THE UNFINISHED EMANCIPATION

Tindall, George B.

The Unfinished Emancipation by GEORGE B. TINDALL THE challenging battle cry, "Free by '63," seems unhappily to have subsided in the last few years before the realization that the centennial of the...

...She could grow up overnight...
...Here are the old chestnuts that no Negro civilizations have arisen in Africa, that intelligence tests ordinarily show lower scores for Negroes, that Negro criminality is high, that The Southern Case For School Segregation, by James Jackson Kil-patrick...
...The South, he suggests, has a great advantage over other regions...
...In any case, his treatment points up the very real fears among whites that integration may lower standards as a practical fact, whatever the origins or injustices behind Negro deficiencies...
...To a considerable degree that has already happened, but one is inhibited from the ancient Southern temptation to point out the mote that is in thy neighbor's eye by the knowledge that many of the inadequacies with which the metropolitan North must struggle were spawned in the separate but unequal South...
...The Bateses suffered threats, bombings, shots fired into their home, and finally the destruction of their newspaper by the withdrawal of advertising patronage...
...224 pp...
...The war is lost, he confesses— and that is quite a confession for the editor of the Richmond News Leader, the prophet of interposition (a doc- trine conspicuously absent from these pages)—but the battle goes on...
...Anchor Books...
...American Race Relations Today, edited by Earl Raab...
...Those who are eager to see a definitive history of the NAACP's half century of struggle for emancipation will be disappointed in Langston Hughes' Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP (W...
...Lenoir Chambers, Norfolk editor and biographer of Stonewall Jackson, neatly disposes of Kilpatrick's objections to the desegregation rulings and declares that "modern Negro leadership possesses a sense of responsibility that the country associates with reasonable men...
...We Dissent, edited by Hoke Nor-ris...
...Fight For Freedom: the story of the naacp, by Langston Hughes...
...Sarah Boyle, the wife of a professor at "Mr...
...It is a useful supplement to Robert L. Jack's history in that it gives the bulk of its space to the period since the publication of that volume in 1943, and it is much more skilfully written...
...W. W. Norton...
...His experiences also support the Raab-Lipset thesis...
...The more baffling thing for Yankees inured to their own peculiar images of the monolithic South is the mental set of white Southern moderates and liberals, especially those who manifest loyalty to a viable Southern heritage, while opposing segregation...
...Daughter of an old Virginia family, she found her conscience drawn irresistibly to the public defense of the first Negro student enrolled at the university under court order in 1951...
...In Changing Patterns of Prejudice (Chilton, $6.95), Alfred J. Marrow, psychologist, businessman, and civic leader, looks at racial, religious, and cultural tensions from the perspective of a man who from 1956 to 1960 was chairman of New York City's Commission on Intergroup Relations, dealing with the problems of the world's greatest Negro, Jewish, Irish, Puerto Rican, and Italian city...
...The Unfinished Emancipation by GEORGE B. TINDALL THE challenging battle cry, "Free by '63," seems unhappily to have subsided in the last few years before the realization that the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation will arrive with the battle still unfinished...
...Problems yielded more readily in a permissive atmosphere...
...He was a contributor to the 1960 book, "The Southerner as American...
...271 pp...
...While the Kilpatrick and Norris books are largely theoretical or expository disquisitions, two other recent books present the intimate personal narratives of Southerners in the front lines of conflict...
...Joseph S. Himes examines "Changing Social Roles in the New South" and Charles U. Smith "The Sit-ins and the New Negro Student," but more than half the book is given over to racial problems and tensions in metropolitan areas utside the South, including essays on Mexicans and Puerto Ricans...
...she has a history of such tragic depth and varied nature that she stands now upon the very brink of maturity...
...Crowell-Collier...
...The Long Shadow of Little Rock, by Daisy Bates...
...The evidence is essentially an effort to demonstrate Negro inferiority...
...William Morrow...
...New insights of the social scientists may be found in the new paperback collection gathered by Earl Raab in American Race Relations Today (Anchor Books, Doubleday, 95 cents...
...But is is a superficially researched publicist's tract for the NAACP rather than a critical history...
...We meet it, and survive...
...It is no restatement of Brady's Black Monday nor of Bilbo's Separation or Mongrelization...
...Francis Pickens Miller, a Virginia leader once nearly elected governor over the Byrd candidate, sees the South at the dawn ending a long night that descended in 1832 when the Virginia legislature narrowly defeated an abolition resolution...
...Probably for all the complaints of segregationists that they cannot get a hearing in the North, their mental set is all too well understood there...
...The Desegregated Heart: a Virginian's stand in time of transition, by Sarah Boyle...
...we rise again...
...St Martin's Press...
...I don't believe it...
...The Old South had its pro-slavery argument, a grandiloquent structure of philosophical justification for human bondage...
...In addition, he is the author of the study, "South Carolina Negroes, 1877-1900" and is now completing the Twentieth Century volume for the cooperative "History of the South...
...standards of sexual morality among Negroes are not those of middle class whites...
...He admits that these circumstances may be explained by environmental causes, though he strongly suspects hereditary deficiencies that he sometimes claims to be susceptible of proof—but he is cautious on the point...
...Desegregation, he argues, while it is a legal fait accompli, "is not to be a two-day coup d'etat, but a thirty-year Peloponnesian War...
...Two of Kilpatrick's compatriots dissent strongly from his views...
...By 1957 she was state president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and in that position became the leader of the struggle for nine Negro students to enter Central High...
...The orphaned daughter of a woman murdered by white rapists, Mrs...
...Two committed suicide, the victims of internal conflict exacerbated by segregationist abuse...
...Boyle stood by her new convictions and emerged to a renewal and deepening of religious faith...
...Changing Patterns of Prejudice, by Alfred J. Marrow...
...4.50...
...Jefferson's uniTHE REVIEWERS GEORGE B. TINDALL, a South Carolinian, is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina...
...versity," illuminates the way in which a Southerner with deep roots may draw drastically new conclusions from her heritage of religion and "aristocratic" responsibility...
...In the end Mrs...
...W. Norton, $4.50...
...Have we lived here three hundred years to accomplish only this...
...Here are marshaled the evidence and law from the segregationist viewpoint...
...While in America at large "the Negroes have greater political power than Southern politicians," in the South "the lemmings have taken command" in a kind of arrogant impotence...
...It gives no treatment at all, for instance, to the important policy struggle of the Thirties between the integrationists and the DuBois group that supported separate economic development as the basis for future gains...
...Its tenor reflects the distance from Virginia to Mississippi...
...second, the discovery of a deep distrust of white "liberals" among Negroes who do not understand their inner struggles with prejudice nor have faith in their perseverance under fire...
...The book gives a new dimension of immediacy to the perspnal stories of the Little Rock Nine who persisted with remarkable stubbornness to their goal despite unbelievable cruelties from mobs and vindictive fellow students, in the absence of effective discipline from National Guardsmen and school officials...
...Having given away the game, he proceeds to the reasons for continuing it...
...The first essay by Raab and Seymour Martin Lipset cogently develops the significant theory that prejudiced behavior arises more directly from community circumstances and social situations than from conscious thought or teachings—a theory that seems to be strongly confirmed by the experience of Sarah Patton Boyle, and of Kathleen Keen Sinnett, one of the contributors to We Dissent...
...This reviewer, perhaps out of professional prejudice, is inclined to believe that the Supreme Court might have strengthened its opinion by reference to historical evidence that racial separation has been very clearly a device for maintaining inequality for more than a half-century—a point implicit in Kilpatrick's plea that Southern states now belatedly comply with the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson...
...In The Desogregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in Time of Transition (William Morrow, $5), Mrs...
...Daisy Bates in The Long Shadow of Little Rock (David McKay, $4.75), a personal memoir of the Battle of Central High...
...It is precisely because the South has ex-perienced defeat, again and again," he writes, ". . . that defeat has become an old friend...
...220 pp...
...Bates only with difficulty conquered a blind hatred of all things white...
...95 cents...
...3.95...
...it does not echo Eastland or Barnett or McCarthy...
...Defending segregation as our way of life, we sell the South short," writes James McBride Dabbs, the South Carolinian who is president of the Southern Regional Council...
...David McKay...
...Once the South's "natural leadership of mind and spirit" steps out "in battle array," he predicts, "the impact will be formidable and probably irresistible...
...WILLIAM Mc-CANN reviews paperbacks regularly for The Progressive...
...White sympathizers suffered harass-x ment and abuse and economic ruin...
...and third, the persistence of original sin and selfishness: the capacity of people for clinging to conventional ways, at best for making excuses, at worst for ostracising and vilifying and threatening the individual who strikes out on new paths...
...To bring about a desired change, he writes, "it was often more effective to reduce the opposition to such a change than to increase the pressure for it...
...234 pp...
...As a creature of the law," however, "racial segregation in the United States is dead...
...If so, "she would distrust and hate the world less and love herself more...
...4.75...
...It is merely that the obsequies should be postponed while all the legal objections to de facto segregation are paraded across the record...
...4.95...
...Anybody who wants to understand this unyielding reality will find it en-lightening to turn to James Jackson Kilpatrick's The Southern Case for School Segregation (Crowell-Collier Press, |3.95), the latest monument to a fatal Southern affinity for lost causes...
...Chilton...
...For the time being, however, Raleigh editor Jonathan Daniels points up the recent dearth of statesmanship skilled in the effective development and use of power...
...Other enlightening essays in We Dissent are contributed by James and Wilma Stokely, Ralph McGill, Kathleen Keen Sinnett, Thomas D. Clark, Hodding Carter III, LeRoy Collins, Borden Deal, Paul Green, and Hoke Norris...
...Nor does it analyze the policy crisis created by the rise of direct action movements in the bus boycotts, sit-ins, and Freedom Rides out of impatience with the NAACP's traditional evolutionary legal approach...
...he edited "Ambrose Bierce's America...
...The general tenor of all these recent books leads one to the inevitable speculation that in the next decade the center of the most serious intergroup tensions may shift from the South to the metropolitan North...
...Harry Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette, Mayor Wood-row Mann, and school superintendent Virgil Blossom were hounded out of town...
...The authors are Morton Grodzins, Dan W. Dodson, Nathan Glazer, James B. Conant, Leonard Broom, Eshref Sherky, Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, and C. Eric Lincoln...
...In 1941 she and her husband, L. C. Bates, moved to Little Rock, where they started a crusading newspaper, the Arkansas State Press...
...The calm courage and determination displayed by Daisy Bates and the nine Negro students in the face of virulent opposition lead one to question seriously the Kilpatrick thesis of a thirty-year war...
...Here, at last, is the pro-segregation argument, not so imposing perhaps, but engagingly presented in tones of sweet reason, citing all the major authorities, indispensable for understanding the tenacity of segregationist attitudes...
...Hoke Norris, a North Carolinian now literary critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, has gathered a potpourri of their views in fourteen essays under the title, We Dissent (St Martin's Press, $4.95...
...6.95...
...211 pp...
...What followed was a process of knowledge gained in the fires of controversy: first, the self-awareness of deeply ingrained attitudes of condescension and paternalism that hamper the white Southerner in his contacts with Negroes and undermine his courage...
...364 pp...
...He traverses all the familiar paths of constitutional guaranties of state rights, all the major "separate but equal" precedents, and the charges that the Supreme Court improperly relied upon sociological and psychological evidence—at least sociological and psychological evidence opposed to Kilpatrick's...
...A far more intense spiritual and physical travail is narrated by Mrs...

Vol. 26 • December 1962 • No. 12


 
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