THE SOUTH AND NEGROES
Villard, Oswald Garrison
The South And Negroes By Oswald Garrison Villard IN AN HOUR in which the race problem appears more critical and dangerous than ever, a powerful Southern daily has editorially taken a remarkable...
...Infinitely More Heartening Mr...
...The South And Negroes By Oswald Garrison Villard IN AN HOUR in which the race problem appears more critical and dangerous than ever, a powerful Southern daily has editorially taken a remarkable and altogether the most heartening stand recorded in many years...
...It might have shielded itself behind the gravity of the existing situation created by the war...
...The Times-Dispatch is entirely right in saying that the repeal would be "the greatest single step toward better race relationships taken in any Southern state for decades...
...The Richmond Times-Dispatch, the foremost Virginia newspaper, has actually demanded the repeal of the Jim Crow laws applicable to street cars and buses...
...Dabney—I presume the editorial is from his pen or that of the distinguished owner of the paper, John Stewart Bryan—is completely correct in saying that "the best way to provoke bitter race clashes in this region over an indefinite period is for the whites to turn their backs on the legitimate appeals of the Negro for justice...
...It is, however, infinitely more heartening that this move should come out of the South than if it had appeared in the leading dailies of a dozen Northern cities...
...Dabney and the editors of the famous Louisville Courier-Journal to speak out for the black man...
...More than any other section it has its insistent local mores and social customs and more than any other it has applied social ostracism to all dissenters, however inconsistent some of its attitudes, or how remote from the currents of modern economic and social life...
...There have been innumerable signs of progress there, many men like Mr...
...Not the most optimistic observer of the New South could have believed that this could come to pass in the year 1943 or 1953...
...But most remarkable of all, it declares that such a move would not be a radical one but "the truly conservative course...
...It is a statesmen-like and far-seeing stand which the Times-Dispatch thus takes against segregation on cars for it strikes at one of the most potent causes of race friction and, for the Negro, a source of constant humiliation and acerbation...
...That the editor of the Times-Dispatch, Virginius Dabney, portrayed vividly in an article in the Atlantic Monthly last Winter, in which he declared that the problem had never before been so critical and that if the hotheads On both sides were not restrained this country would be drenched with blood in a frightful civil conflict...
...But I never dreamed that I should live to see a powerful Southern daily openly champion the abolition of transportation segregation, when a man like the owner of the Raleigh News-Observer, the Ambassador to Mexico, still glories in the fact that he helped to put the Jim Crow laws over in his state.- The Times-Dispatch's leadership in the other direction is the best available proof that, somehow, we shall safely work our way out of the present race crisis...
...Now the war has come to make it clear to all thoughtful Americans that we cannot fight a war for the right of individuals everywhere on the globe to the Four Freedoms and continue to withhold from 13 millions of our own people freedom from discrimination, from oppression, and full rights of citizenship to which they are entitled under the Constitution...
...For the South is a citadel of reaction, conservatism, and tradition...
...The Spirit Behind It This position it takes in the belief that if the white South itself does not modify some of the disabilities under which the Negro labors, the soundest Negro leaders will be forced to yield to radicals in and out of the State who are "demanding the complete abolition of all discrimination overnight...
...Thus, it declares that "the time has come when the white South must do more than issue pious statements about loving and understanding the Negro if it wishes to build a firm foundation for amicable race relations in this region...
...But the best thing about the Times-Dispatch's editorial is the spirit that animates it...
...To many hidebound Southerners it must seem like the blackest treason, for it is a most powerful blow at what has been widely heralded as the rock-bottom foundation of race relationships in the South...
...I have seen in 40 years many changes in the South, slow enough in all conscience, but yet so steady as to make me certain that the tide had set in the right direction and nothing could stop it, that in the end the true American spirit and conscience would triumph over the tremendous dangers that Mr...
...As the New York Herald-Tribune points out, that applies to all places where the Negro is under disabilities...
...Like many another Southern journal which at heart realizes the wrongfulness of many of the Southern attitudes towards the Negro, it could have kept silent, shrugged its editorial shoulders, and left the whole question to the passing of time...
...Dabney has foreseen...
Vol. 7 • December 1943 • No. 52
