Amidst the Nation's Desegregation Crisis, a Voice of Reason

A Southern Negro's View of the South

By Charles S. Johnson*

From The New York Times Magazine, September 23, 1956

It is not merely by inadvertence that the viewpoint of the Negro Southerner is consistently omitted from characterizations of the "Southern point of view and way of life." It is a part of the Southern way of life to disregard it. Some writers, in order to provide a touch of realism for persons outside the South, explain that "the better-thinking elements of both races'' prefer to leave things as they are, or "it is only the outsider and agitator who want to stir up things and change the social pattern of the South." But these are not Negroes themselves speaking.

A few years ago a university press editor in one of the Upper South states projected a volume that would represent the range of Negro thought on race relations, from conservative to liberal to radical opinion. The title was "What the Negro Wants." In the final result, all of the Negro writers seemed to think and want substantially the same things; differences appeared only in the literary styles Of the authors. ·This irritating unanimity provoked the editor to one of the most extraordinary introductions in publishing history. He censured the writers for thinking and wanting the wrong things, and advised them what they should be wanting!

The common desires of Southern Negroes reflect a viewpoint about which several generalizations can be made.

(1) The Southern Negro viewpoint is more broadly national than regional. There are very few, if any, Southern Negroes who do not want full American citizenship, even though there are undoubtedly those who, if they had it, would make no better use of it than some of their white counterparts. In philosophy, the Southern Negro identification is with the nation and not with the Southern region, which is, in spirit, separatist.

(2) The present day Southern Negro does not share the belief of the Southern white that he is inferior as a human being, even though he may earn lower wages and have fewer years of schooling. Sixty or seventy years ago there were many who acted as if they believed themselves inferior, although they no longer actually believed it. What is for white Southerners most difficult to understand, in these days, is the absence of both the belief in inferiority and the simulation of this belief. More than this, there has been a measurable loss of Negro respect for the white pretenders to a superiority that can only be sustained by legal statutes and illegal violence, or the threat of it.

The apparent change in attitude of the Southern Negro reflects the difference between the political and social structure in the South itself as of today and sixty years ago. The genteel tradition of the South has been extinguished with the displacement of the Southern gentleman and planter aristocrat in business and politics by the culturally undisciplined new generations coming into power. The genteel tradition needed no segregation laws to confirm cultural superiority and position in society.

(3) It is variously expected that Negro Southerners. as a result of their limited status in the racial system, would be bitter or hostile, or patient or indifferent. They are typically none of these. If a generalized attitude can be defined, it would be something closer to forbearance. Bitterness grows out of hopelessness, and there is no sense of hopelessness in this situation, however uncomfortable and menacing and humiliating it may be at times. Faith in the ultimate strength of the democratic philosophy and code of the nation as a whole has always been stronger than the impulse to despair.

(4) The Southern Negro does not seriously expect very much change in his civil rights status through "grass roots" conversion. There has, indeed, been improvement in education, health, housing and welfare at this level, as an aspect of general improvement in community facilities. But in employment and wages, voting, personal security, access to cultural facilities, and other requisites of democratic living, there has been very little change except that brought about by a stronger and higher authority.

It was the Federal Government that wiped out the racial differentials in Southern wages, and the Federal courts that equalized white and Negro teachers' salaries and opened the ballot box. It was the impact of national and world .criticism that curbed mob violence in the South, and gave the stigma of crime to such brutal indulgences as the Emmett Till case in Mississippi; it was not the local courts or the neighbors. Few Southern whites of liberal or· humane views regarding Negro civil rights want personal responsibility among their less liberal friends for advocating such. It ·is simpler if the mandate comes. from some unchallengeable and objective authority that is stronger than the community itself.

That is why so many dark fingers are crossed in the United States today, as the compassionate high court patiently awaits local compliance with its school desegregation decrees. For aIl the recent, and welcome. advances in :border regions, the deep South is still erupting with white citizens' councils, and the Southern state Legislatures, which are dominated by the medieval pillars of the rural "grass-roots" areas, are passing defiant and, in some instances, brazenly insulting legislation in the name of the Southern way of life.

Just what do these Southerners stand for? The stereotypes and arguments in defense of what is called the Southern way of life are put forth by Southerners of presumed high responsibility, who are, in fact, the greatest present danger to American democracy. The reasons they give for insisting on racial segregation are defined as sociological and cultural, rather than moral or ethical or even humane. No Southern white opinion, respectable or otherwise, has, in the past half century, seriously ventured a moral or ethical - or humane justification for the Southern way of life.

It is true that there have been some fundamentalist attempts to torture he Holy Scriptures into a blessed condonement of inequality and inhumanity. Biblical scholars are considerably bewildered and embarrassed about the religious convictions of these mentalities.

There have been, too, attempts to "prove" that Negro students in the available Southern schools measure lower in educational achievement than white students. But Negro youth in Ohio, where there are better schools available, measured higher in the comprehensive intelligence tests for army recruits than the white youth of every state in the South except Florida, where there has been much migration from the North. With a historical one-third of the educational facilities, Negro youths have managed to do at least two-thirds as well as Southern white students on their own ground. It is a tortuous logic that would use the tragic results of inequality to establish the need for continuing it.

Equally illogical is the economic character of the Southern way of life.

The United States has lately experienced tremendous social and economic changes. There has been a shift in our economic perspective not yet fully recognized. The vast productive potential has made necessary the development of new areas of consumption and these are no longer found in sufficient quantity abroad. The most obvious and immeiate outlet for an expanding economic is the increased purchasing power of the underdeveloped markets at home. This is impossible in a social economy, like that of the South, that artificially limits earning power through a restrictive racial system.

We cannot escape the fact that the Negro minority market alone, even when held down by unequal opportunity and limited education to one half of its potential, is equal to the total wealth of Canada or to our total foreigh exports.

The Southern region, despite the inevitable currents of industrializatoin, continues to cling to the older patterns of its inadequate agrarian economy. Mr. Hodding Carter of Mississippi is responsible for the statement that 65 per cent of the white college grad­uates have to leave the region to find adequate careers.

Closely related to to this plantation economy and "way of life" is the illusory role and historical philosphy of "states' rights." This is the basis of attacks on the Supreme Court and the reckless array of state legislation confirming ancient patterns of racial inequality.

Mr. William Faulkner, the Mississippi Nobel laureate, in a second thought on this whole issue, said: We sold our states' rights back to the Federal Government when we accepted the first cotton price support subsidy twenty years ago. Our economy is not agricultural an longer. Our economy is the federal government. We no longer form in Mississippi cotton fields. We farm now in Washington corridors and Congressional committee rooms." Thus, if there has been a broadening of federal powers, it has been made necessary by the demands of the Southern states themselves.

 

Finally, what of the political character of the Southern way? Most of the Legislatures are dominated by rural representatives who lack the cultural sophistication of an increeasingly urban and industrial age. As a result, the region is anti-labor, anti-capital, anti-race, anti-liberal, anti-civil rights, anti-education, anti-intellectual, anti-technology, anti-Federal Government; it is provincial and isolationist to the core.

 

Political leadership has to adjust to this level of operation, and does so whenever it prizes political success above national welfare or the dominant current of human rights sweeping over the world. At present, the preoccupation of the Southern Legislatures is not with improving the health, welfare and economy of the region, but with defeating "civil rights" as a national policy.

It is the tragic truth today that in the face of the world's turning away from the crass inhumanities of racial snobbery and imperial domination, we have a substantial part of an entire region asserting defi­ ance of freedom and the laws that support it. It is a tnrg'iC pity that wltile the rest of the world is giving new attention and .respect to basic human rights, every device from subversion of law to violence is being employed to defeat the Constitution, and with such frantic desperation that no voice of stern national statesmanship dares defy, without apology and compromise, this organized his organized retreat from freedom to tyranny and feudalism.

There has been no bold and forthright national statesman­ship that would dare look at the nation as a whole and its intractable parts, and face a common destiny in the new kind of world we have today.

Even in the North, it is not yet fully recognized that the real issue is not how ·much education Negroes and other minorities can get in a segregated system, but how to improve the education of all American youth; not how racial minorities can be gradually and cautiously insinuated into industry and labor organizations, but how to increase and improve the total manpower potential of the nation for maintaining our productive capacity.

The issue is not how unsanitary some enforced racial slums and ghettos may have become, but how to improve the health and welfare of the nation without regard to race or sex or national origin - not now much a person thinks his property loses in value if a Negro moves into his neighborhood, but how to achieve a free market for living space for the people of the nation.

Basically, this Is a struggle today not between North and South, or whites and Negroes, or between the national and international points of view. It is a struggle between those who believe in democracy and those who do not.

 

Of all the voices raised in this crisis, the one most ignored has been that of the Southern Negro. In October, 1954, a group of nearly 100 Negro educators and civic leaders met in Hot Springs, Ark. and drafted a statement of invitation to sober and intelligent cooperatoin in working out this admittedly difficult problem. Although it was issued to the national press through its central services in the Southern region, it has been one of the most ignored public invitations on record.

 

Since it still lies buried in limbo, it is perhaps worth quoting from it:

Good statesmanship in a democracy requires that all segments of the population participate in the implementation of the court's decsion, which is of common concern. The idea is still too prevalent that the issues involved can be resolved with­ out Negro participation. Some public officials speak as if only white Americans are involved. We are all, Negro and white, deeply and equally involved. Many Negroes can contribute sound, intelligent and states­ manlike techniques for the handling of the inevitable issues. . . .

The court's decision makes possible a single school system with the opportunity for the people in the region to marshal their educational resources and to develop a philosphy that brings education generally a new perspective, and to the nation a new spirit. This cannot be done in a dual system of education. Let it be clearly understood that we are not pleading for Negroes alone. We are concerned about the best education that can be made available for every child in teh South. . . .

Ours Is a common democ­racy in which the weakest and the strongest, the most privileged and the most dis­ advantaged, the descendants of every race and every na­ tion, can share and happily boast that we are proud to be Americans. Children educated from the beginning in such a system will insure for us all a future of which we can be as proud as of the abolution of slavery and child labor, woman suffrage, equal educational opportunities for women, and the institution of the public schools themselves.

Time will prove that our fears have no foundation in fact just as has been proved by the implementation of previous court decisions. Segregation breeds fear; and when the barriers of segregation are at last removed from American life,·we will. wonder why we feared at all. . . . We as Negro citizens stand ready to cooperate whole-heartedly in the progressive fulfillment of these democratic objectives.

None of this cooperation has been seriously sought or accepted. The course of events has left no alternative to Negroes but the courts. This is an unnecessary waste of ability and social statesmanshp, and a repudiation of a gracious and tempered gesture of goodwill aimed at helping the whole nation surmount a common problem.

The really critical problem of the present, we believe, is the confusion of the moral imperatives of this issue with the tired poicy of moderation, our current middle-of-the-road philosophy. Whatever the personal sentiment, there can be no middle-of-the-road attitude toward morality or legality if the fabric of our society is to remain inviolate. Where there is repudiation of the integrity of the Court and the law on any or all is­ sues. No one expects laws to reform the hearts of people, and this is not their purpose. They can, however, and do, according to the venerable Judge Learned Hand, control the disorderly, even at times at the risk of making them angry.

The issue today is human equality and national. civil rights, and the touchstone is the racial segregation that prevents this human equality. Whatever our internal national differences on domestic issues, we are a total nation to the rest of the world, and no allowances can safely be made for regional defections from our basic American philosophy and practice. At stake is our survival in a world in which we are losing our allies by millions, the allies we need for military aid and support, friendship, trade and the essential raw materials for our industrial growth.

The essence of our system of government and life is voluntary cooperation in a democratic process that respects the dignity and rights of individuals. Our faith in the power of the human spirit to achieve the ends of a free society has given hope to millions of mankind over the world. We cannot default on this · promise. This is our moral challenge in a national crisis.


*Note by the Editors of The Times: Charles S. Johnson is a noted Negro educator and author. He has served as President of Fisk University since 1946 and has written many books dealing with racial problems.

Clinton Warner: I Became an American on September 11

The Changing of the Guard: A Minor Epiphany, a Major Horror*

By Clinton E. Warner, Jr.

 

"In all affairs it's  a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."- Bertrand Russell (1872-  1970).

 

I cannot remember a time in my life that I  did not consider myself anything other than colored Negro, Black, African­ American and I still do and take pride in this self image. All of my life it seems that I was a member of a group of people who felt excluded, economically, politically, educationally, culturally. There  were abundant reasons to feel this way. In high school I received old books in classrooms, old football gear passed down from the white high school. There was one Bunsen burner in the room where chemistry was taught. I always wondered if I was as well educated as whites. My Army experiences in World War II were the same as those of other Blacks - having all white officers. While on Omaha Beach in a foxhole a few days after D-Day, I wrote a poem:

Democracy to me is a fallacy.

A string of unprintable lines.

A castle on sand that can never withstand

The forces of reality

I was offered a chance to return to the United States to attend Officers Candidate School. I refused. Later, during the Battle of the Bulge, we were asked to leave our units and volunteer for infantry in the Battle. I refused.

After medical school, I fought for and won an internship at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, Illinois but, I was not allowed to rotate through obstetrics and gynecology. However, I   was asked to stay after completing the internship for further training in surgery and I politely refused. My question had been answered - I was as good as or better than the guys from Harvard, Princeton, University of Michigan and Chicago. The fact that on one occasion, when changing clothes to go into the operating room, a white surgeon burst in and said, ''Boy, go into the storage and get me a scrub suit, and be quick about it; I'm in a hurry" did nothing to shake my confidence. Insidious, subtle and blatant instances of segregation, discrimination and daily observation of "white-skin privilege" did nothing to deter me. It all reinforced the pattern of exclusion that engulfed my senses but was buffered by what I learned from my father, Benjamin Mays and others. It was a fact that everything I did in life, choices I made, where I lived, ate, went to school, sought recreation and friends was based on the color of my skin. I was not an American citizen; I  was a Black American citizen.

In my younger days, I was asked as a Black surgeon to agree to come to Mississippi- during the days of Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney and Michael Henry Schwerner by a few splinter radical members of the Civil rights Movement. They had decided to take military action against, whites. My role was to treat our casualties and triage them to Atlanta to Black hospitals. I agreed to go!!! After all, I was a strong Black male. Fortunately, cooler heads and the teachings of nonviolence prevailed. I am not ashamed about this. Yet I treasure my practice, my reputation and personal integrity and I have a 'Malcolm X' tag on my car.

A few days ago, I gave in to my wife and reluctantly agreed to visit Williamsburg, Virginia with our best friends. I   was reluctant because of the residual memories just described. I  had never flown an American flag at home or elsewhere. I had never visited a Confederate gravesite or a Revolutionary War site. "The Negro national Anthem" and "We Shall Overcome" were my songs and I never enjoyed seeing evidence or reminders of slavery. Upon entering Colonial Williamsburg, I noticed two street signs: "Harriet Tubman Street" and "Amistad Street." Something half clicked in my head, an epiphany, if you will. They do recognize and acknowledge our Black labor that built this country, our contributions to the American Dream, our inventions, our music, art, writings, scientific advances and political, social, educational and cultural contributions to this great country.

The following day, September II,  2001, at 9:00 a.m., the unspeakable horror, the vicious attack, the abominable terror, the unbelievable reality happened- the deaths of thousands of innocent Americans burned into our collective brain as we watched. The tears came, the other half of my brain clicked, and I became an American for the first time in my life. I can sing "The Star Spangled Banner" with reverence. I remain proud of my historical heritage. I will never forget it and always honor it.

We shall overcome the scourge of evil without hatred. I remain committed to the sayings of two of my favorite people: 

"Don't send me back to Africa: St. Louis is my home". - Redd Fox [John Elroy Sanford] (1922-19910).

"I believe in truth, no matter who speak it. I believe in justice, no matter who is for or against it.  I am a human being and, as such, I believe in freedom and will support anybody or anything that benefits humanity." - Malcolm X [Malcolm Little/El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz] (1925-1965)

*Warner  Jr.,  Dr.  Clinton Ellsworth. "The  Changing of  the  Guard:  A Minor  Epiphany,   A  Major Horror." The Boule Journal 65.4 (Winter 2001). Reprinted with permission.

Courts Overturn Repeated Voting Rights Violations in Texas

On August 28, 2012, a three-judge federal court in the District of Columbia held that Texas' 2010 redistricting plan violated the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The court found in Texas v. United States, that the redistricting plan was "retrogressive" because it diminished the ability of minority voters to elect candidates of their choice. The court also ruled that the plan had been enacted with an intent to discriminate against black and Hispanic Voters.

Under Section 5 of the VRA changes in voting procedures in a "covered" jurisdiction cannot be made without preclearance by the federal court in the District of Columbia or the United States Attorney General. In the 1950s and '60s the federal government’s efforts to eliminate discriminatory election practices with court cases were frequently thwarted. When one discriminatory practice was proven, a new one would be substituted requiring another round of lengthy and time consuming litigation. To put an end this cycle of chicanery, the VRA included special preclearance provisions targeted at states where the record of discriminatory tactics was the greatest.

Texas is one of six southern states covered along with a number of counties in other states. In 2006 amendments to the VRA were enacted which extended Section 5 for 25 more years. The amendments were based on evidence compiled in congressional hearings showing that racially discriminatory practices continued at very high levels.

Texas' redistricting was prompted by the 2010 census. The state's population grew by 4.3 million between 2000 and 2010. Almost 90 percent of that growth was attributable to minority residents. Latinos accounted for 65 percent of the increase, blacks 13.4 percent and Asian-Americans 10.1 percent. The growth qualified Texas for four new Congressional seats and required the state to create new voting districts.

Texas enacted a redistricting plan and in 2011, the state filed a civil action in the District of Columbia seeking a declaration that the plan did not violate the VRA. "Retrogression" occurs when minority voting strength is reduced by a redistricting plan. Texas' Republican-controlled legislature drew districts in a manner that reduced the number represented by blacks and Latinos.

In a detailed, 75-page opinion, the court found retrogression in Texas' congressional plan, the state house plan and the state senate plan. Although minorities accounted for 90 percent of Texas' population growth, black and Latino voters were in a weaker position to elect the candidates of their choice than they were before the redistricting plan was enacted. This reduction of minority voting strength violated the VRA.

The court also found extensive evidence of discriminatory intent. For example, in the case of congressional redistricting, evidence showed that institutions that generated significant economic activities were removed from an African American Congressman's district. In two other congressional districts represented by African Americans, institutions that generated substantial economic activities were removed along with neighborhoods in which their district offices were located. The court ruled that the legislature removed the "economic guts" from of the black districts but "no such surgery was performed on the districts of Anglo incumbents." Every Anglo member of Congress retained his or her district offices.

The court observed that in the last four decades Texas' redistricting plans had been challenged under the VRA and the state lost in each case. The evidence showed that black and Latino members of Congress were excluded from the process of drafting new legislative maps while the preferences of Anglo representatives were solicited and included. On the basis of this and other evidence of racial gerrymandering, the court ruled that the districts were drawn with an intent to discriminate against black and Latino voters.

Two days after the decision in Texas v. United States, a three-judge panel issued a decision in another case, Texas v. Holder, that struck down Texas' voter-identification law. The Texas law required voters to identify themselves with one of five forms of ID, including a driver’s license or a United States passport. Voters who did not possess one of the five types of identification were required to obtain a government-issued identification card similar to a driver’s license. The court ruled that the law would diminish minority voting and imposed "strict, unforgiving burdens on the poor" by charging fees to obtain election ID cards when voters lacked the required documentation. A disproportionate percentage of individuals adversely affected by the ID law were black and Latino voters.

These are just two of several pending VRA cases. A number of them claim that the VRA is unconstitutional because Section 5 preclearance is no longer needed. Opponents contend that conditions are different now than they were in the 1960s when state and local officials engaged in overt conduct to prevent minorities from exercising the franchise. However, Texas v. United States and Texas v. Holder show that intentional discrimination is not some relic of a distant past. Discrimination is still deep in the heart of Texas as the flagrant conduct of the Republican-dominated Texas legislature clearly shows.

 

About the Author

 

Leland Ware, a member of the Board of the Southern Regional Council, is Louis B. Redding Chair and Professor for the Study of Law and Public Policy at the University of Delaware.He is the author of numerous publications, and he served as co-editor of the recently-published volume, Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience.

The Southern Regional Council Announces the Lillian Smith Book Award Recipients for 2012

Atlanta - Two exceptional books will be recognized with this year's Lillian Smith Book Awards. These awards were established in 1968 by the Southern Regional Council (SRC) to recognize authors whose books represent outstanding achievements demonstrating through literary merit and moral vision an honest representation of the South, its people, its problems, and its promise.

This year's Forty-Fourth Anniversary Awards Ceremony is a partnership between the Southern Regional Council, the University of Georgia Libraries, and the Georgia Center for the Book. It will be presented in connection with the Decatur Book Festival at the DeKalb County Public Library in Decatur, Georgia on Sunday, September 2, 2012 at 2:30 p.m.

The 2012 Award Recipients are:

Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement

By Tomiko Brown-Nagin

"In this sweeping history of the Civil Rights movement in Atlanta–the South’s largest and most economically important city–from the 1940s through 1980, Tomiko Brown-Nagin shows that the movement featured a vast array of activists and many sophisticated approaches to activism. Long before 'black power' emerged and gave black dissent from the mainstream civil rights agenda a new name, African Americans in Atlanta debated the meaning of equality and the steps necessary to obtain social and economic justice.

"This groundbreaking book uncovers the activism of visionaries–both well-known legal figures and unsung citizens–from across the ideological spectrum who sought something different from, or more complicated than, 'integration.' Local activists often played leading roles in carrying out the integrationist agenda of the NAACP, but some also pursued goals that differed markedly from those of the venerable civil rights organization. Brown-Nagin discusses debates over politics, housing, public accommodations, and schools. She documents how the bruising battle over school desegregation in the 1970s, which featured opposing camps of African Americans, had its roots in the years before Brown v. Board of Education.

"Exploring the complex interplay between the local and national, between lawyers and communities, between elites and grassroots, and between middle-class and working-class African Americans, Courage to Dissent tells gripping stories about the long struggle for equality that speak to the nation’s current urban crisis. This remarkable book will transform our understanding of the Civil Rights era."

Writing the South Through the Self: Explorations in Southern Autobiography

By John C. Inscoe

"Drawing on two decades of teaching a college-level course on southern history as viewed through autobiography and memoir, John C. Inscoe has crafted a series of essays exploring the southern experience as reflected in the life stories of those who lived it. Constantly attuned to the pedagogical value of these narratives, Inscoe argues that they offer exceptional means of teaching young people because the authors focus so fully on their confrontations—as children, adolescents, and young adults—with aspects of southern life that they found to be troublesome, perplexing, or challenging.

"Maya Angelou, Rick Bragg, Jimmy Carter, Bessie and Sadie Delany, Willie Morris, Pauli Murray, Lillian Smith, and Thomas Wolfe are among the more prominent of the many writers, both famous and obscure, upon whom Inscoe draws to construct a composite portrait of the South at its most complex and diverse. The power of place; struggles with racial, ethnic, and class identities; the strength and strains of family; educational opportunities both embraced and thwarted—all are themes that infuse the works in this most intimate and humanistic of historical genres.

"Full of powerful and poignant stories, anecdotes, and testimonials, Writing the South through the Self explores the emotional and psychological dimensions of what it has meant to be southern and offers us new ways of understanding the forces that have shaped southern identity in such multifaceted ways."

The Southern Regional Council (SRC) is an inter-racial organization founded in 1919 to combat racial injustice in the South. SRC initiated the Lillian Smith Book Awards shortly after Smith's death in 1966 to recognize authors whose writing extends the legacy of the outspoken writer, educator and social critic who challenged her fellow Southerners and all Americans on issues of social and racial justice. Since 2004 the awards have been presented by SRC in a partnership with the University of Georgia Libraries, whose Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library houses a historic collection of Lillian Smith's letters and manuscripts. The Georgia Center for the Book became a partner in 2007, when the awards ceremony first became part of the Decatur Book Festival.

The 2011 winners of the Lillian Smith Book Award were Steve Lerner for Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States and Danielle McGuire for At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power.

"But Then, We All Have Fathers:" The 1982 Lillian Smith Book Awards

From Southern Changes, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983

The Southern Regional Council's annual Lillian Smith Awards Luncheon was held in Atlanta in November as a part of the SRC's annual meeting. The awards recognize the year's best fiction and non-fiction books about the South. The 1982 winners were John Ehle for The Winter People (New York: Harper and Row) and Harry Ashmore for Hearts and Minds: A History of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: McGraw-Hill). Following are excerpts from remarks at the luncheon.

Mary Frances Derfner

Lillian Smith, Georgia thinker, activist, author and Southern Regional Council Life Member, died September 28, 1966, concluding a career of a Southerner who said that she never wanted to write about race, just about people. The Southern Regional Council created the Lillian Smith Awards shortly after Miss Smith's death to honor her life, her work, and her commitment, and to recognize in her name those who, like her, have contributed to our understanding of or given us new insights into the Southern region, its people, its strengths, its problems and its weaknesses.

The Lillian Smith Awards are given annually. Five judges receive from fifty to seventy-five entries and judge them seeking a certain quality which is something like the Supreme Court's definition of pornography--you can't define it, but you know it when you've seen it. The committee receives many good, even fine, works each year. This is a heartening sign to those of us interested in the Southern arts. But only a few of them every year have that undefinable quality which makes them Lillian Smith Award winners. Both of this year's winners struck us immediately as having that quality, that relevance and humanity in abundance. This is a quality which brings to mind and keeps alive the life and work of Lillian Smith.

Lillian Smith's fame came with her first novel, Strange Fruit, a small town story of a tragic black-white love affair. It sold three million copies and was translated into fifteen languages. It made her a spokesperson to the world on Southern sins of race. Her Killers of the Dream, a psychological analysis of the Southern system of separation became a classic of sectional understanding and a ringing demand for the liberation of Southerners, black and white, male and female, rich and poor from the bonds of segregation and sexism. Although Lillian Smith wrote many more books, I think that Killers of the Dream is her best, the one which spells out most specifically and clearly what I call Lillian Smith's "whole ball of wax" theory: the theory that the Southern system, dominated as it is, and was when she was writing, by wealthy white males, invariably discriminates against those who are black or female or poor or a combination of the above. And the system, said Miss Smith, would work only so long as those wealthy white males could keep women and blacks and poor folks from joining forces with one another.

Tony Dunbar

John Ehle couldn't be with us today. Last year's Lillian Smith book award winner for fiction was Pat Conroy, who was out of the country. John Ehle, his publisher tells us, is in the country and it's reassuring to know that there are still places in the South so far back that even someone as persistent as Mary Francis Derfner can't dig them out.

Those of you from North Carolina may know the man. He has been a writer of merit for twenty-five years and a champion of the arts in a state best known for tobacco and its residue: the politics of Jesse Helms.

The book we're honoring today is called The Winter People. It's unquestionably his finest work. In a better world ruled less by literary fashions and megabucks, this book would be a popular classic. Maybe today we can help it along in that direction.

The Winter People is set in the North Carolina mountains during the Depression. It is a story of love and violence, two human capacities frequently associated with mountain life. But the book is something more than that. It shows us an Appalachia before there was coal, before there were social programs, before the world outside meant very much. The forces at work in Ehle's mountains are Scottish and Irish clans who measure their power in the quantity of children and the number of timbered acres they possess. The pageantry of warlords in homespun clothes reminds us of tales from across the water like Lancelot, but these people in John Ehle's work appear real to us, not mythical. Their devotion to family is overriding and it takes no great leap of imagination to see the body and soul of today's mountain people in Ehle's wonderful prose. In giving us this first glimpse, I think, in fiction, of the people who pioneered our Southern highlands, Ehle has given us the year's most original work of Southern fiction.

Harry Ashmore

A few weeks ago I encountered one of your former executive directors, Leslie Dunbar, and was pleased to find that he had read Hearts and Minds--or at least had checked the index to see wherein he might be mentioned. Since no account of racism from Roosevelt to Reagan would be complete without numerous references to the Southern Regional Council and its battle-scarred principals, Les had come upon a passage in which I referred to him as a "certified idealist." He was somewhat taken aback, he said, since he thought "certified" was applied only to lunatics and recidivist criminals. I reminded him that it also designated public accountants, but this did nothing to placate him since, like all budget-ridden foundation executives, he regards those who draw up balance sheets as natural enemies.

The chapter in which I certified Les begins with an anecdote I hope bears repeating here today. I tell of returning to Atlanta to address the chief state school officers of the old Confederacy twenty-five years after Harold Fleming, John Griffin and I had arranged a gathering of their predecessors to consider the findings we were about to publish in a book with the incendiary title, The Negro and the Schools. The Brown decision was then pending, and the learned gentlemen responded to the invitation of our sponsor, the Ford Foundation, only on condition that we hide out in the suburbs and not only keep the meeting secret but make it, as they say in diplomatic circles, deniable--that is, that in the event of a leak to the press we would claim that no such assemblage had ever taken place, and even if it had the dread possibility of school desegregation had never been mentioned. There were, as I recall, several apparent cardiac arrests when a rumor spread that young William Emerson of Newsweek had been seen skulking in the shrubbery.

Now, a quarter century later, I again faced the chief state school officers, but this time each was accompanied by a black deputy and the pepper-and-salt audience was assembled at the Atlanta Biltmore under the glare of television lights. It was, I noted, a far cry from the days when we were working with black colleagues on the school project and the closest we could get to the Biltmore at mealtime was the Southern Education Foundation a block away, where we pulled down the shades and shared catered barbecue sandwiches--which, I must say, did represent an improvement over the cuisine available in a hotel ballroom, then or now.

My citation of the transformation that had, in that brief span, made Atlanta perhaps the most thoroughly desegregated major city in the nation prompted a question from one of the black participants. He agreed that on the surface there were a great many changes--but, deep down, did I think anything was really different? Indeed I did. Twenty-five years ago, I pointed out, the great majority of Southerners, white and black, acted on the assumption that there was a real difference between the two races: "Now we know this is not so. And that's the root of the problem--blacks have turned out to be just like us, and we're no damned good."

This back-handed assertion of common humanity did, in its ironic way, recognize the widespread disillusionment among those of both races who had been sustained by soaring hopes in the glory days of the civil rights movement. The idealists had believed--perhaps had had to believe--that the inspired gallantry of liberated blacks and their white supporters would usher in the beloved community of Martin Luther King's dream. It was in this company that I placed Les Dunbar, quoting from his recent appraisal of The South and the Near Future in Clark College publication:

We did not pass from a segregated to an integrated society. Only in a relative sense have we come from an unjust to a more just society; most certainly we have not passed from a wandering in the desert by blacks and from moral squalor of whites into a 'beloved community.' We attained none of these. What was accomplished, however, is a vast enlargement of choice.

And that, of course, is so. As the cliche has it, those who measure progress against the ideal of a fully integrated society see the bottle as half-empty; the pragmatists who measure against the point of departure see it as half full.

The indomitable woman in whose name we are gathered today surely qualified for the certification I bestowed upon Les Dunbar. By 1943, when SRC was created out of the remains of the more timorous Commission on Interracial Cooperation, Lillian Smith had already rejected the prevailing arguments for gradual change; for her, segregation posed a moral choice between good and evil, life and death of the spirit. She publicly declared that SRC's temporizing policy made t-he organization "potentially more harmful than beneficial." And she was unimpressed when Guy Johnson, the first executive director, replied that it was unrealistic to adopt a policy that would restrict SRC's membership to those who were willing to denounce segregation but were powerless to do anything about it.

If Miss Lillian did not prevail, neither did those she scorned as killers of the dream--the dream she shared with the dedicated young preacher who became her friend. Her adamant rejection of the demeaning social conventions of the day may have scared off some potential allies, but it also made one of our most pragmatic presidents the first to employ the full authority of his office in support of Southern blacks who had taken to the streets to protest denial of their civil rights.

One evening early in 1960 Miss Lillian had dinner with Coretta and Martin King, and afterward they drove her to Emory University hospital where she was undergoing treatment for cancer. As they passed through a corner of DeKalb County a patrolman noticed a white woman sitting beside a black man and automatically halted the car. When he discovered that the driver was the trouble-making preacher who had just moved in from Montgomery he concluded that his driver's license was bound to be invalid. Martin was fined twenty-five dollars, given a six-months suspended sentence, and released on parole. Some months later, when he refused bond and went to jail in Atlanta to dramatize a student sit-in at Rich's, the DeKalb court charged him with violating parole. On this second trip to the drumhead he was whisked off in the dead of night to Reidsville state prison.

In desperation Coretta King put in a call to the young Democratic candidate for president who was then heading into the home stretch. Jack Kennedy offered reassurance, Robert Kennedy got in touch with the DeKalb County judge, and Martin was returned to his father's Ebenezer Baptist Church in a blaze of televised glory. Daddy King, who had been publicly supporting Richard Nixon on the ground that his Baptist faith would not permit him to vote for a Catholic, recanted and offered a ringing endorsement of the Democratic ticket. The resulting sweep of the black precincts in all the major cities provided Kennedy's narrow margin of victory, and left him beholden to Martin Luther King, Jr. and the movement he led.

From the beginning, the civil rights movement depended upon political finagling as well as eloquent appeals to the conscience of the white majority. There was a splendid irony in the maneuvering that took place in the traditional gap between rhetoric and reality--which became even wider after the Citizens Councils unfurled the banner of massive resistance and accentuated the discrepancy between what leaders of both races said in public and what they were privately willing to do. When Jack Kennedy was told that Daddy King had to suspend his anti-Catholic bias in order to convert to the Democratic cause, he said, "Who would have thought that Martin Luther King's father could be a bigot?" Then, reflecting upon the life and times of old Joe Kennedy, he added, "But, then, we all have fathers."

So we do, and progress on the race front can be measured by the tempering of attitudes from one generation to the next. The fathers of my generation of white Southerners took their stand on what their preachers told them was biblically-sanctioned moral ground, reducing the region to poverty as they sacrificed self-interest on the altar of white supremacy. My contemporaries, with no more valid claim to probity; concluded that they had rather abandon Jim Crow than pay the price required to maintain segregation in the face of mounting black protest.

So it was that when Bull Connor unleashed police dogs and firehoses against black children in Birmingham, Jack Kennedy employed his cabinet's corporate heavyweights to convince the Big Mules of the Alabama establishment that racial violence was bad for business. After the White Only signs came down the President told Martin and his aides: "I don't think you should be totally harsh on Bull Connor. He's done as much for civil rights as anybody since Abraham Lincoln."

Those of you who labor in the vineyard of race relations are painfully aware of the circularity that has always characterized public discussion of the basic issue. In the old days the demonstrably inferior social condition of the black minority was cited to justify the caste discrimination that perpetuated the inferior condition--and so the dogma of white supremacy came to prevail everywhere in the nation when blacks began to migrate from the South in substantial numbers. That ghost, at least, has been laid by the enlargement of choice that is the not inconsiderable legacy of the civil rights movement. When the federal courts struck down the barriers of institutional segregation a third of the black population promptly moved into the mainstream, visibly giving the lie to the myth of inherent racial inferiority. In terms of educational attainment, income level, and type of employment these blacks are certifiably middle-class, and are more or less being accepted as such by their white counterparts. The larger society--burdened as it is by the third of the black population still confined to a poverty-stricken underclass--is a long way from being free of the residue from the racist past. But the tempering of restrictive majority attitudes has been sufficient to change the dimensions of the American dilemma.

This shows up most significantly in politics. Those of us who were on the front line in the early days of the movement may be appalled by the resurrection of George Wallace in Alabama, but there is surely encouragement in the fact that he could re-enter the lists only by proclaiming himself a born-again integrationist, repentant of his race-baiting past and wholly committed to advancing the welfare of the blacks whose votes he sought and won. Then there is Ronald Reagan, whose political strategy writes off the black vote but who hotly denies that his reactionary policies are tinged with racism. "I want everyone to understand that I am heart and soul in favor of the things that have been done in the name of civil rights and desegregation," he has proclaimed, and, if you accept his remarkably constricted view of contemporary society, there is no reason to doubt his sincerity.

But if the President has rejected the dogma of white supremacy he has fervently embraced the doctrine it produced--the old states rights federalism elaborated by our forefathers in defense of slavery and the second-class citizenship that succeeded it. The President's so-called "new" federalism ignores not only the lessons of the bloodshot past, but the reality of contemporary demography, which reflects the transfer of the enduring race problem from the rural South to the center of the nation's great cities, where it has produced what is rightly labeled an urban crisis. The black underclass is not trapped in northern slums by institutionalized race prejudice, but by a debilitating, self-perpetuating culture of poverty that cannot possibly yield to the kind of social Darwinism in which the President places his faith. We are long past the share-cropping days when blacks were kept in their place so they could be exploited as a source of cheap labor; along with the Hispanics and poor whites who share its misery, the black underclass has become surplus population, a non-productive burden increasingly seen as intolerable in a shrinking economy.

The secular theology called Reaganomics holds that this condition is of no concern to the federal government and can readily be disposed of by placing responsibility for its cure upon state and local authorities assisted by the benign working of the private sector. That delusion cannot endure, and when it is finally dispelled there will be much work to do--particularly for organizations like SRC which have always had to find their way in the void between rhetoric and reality.

I have never been blessed with a faith strong enough to take me to the mountaintop from which Martin Luther King caught sight of the promised land, and assured his people that, with or without him, they would get there one day. But I have never doubted that his vision of a beloved community represented the only goal that would, in the end, prove acceptable to Southerners. Miss Lillian believed that, too, and when, at the end of her life, she revised Killers of the Dream, she closed with these lines:

"So we stand: tied to the past and clutching at the stars! Only by the agonizing pull of our dream can we wrench ourselves from such fixating stuff and climb into the unknown. But we have always done it and we can do it again. We have the means, the techniques, we have the knowledge and insight and courage. All have synchronized for the first time in history. Do we have the desire? This is a question that each of us must answer for himself."

In 1982, Mary Frances Derfner was Vice-President of the Southern Regional Council and chairperson of the Smith Awards Committee. Other committee members for 1982 included Tony Dunbar, John Popham, Wilma Dykeman and Lottie Shackelford.