THE NOT SO SOLID SOUTH
Snelling, Paula
The Not So Solid South by PAULA SNELLING In the aftermath of the Civil War, there was one Southerner, and only one—George Washington Cable, the journalist and novelist—who spoke publicly, clearly,...
...Shortly afterward, she wrote an editorial against segregation as a way of life—the first personal statement, so far as we know, published in the South since George W. Cable's honest testament in the 1860's...
...These women not only made speeches and wrote pamphlets...
...One wonders how this heartbroken man would have felt over the acclaim his book is now given in most educated areas of his region...
...One way or another we found a path to such writers as James Wel-den Johnson, W. E. B. DuBois, Jean Toomer, Charles Johnson, and Walter White, who wrote well in his younger days before he became an organization man...
...At this time, Southern newspapers were silent about lynching...
...In 1936, a few months before Gone with the Wind appeared, Lillian Smith and I began to publish a little magazine called South Today...
...Ames, and others organized among Protestant church women an Association for the Prevention of Lynching...
...It is well for all Southern whites to realize that no important, no deep-rooted change could have come to the region without the Ne-groes' own recent and non-violent and immensely brave protests...
...The first Southern newspaper to take a stand against lynching was the Columbus, Georgia, Enquirer, etlited by Julian LaRose Harris (son of Joel Chandler Harris...
...They invaded courthouses where no women except female lawbreakers had ever been...
...The word is literally "discovered," for at this time no word of books by Negroes appeared in the Southern press, or in Southern bookstores, and their books were frequently neglected in the North...
...The heroic part the Negroes themselves have played in recent years has been dramatically obvious—especially since Dr...
...they established lines of communication, and whenever they learned that a lynching was brewing they went by buggy, train, or Model T straight to the sheriff of the county and stayed with him until he did something about it...
...In their various ways, Thomas Wolfe, Ellen Glasgow, T. S. Stribling, and William March had revealed that all was not well in their corners of Dixie...
...It did not have a thing to do with lynchings or the Klan, but it had a great deal to do with sacred womanhood and indicated that the old order was heaving and splintering...
...From scores of readers throughout the region came letters saying, "This is my town...
...South Today reviewed these books and many others which were breaking new ground...
...Meanwhile, Dr...
...Novelists and poets, no less than journalists and editors, conformed to the official dream...
...For fifty years this heavy silence lay on the South...
...he went on to positions of wider influence...
...The Not So Solid South by PAULA SNELLING In the aftermath of the Civil War, there was one Southerner, and only one—George Washington Cable, the journalist and novelist—who spoke publicly, clearly, and eloquently against both racial brutality and segregation...
...In 1941, Arthur Raper and Ira Reid wrote Sharecroppers All—one of the really imaginative and succinct analyses of the Southern way of life...
...In one issue, Lillian Smith reviewed nearly a century of Negro writing...
...they were invited to contribute to it if they wrote well...
...After World War I, young Southerners snipped here and there at the barbed wire...
...When his voice was hushed, all were silent...
...Eight hundred thousand copies were sold in this country before it went into paperback...
...It was Lillian Smith's personal and regional autobiography, Killers of the Dream, published in 1949 (a revised and enlarged edition appeared in 1961) which proved more than Southerners and their Northern friends could take...
...In February, 1960, came the stunningly courageous protests of the students' non-violent stand...
...Today few readers, South or North, have ever heard of her...
...Social scientists expressed approval and offered support...
...its good and evil, its strength and weakness permeating each character...
...But, whether because of his mythic imagination, his involved style, his eventual Ionization in the North, or, more plausibly, because he so obviously identified himself with the man with the pipe and tweed suit, many of the South's self-styled moderates finally accepted him as their ambiguous spokesman, aware that all was not well with a region being taken over by the Snopses, yet still yearning towards a past gone forever, impotent to envision or help create a future...
...Without the new attitude of the city's two newspapers, Atlanta could not have come through its recent crisis as honorably as it did...
...About this time, Frances Newman wrote The Hardboiled Virgin...
...Since the taboo against speaking was broken in our South, many brave souls—some have been hurt—have spoken up in small town newspapers and pulpits...
...Among them, the ministers, somewhat slowly (except for the dedicated Fellowship of Southern Churchmen), college professors, and here and there a group of doctors or lawyers, and now and then a Junior Chamber of Commerce or a handful of industrialists, have taken a stand for law and order, citing moral, spiritual, or economic reasons for their position...
...The South's most courageous and brilliant young editor during the later 1920's and early 1930's was Mark Ethridge...
...their books were reviewed in it...
...A few honest, sensitive books have been written...
...Even before her, in 1908, young Howard Odum had used "the Negro" as the subject of PAULA SNELLING was co-editor of South Today for a decade...
...The manifest affection he felt for the Jeeters of Georgia could not compensate for his raucous shattering of the magnolia-image...
...Groups such as Georgia's hope and oasis, Louisiana's sos, and others in Tennessee and elsewhere rose to meet specific local crises following the various Supreme Court rulings...
...Richard Wright, that Native Son in exile, dramatically stated, for those who would listen, what the effect can be, on a black boy, of growing up in the deep South...
...South Today made friends, of course, as well as enemies...
...Among organizations, the outstanding Southern Regional Council and the various statewide Councils on Human Relations have had great influence...
...But these women, some of whose husbands were Klan members, had a courage that can scarcely be exaggerated...
...In the Twenties, that brilliant rebel, Evelyn Scott, wrote a spate of books about the South's calendar of sin...
...Mark Ethridge wrote a friendly letter giving the editors a few badly-needed lessons in how to edit a magazine...
...A few years later, Mrs...
...William Faulkner fared little better in the South during his early years of writing...
...In 1919, Will W. Alexander, with the help of Mrs...
...activities, wrote the first book on the Negro as a human problem...
...He was viciously attacked by fellow Southerners and soon left the region...
...Dorothy Tilly, Mrs...
...Its spokesmen, now beginning to be listened to, are no longer the demagogues but the truthseekers who speak with respect for the human being and with longing for a world where men can relate themselves to each other in honor and peace...
...After snorting and coughing and gasping, the Atlanta Constitution gradually began to change its mind and by 1957 was playing a leading role in acquainting its readers with the political and economic and legal facts of life in this moment of history...
...During the last five years, the Atlanta newspapers have also had a more permissive attitude toward their reporters, letting them describe things as things are...
...Odum and the Chapel Hill group of social scientists were turning out books on the real South, slowly tearing the myths to pieces...
...However opinions may vary as to Caldwell's talents or taste, his book and play made the whole country aware of the predicament of the "poor white" in the South...
...The magazine eventually had a circulation of ten thousand, and more than a quarter of a million reprints of some of its articles were sold...
...Our region's future lies with its people and will go in the direction of those voices which speak most eloquently and clearly...
...Whatever else might be said about them, the editors were critical idol-smashers...
...There were also open reprisals, led off by the Atlanta Constitution, whose editorial position at this time was still strong for segregation...
...Maxwell, Georgia—a microcosm of the South—was there, in flesh and blood, in black and white...
...in 1944, Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit was published...
...The Enquirer's editor received a Pulitzer Prize in 1925 for his editorials against the Klan and racial violence...
...South Today had the pleasure of presenting a chapter from W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South months before the book was completed and some two years before it was published...
...From its beginning, the little magazine refused to observe the rites of segregation: Negroes were called by courtesy titles...
...teachers and preachers, laborers, and even some industrialists were constant readers...
...This group quickly and quietly acquired members in many small Southern towns...
...The editors also discovered Negro writers...
...She was efficiently smothered...
...The manifestoes of professional men have also had a strong moral effect...
...Tilly, Mrs...
...his doctoral dissertation at the University of North Carolina...
...all were quick to learn that individuals who dared to express their own ideas and experiences would starve or be persecuted...
...During this decade or so, other novelists were chipping away, some more, some less peripherally, at the white columns which supported the Southern myth...
...The influential writers include the courageous and brilliant John Howard Griffin, the equally brilliant Tennessee Williams, the sensitive Truman Capote, the sardonic Margaret Long, the irascible and hilariously brave P. D. East, the warm and humane Sarah Patton Boyle, Harry Golden of Charlotte, North Carolina, whose accent is human if not specifically Southern, and Robert Penn Warren, whose book on Huey Long made a deep impact—these, varying in talent and importance, have spoken their personal truths as they see them...
...he finally moved to New England, a heart-broken exile from the people he loved, whose evils he hated...
...they talked to mayors and town marshals, and to their husbands...
...W. D. Weatherford, Southern educator and leader in Y.M.C.A...
...Jessie Daniel Ames, and R. B. Eleazer, organized (in Atlanta) the first interracial committee in the world...
...After this book's appearance, some old supporters dropped away, some new ones formed...
...Less than a year after the book came out, he too had committed suicide...
...Then a restlessness began...
...The times were atune for it...
...It is not easy to assess the effect this handsome, brave, intelligent, and socially prominent Missis-sippian had on the young intellectuals of the South as he steered the policies of the papers he edited, first in Macon, Georgia, and later in Richmond, Virginia, and Louisville, Kentucky...
...The letter he sent to the Jackson, Mississippi, newspaper a short time after the tragic war ended was a stirring and historic document...
...Its editorials for several years now have been eloquent and persistent in their position against mobs and violence, and for open schools and law and order...
...Lillian Smith called Gone with the Wind "the swan song of white supremacy," and quite a few Southerners stopped speaking to her...
...Idealism was at a new high...
...these are my people...
...This democracy for which thousands were dying seemed worth a closer look...
...The eventual arousal of Southern public opinion against lynching must in large part be attributed to them...
...Since 1954, the whole world has been aware of the brilliant strategies of the naacp's legal committee...
...Martin Luther King's Montgomery Movement...
...Never before had a Southern magazine been other than fully segregated...
...Raper joined the list of Southerners who lost their jobs in their home states because of their liberal views...
...they laughed off some of the old sacred assumptions and began asking quiet, troubled questions...
...White and black voices speak more and more freely, not always agreeing with each other but openly expressing their beliefs...
...Young Clarence Cason had written his 90° in the Shade, and shortly afterward committed suicide because of the cruel criticism he received from fellow Southerners...
...He was berated, insulted, and then ignored...
...For complex reasons, the full penalty for recreating Southern life as she saw it was not exacted for this book...
...perhaps it should be a thing to live for, as well as die for...
...editors dared not protest for the Ku Klux Klan was too powerful...
...Carson McCullers' first book, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, called attention to some of the square pegs for whom no space was provided in the traditional round holes: the different and lonely adolescent, the mute, the small town Negro doctor, the white derelict...
...some front doors closed, some back doors opened...
...Earlier, Erskine Caldwell had held up for national scrutiny the Tobacco Roader, who for more than a century had been the South's forgotten man...
...Whatever it did for the readers," she wrote, "it was one of the most moving times of my life, as I discovered how Negroes felt, dreamed, created, suffered as human beings...
...There is no solid South now...
...By this time World War II was under way, with its unprecedented demands for the sacrifice of lives and ways of life by rich and poor, North and South, black and white...
...Then Dr...
...psychologists and philosophers and artists wrote stimulating letters and were faithful subscribers...
...The book was ardently received by many young Southern intellectuals...
Vol. 26 • December 1962 • No. 12
