by Jon Meacham
I shake my head.
“Well, I’ll tell you. You see those girls in my office outside, those young men. Come from good lower-middle-class homes, went to college a lot of them. Well, a girl comes in here and says to me a gentleman is waiting. She shows him in. He is as black as the ace of spades. It just never crossed that girl’s mind, what she was saying, when she said a gentleman was waiting.” He pauses. “Yes, sir,” he says, “I just don’t know why I’m doing it.”
I am thinking of walking down Canal Street, in New Orleans, and a man is saying to me: “Do you know how many millions a year the Negroes spend up and down this street?”
No, I had said, I didn’t know.
He tells me the figure, then says: “You get the logic of that, don’t you?”
What’s coming? And the college student says: “I’ll tell you one thing that’s coming, there’s not going to be any academic freedom or any other kind around here if we don’t watch out. Now, I’m a segregationist, that is, the way things are here right now, but I don’t want anybody saying I can’t listen to somebody talk about something. I can make up my own mind.”
What’s coming? And a state official says: “Integration sure and slow. A creeping process. If the NAACP has got bat sense, not deliberately provoking things as in the University of Alabama deal. They could have got that girl in quiet and easy, but that wouldn’t satisfy them. No, they wanted the bang. As for things in general, grade schools and high schools, it’ll be the creeping process. The soft places first, and then one county will play football or basketball with Negroes on the team. You know how it’ll be. A creeping process. There’ll be lots of court actions, but don’t let court actions fool you. I bet you half the superintendents over in Tennessee will secretly welcome a court action in their county. Half of ’em are worried morally and half financially, and a court action just gets ’em off the hook. They didn’t initiate it, they can always claim, but it gets them off the hook. That’s the way I would feel, I know.”
What’s coming? I ask the taxi driver in Memphis. And he says: “Lots of dead niggers round here, that’s what’s coming. Look at Detroit, lots of dead niggers been in the Detroit River, but it won’t be a patch on the Ole Mississippi. But hell, it won’t stop nothing. Fifty years from now everybody will be gray anyway, Jews and Germans and French and Chinese and niggers, and who’ll give a durn?”
The cab has drawn to my destination. I step out into the rain and darkness. “Don’t get yourself drownded now,” he says. “You have a good time now. I hope you do.”
What’s coming? And a man in Arkansas says: “We’ll ride it out. But it looked like bad trouble one time. Too many outsiders. Mississippians and all. They come back here again, somebody’s butt will be busted.”
And another man: “Sure, they aim for violence, coming in here. When a man gets up before a crowd and plays what purports to be a recording of an NAACP official, an inflammatory sex thing, and then boasts of having been in on a lynching himself, what do you call it? Well, they got him on the witness stand, under oath, and he had to admit he got the record from Patterson, of the Citizens Council, and admitted under oath the lynching statement. He also admitted under oath some other interesting facts—that he had once been indicted for criminal libel but pleaded guilty to simple libel, that he has done sixty days for contempt of court on charges of violating an injunction having to do with liquor. Yeah, he used to run a paper called The Rub Down—that’s what got him into the libel business. What’s going to happen if a guy like that runs things? I ask you.”
What’s coming? And the planter leans back with the glass in his hand. “I’m not going to get lathered up,” he says, “because it’s no use. Why is the country so lathered up to force the issue one way or the other? Democracy—democracy has just come to be a name for what you like. It has lost responsibility, no local integrity left, it has been bought off. We’ve got the power state coming on, and communism or socialism, whatever you choose to call it. Race amalgamation is inevitable. I can’t say I like any of it. I am out of step with the times.”
What’s coming? I ask the Episcopal rector, in the Deep South, a large handsome man, almost the twin of my friend sitting in the fine office overlooking the rich city. He has just told me that when he first came down from the North, a generation back, his bishop had explained it all to him, how the Negroes’ skull capacity was limited. But, as he has said, brain power isn’t everything, there’s justice, and not a member of his congregation wasn’t for conviction in the Till case.
“But the Negro has to be improved before integration,” he says. “Take their morals, we are gradually improving the standard of morality and decency.”
The conversation veers, we take a longer view. “Well, anthropologically speaking,” he says, “the solution will be absorption, the Negro will disappear.”
I ask how this is happening.
“Low-class people, immoral people, libertines, wastrels, prostitutes and such,” he says.
I ask if, in that case, the raising of the moral level of the Negro does not prevent, or delay, what he says is the solution.
The conversation goes into a blur.
What’s coming? And the young man from Mississippi says: “Even without integration, even with separate but pretty good facilities for the Negro, the Negro would be improving himself. He would be making himself more intellectually and socially acceptable. Therefore, as segregationists, if we’re logical, we ought to deny any good facilities to them. Now, I’m a segregationist, but I can’t be that logical.”
What’s coming? And the officer of the Citizens Council chapter says: “Desegregation, integration, amalgamation—none of it will come here. To say it will come is defeatism. It won’t come if we stand firm.”
And the old man in north Tennessee, a burly, full-blooded, red-faced, raucous old man, says: “Hell, son, it’s easy to solve. Just blend ’em. Fifteen years and they’ll all be blended in. And by God, I’m doing my part!”
Out of Memphis, I lean back in my seat on the plane, and watch the darkness slide by. I know what the Southerner feels going out of the South, the relief, the expanding vistas. Now, to the sound of the powerful, magnanimous engines bearing me through the night, I think of that, thinking of the new libel laws in Mississippi, of the academic pressures, of academic resignations, of the Negro facing the shotgun blast, of the white man with a nice little hard-built business being boycotted, of the college boy who said: “I’ll just tell you, everybody is scairt.”
I feel the surge of relief. But I know what the relief really is. It is the relief from responsibility.
Now you may eat the bread of the Pharisee and read in the morning paper, with only a trace of irony, how out of an ultimate misery of rejection some Puerto Rican schoolboys—or is it Jews or Negroes or Italians?—who call themselves something grand, the Red Eagles or the Silver Avengers, have stabbed another boy to death, or raped a girl, or trampled an old man into a bloody mire. If you can afford it, you will, according to the local mores, send your child to a private school, where there will be, of course, a couple of Negro children on exhibit. And that delightful little Chinese girl who is so good at dramatics. Or is it finger painting?
Yes, you know what the relief is. It is the flight from the reality you were born to.
But what is that reality you have fled from?
It is the fact of self-division. I do not mean division between man and man in society. That division is, of course, there, and it is important. Take, for example, the killing of Clinton Melton, in Glendora, Mississippi, in the Delta, by a man named Elmer Kimbell, a close friend of Milam (who had been acquitted of the murder of Till, whose car was being used by Kimbell at the time of the killing of Melton, and to whose house Kimbell returned after the deed).
Two days after the event, twenty-one men—storekeepers, planters, railroad men, schoolteachers, preachers, bookkeepers—sent money to the widow for funeral expenses, with the note: “Knowing that he was outstanding i
n his race, we the people of this town are deeply hurt and donate as follows.” When the Lions Club met three days after the event, a resolution was drawn and signed by all members present: “We consider the taking of the life of Clinton Melton an outrage against him, against all the people of Glendora, against the people of Mississippi as well as against the entire human family. . . . We humbly confess in repentance for having so lived as a community that such an evil occurrence could happen here, and we offer ourselves to be used in bringing to pass a better realization of the justice, righteousness and peace which is the will of God for human society.”
And the town began to raise a fund to realize the ambition of the dead man, to send his children to college; the doctor of Glendora offered employment in his clinic to the widow; and the owner of the plantation where she had been raised offered to build for her and her children a three-room house.
But, in that division between man and man, the jury that tried Elmer Kimbell acquitted him.
But, in that same division between man and man, when the newspaper of Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the heart of the Delta, ran a front-page story of the acquittal, that story was bracketed with a front-page editorial saying that there had been some extenuation for acquittal in the Till case, with confusion of evidence and outside pressures, but that in the Melton case, there had been no pressure and “we were alone with ourselves and we flunked it.”
Such division between man and man is important. As one editor in Tennessee said to me: “There’s a fifth column of decency here, and it will, in the end, betray the extremists, when the politicians get through.” But such a division between man and man is not as important in the long run as the division within the individual man.
Within the individual there are, or may be, many lines of fracture. It may be between his own social idealism and his anger at Yankee Phariseeism. (Oh, yes, he remembers that in the days when Federal bayonets supported the black Reconstruction state governments in the South, not a single Negro held elective office in any Northern state.) It may be between his social views and his fear of the power state. It may be between his social views and his clan sense. It may be between his allegiance to organized labor and his racism—for status or blood purity. It may be between his Christianity and his social prejudice. It may be between his sense of democracy and his ingrained attitudes toward the Negro. It may be between his own local views and his concern for the figure America cuts in the international picture. It may be between his practical concern at the money loss to society caused by the Negro’s depressed condition and his own personal gain or personal prejudice. It may be, and disastrously, between his sense of the inevitable and his emotional need to act against the inevitable.
There are almost an infinite number of permutations and combinations, but they all amount to the same thing: a deep intellectual rub, a moral rub, anger at the irremediable self-division, a deep exacerbation at some failure to find identity. That is the reality.
It expresses itself in many ways. I sit for an afternoon with an old friend, a big, weather-faced, squarish man, a farmer, an intelligent man, a man of good education, of travel and experience, and I ask him questions. I ask if he thinks we can afford, in the present world picture, to alienate Asia by segregation here at home. He hates the question. “I hate to think about it,” he says. “It’s too deep for me,” he says, and moves heavily in his chair. We talk about Christianity—he is a churchgoing man—and he says: “Oh, I know what the Bible says, and Christianity, but I just can’t think about it. My mind just shuts up.”
My old friend is an honest man. He will face his own discomfort. He will not try to ease it by passing libel laws to stop discussion or by firing professors.
There are other people whose eyes brighten at the thought of the new unity in the South, the new solidarity of resistance. These men are idealists, and they dream of preserving the traditional American values of individualism and localism against the anonymity, irresponsibility, and materialism of the power state, against the philosophy of the ad-man, the morality of the Kinsey report, and the gospel of the bitch-goddess. To be Southern again: to re-create a habitation for the values they would preserve, to achieve in unity some clarity of spirit, to envisage some healed image of their own identity.
Some of these men are segregationists. Some are desegregationists, but these, in opposing what they take to be the power-state implications of the Court decision, find themselves caught, too, in the defense of segregation. And defending segregation, both groups are caught in a paradox: in seeking to preserve individualism by taking refuge in the vision of a South redeemed in unity and antique virtue, they are fleeing from the burden of their own individuality—the intellectual rub, the moral rub. To state the matter in another way, by using the argument of mere social continuity and the justification by mere mores, they think of a world in which circumstances and values are frozen; but the essence of individuality is the willingness to accept the rub which the flux of things provokes, to accept one’s fate in time. What heroes would these idealists enshrine to take the place of Jefferson and Lee, those heroes who took the risk of their fate?
Even among these people some are in discomfort, discomfort because the new unity, the new solidarity, once it descends from the bright new world of Idea, means unity with some quite concrete persons and specific actions. They say: “Yes—yes, we’ve got to unify.” And then: “But we’ve got to purge certain elements.”
But who will purge whom? And what part of yourself will purge another part?
“Yes, it’s our own fault,” the rich businessman, active in segregation, says. “If we’d ever managed to bring ourselves to do what we ought to have done for the Negro, it would be different now, if we’d managed to educate them, get them decent housing, decent jobs.”
So I tell him what a Southern Negro professor had said to me. He had said that the future now would be different, would be hopeful, if there could just be “one gesture of graciousness” from the white man—even if the white man didn’t like the Supreme Court decision, he might try to understand the Negro’s view, not heap insult on him.
And the segregationist, who is a gracious man, seizes on the word. “Graciousness,” he says, “that’s it, if we could just have managed some graciousness to the race. Sure, some of us, a lot of us, could manage some graciousness to individual Negroes, some of us were grateful to individuals for being gracious to us. But you know, we couldn’t manage it for the race.” He thinks a moment, then says: “There’s a Negro woman buried in the family burial place. We loved her.”
I believe him when he says it. And he sinks into silence, feeling the rub, for the moment anyway, between the man who can talk in terms of graciousness, in whatever terms that notion may present itself to him, and the man who is a power for segregation.
This is the same man who has said to me, earlier, that he knows integration to be inevitable, doesn’t know why he is fighting it. But such a man is happier, perhaps, than those men, destined by birth and personal qualities to action and leadership, who in the face of what they take to be inevitable feel cut off from all action. “I am out of step with the times,” one such man says to me, and his wife says, “You know, if we feel the way we do, we ought to do something about it,” and he, in some deep, inward, unproclaimed bitterness, says, “No, I’m not going to get lathered up about anything.”
Yes, there are many kinds of rub, but I suppose that the commonest one is the moral one—the Christian one, in fact, for the South is still a land of faith. There is, of course, the old joke that after the Saturday night lynching, the congregation generally turns up a little late for church, and the sardonic remark a man made to me about the pro-integration resolution of the Southern Baptist Convention: “They were just a little bit exalted. When they got back with the home folks a lot of ’em wondered how they did it.”
But meanwhile, there are the pastors at Glendora and Hoxie and Oxford and other nameless places. And I remember a pastor, in Tennessee, a
Southerner born and bred, saying to me: “Yes, I think the Court decision may have set back race equality—it was coming fast, faster than anybody could guess, because so quiet. But now some people get so put out with the idea of Negroes in church, they stop me on the street and say if I ever let one in, they won’t come to church. So I ask about Heaven, what will they do in Heaven?
“ ‘Well,’ one woman said, ‘I’ll just let God segregate us.’
“ ‘You’ll let God segregate you?’ I said, and she flounced off. But I ask, where is Christianity if people can’t worship together? There’s only one thing to try to preach, and that is Christ. And there’s only one question to ask, and that is what would Christ do?”
Will they go with him? I ask.
“They are good Christian people, most of them,” he says. “It may be slow, but they are Christians.”
And in a town in south Kentucky, in a “black county,” a Confederate county, where desegregation is now imminent in the high schools, the superintendent says to me: “The people here are good Christian people, trying to do right. When this thing first came up, the whole board said they’d walk out. But the ministers got to preaching, and the lawyers to talking on it, and they came around.”
I asked how many were influenced by moral, how many by legal, considerations.
About half and half, he reckons, then adds: “I’m a Rebel myself, and I don’t deny it, but I’m an American and a law-abiding citizen. A man can hate an idea but know it’s right, and it takes a lot of thinking and praying to bring yourself around. You just have to uncover the unrecognized sympathy in the white man for the Negro humiliation.”
Fifty miles away I shall sit in a living room and hear some tale of a Negro coming to somebody’s front door—another house—and being admitted by a Negro servant and being found by the master of the house, who says: “I don’t care if Susie did let you in. I don’t care if Jesus Christ let you in. No black son-of-a-bitch is coming to my front door.”
