of self-esteem and proof of individual worth...
...I merely said that my friend was a Hindu who did not look Hindu because he had become a Methodist...
...The struggle against racial segregation has been dramatized by the picture of a well-dressed Negro walking to and from his classes on a college campus surrounded by Federal marshals...
...four Negro women die in childbirth for each death among white women...
...There is more tragedy than humor in this illusion that a turban makes a man different...
...Why now...
...I once secured a room for a Negro clergyman in the finest hotel of my city, although the clergyman did not wear a turban...
...The Negro's demand for civil rights is part of this social upheaval which has transformed a great agrarian civilization into an industrial-urban society...
...Not the President, however, but the President's wife, Eleanor, was his first "official" champion...
...During the years he was in office, Roosevelt did little to offend the Southern politician directly...
...Even at this late date they do not understand that if the NAACP and all the Northern "agitators" suddenly evaporated, the "agitation" of Southern Negroes for civil rights would hardly miss a beat...
...If low income whites lost their Negro, where would they now find their self-esteem and proof of individual worth...
...But racial segregation also exacts an awesome price in human resources and early death...
...The "uptown" whites called them "lint-heads" or "burr-heads...
...How is that for putting a sense of humor to the proof...
...In the "separate but equal" Negro high school no such training was offered...
...A Negro wearing a turban will be accepted everywhere...
...As we drove off, the cabbie muttered, "That damn Roosevelt, that damn Roosevelt...
...It was Eleanor Roosevelt who first sounded the call...
...He was a sharecropper and a tenant farmer, and the "white" man was a sharecropper and a tenant farmer...
...Father, Let Me Be Rid of This World...
...It was hard for the Negro to make his move for equality while white men themselves were segregated...
...For one thing, the low income whites would probably join a labor union...
...but when you are on Mount Nebo and you finally glimpse the Promised Land, from a distance, you want it—and you want it all...
...Within a few years, the Negro saw that the segregated whites, the former sharecroppers and "lint-heads" were leaving the fields and factories and acquiring things, the many wonderful things of American middle-class living...
...A Negro and I shared a taxi ride, and he reached his destination first...
...He found the path during the Roosevelt Administration...
...He knew he had to present a smile to the dominant white society, and, even more important, he had to make certain that he did not appear too smart, or even aware of the political and historical issues of the day...
...The railroads followed this policy in an attempt to make the segregated Negro as comfortable as possible and to keep him out of the men's room and smoking car...
...Since we are a school-oriented society, the integration of the public schools would result in the collapse of the entire segregation pattern...
...Here is why now: Before the great industrial-urban revolution in the South, which began in the late 1930's, the Negro saw "separate but equal" poverty all around him...
...Marvin Griffin is the stubborn South in a microcosm— unable and unwilling to understand a social revolution of monumental proportions...
...while you kept the Negro segregated I was willing to work for sixty cents an hour less, but now he is going to school with my kids, and I want that extra sixty cents an hour...
...There was only whispering and laughter...
...It is this fear of being called a traitor that has prevented thousands of Southerners from speaking out since 1954...
...and Negro infant mortality is five...
...The caption read, "This is what happens to your union dues...
...at least three times during the course of the evening, and finally the Negro doctor answered wearily, "No, everything is not all right...
...For the first time the Negro did not have to work for whatever wages the white men chose to pay him...
...a doffer in a mill in Massachusetts or in Pennsylvania gets a dollar eighty-five an hour...
...This caste system has been the key to political success, and in the process the politician has succeeded in making the sanction of racial segregation the test of loyalty to the South itself...
...The conductor asked, "Is everything all right...
...For many years seniors who chose could learn this excellent trade...
...They speak the same words but not the same language...
...When the uptown boy was home from college and he had been seen with a girl from the hill, he caused no concern for his family...
...The Southern politicians who called for racial solidarity gained seniority in the Congress and perpetuity in the state legislatures...
...Roosevelt visited the mills at race-conscious Kannapolis, North Carolina, and saw the two drinking fountains, one for whites, one for colored, she said for the benefit of the newspapermen and the edification of the factory owners, "Something must be done to correct this injustice...
...The hotel manager sent a bowl of fruit up to the Negro clergyman, who was born in Decatur, Georgia...
...A few years ago Senator James Eastland of Mississippi told a Charlotte audience, "The Negroes of Mississippi are the happiest people in the state...
...The Southern Senators have filibustered for "states' rights" only when the legislation involved the Negro...
...Because of this lack of communication the myths have survived that have kept so many of the Southern leaders ignorant about the needs, desires, and rights of the Negro...
...Why the fierce resistance, then...
...The segregationists, however, ignore the fact that the Supreme Court decision to end segregation in the colleges of the South was drafted by Fred M. Vinson of old Kentucky...
...times greater than among white infants...
...The Attorney General of Texas had argued that a separate law school for Negroes had adequate facilities...
...Because of lack of communication, the Senator did not know the songs the "happy" Negroes of his state had been singing for many years: Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen...
...the white Protestant descendants of the Covenanteers of Scotland, men and women whose ancestors had helped carve a civilization out of a wilderness, were segregated because they worked in a cotton mill...
...Chester Travel-stead, dean at the University of South Carolina, spoke out for integration in 1956, he was accused of being a renegade and was forced to resign...
...It provided some work for millions of unemployed, but for the Negro of the South it was a step of monumental proportions...
Vol. 26 • December 1962 • No. 12
