I
At the time of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, on Monday, May 17, 1954, seventeen Southern and border States maintained racially separate schools. These included, in addition to the thirteen States to be treated here as “the South,” the States of Maryland, Delaware, Kansas, and Missouri, plus the District of Columbia. Each of the five speedily abandoned segregation—Kansas willingly, Missouri stoically, Maryland cheerlessly, Delaware grudgingly. The District abandoned segregation; white parents abandoned the District, and by 1962 an 82 per cent resegregation could be observed in the schools. Sic transit gloria Monday. None of the four States was in any real sense a part of the South; their constitutional or statutory requirements for segregated schools were appendages more or less ripe for the clipping. And though southern Missouri and the Delaware shore submitted to desegregation with some bitterness, the surgery was not especially painful and the operations, on the whole, were uneventful.
This essay is concerned chiefly with the other thirteen States, with attitudes and practices that then prevailed widely in all of them and still prevail overwhelmingly in some of them: the States of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. A possibly more definitive list might eliminate Oklahoma and Kentucky from this neo-Confederate fold; their Negro populations comprise no more than 6 or 7 per cent of the State total, and Oklahoma looks to the Southwest while Kentucky (mildly anesthetized by Mr. Bingham’s Louisville Courier-Journal) looks nowhere in particular. Yet I myself was reared in Oklahoma, and I know at first hand of the intensely Southern sentiment that still obtains in much of the State; my Kentucky friends write me poignantly, as one writes from East Berlin or Poland, asking CARE packages and seeking prayers, and I judge that many Kentuckians continue to look upon integration as they might look upon orange slices in a julep. They will drink the horrid thing, but their sense of propriety is outraged.
These thirteen States together make up a fascinating part of the American Republic. Their combined area amounts to nearly 863,000 square miles, or about 28 per cent of the continental United States. The 1960 census found in them 48,802,000 persons, of whom 24,036,000 were males and 24,755,000 were females; and, more to our point, the census found in them 38,404,000 white persons, 10,231,000 Negro persons, and 167,000 other nonwhites, mostly Indians in Texas, Oklahoma, and North Carolina.
The census of 1960 turned up a great many other figures useful to an understanding of the American South. Some of these are best presented in tabulated form. These figures, for example, bear close study:
Negro Population, Thirteen Southern
States, 1900-1960
| Per cent Total Pop. | Per cent | Number | |||
| State | 1900 | 1920 | 1940 | 1960 | 1960 |
| Alabama | 45.2 | 38.4 | 34.7 | 30.0 | 980,271 |
| Arkansas | 28.0 | 27.0 | 24.7 | 21.8 | 388,787 |
| Florida | 43.7 | 34.0 | 27.1 | 17.8 | 880,186 |
| Georgia | 46.7 | 41.7 | 34.7 | 28.5 | 1,122,596 |
| Kentucky | 13.3 | 9.8 | 7.5 | 7.1 | 215,949 |
| Louisiana | 47.1 | 38.9 | 35.9 | 31.9 | 1,039,207 |
| Mississippi | 58.5 | 52.2 | 49.2 | 42.0 | 915,743 |
| North Carolina | 33.0 | 29.8 | 27.5 | 24.5 | 1,116,021 |
| Oklahoma | 7.0 | 7.4 | 7.2 | 6.6 | 153,084 |
| South Carolina | 58.4 | 51.4 | 42.8 | 34.8 | 829,291 |
| Tennessee | 23.8 | 19.3 | 17.4 | 16.5 | 586,876 |
| Texas | 20.4 | 15.9 | 14.4 | 12.4 | 1,187,125 |
| Virginia | 35.6 | 29.9 | 24.7 | 20.6 | 816,258 |
| The U.S.A. | 11.6 | 9.8 | 9.8 | 10.5 | 18,871,831 |
The Negro component within the American Union, it is evident, remains today about what it has been all along. Within the Southern States, the Negro population is dropping steadily as a percentage of the whole. Negroes comprised 11.6 per cent of the nation’s total in population in 1900, 9.7 per cent in 1930, and 10.5 per cent in 1960. But this 10.5 per cent of 1960 has shifted dramatically across the nation. Of 18,872,000 Negroes, 8,641,000 or 46 per cent, were living in 1960 outside the thirteen States of the South. There were more Negroes in New York City (1,227,000) than in all of Mississippi or Alabama. Philadelphia turned up 26.4 per cent Negro; Georgia is 28.5 per cent Negro. Chicago counted almost as many Negroes in its city limits (813,000) as there were in the whole of Virginia (816,000), and they represented a larger part of the total—a concentrated 23 per cent in Chicago, a scattered 21 per cent in Virginia.
Between 1950 and 1960, the Census Bureau has reported, the South experienced a net out-migration of about 1,457,000 Negroes. The figure represents the number of Negroes that census enumerators of 1960 would have expected to find in the South if the Negro populations of 1950 had stayed put and had experienced a normal increase of births over deaths. Alabama, which should have gained 225,000 Negroes on this basis, gained only 1000 in the decade; South Carolina, which normally would have gained 226,000 Negroes, gained only 8000. Mississippi actually experienced a net loss in Negro population, from 986,000 in 1950 to 915,000 in 1960.
Where did these Negro migrants go? To the North, primarily—more than a million of them. Others went west: California experienced a net in-migration of 354,000 Negroes. Large numbers moved to Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan. The migration was almost entirely to Northern cities, and ironically, to urban societies of the North almost as segregated by geography as the Old South is segregated by custom.
Yet for all the steady decline of Negro components in Southern States, it still is true that the South, as a region, houses the largest concentration of colored citizens. Of the fifteen States that in 1960 had more than 500,000 Negro residents, all but four (New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey) were in the South. The thirteen Southern States that were 35 per cent Negro in 1900 were still 21 per cent Negro in 1960, and in 140 Southern counties, white residents in 1960 remained numerically in the minority.
Consider some further statistics:
Urban and Rural Population
Thirteen Southern States, 1900-1960.
| Per cent Rural | |||||||
| State | Urban 1960 | Rural 1960 | Total 1960 | 1900 | 1920 | 1940 | 1960 |
| Alabama | 1,791,721 | 1,475,019 | 3,266,740 | 89.0 | 78.3 | 65.2 | 45.2 |
| Arkansas | 765,303 | 1,020,969 | 1,786,212 | 91.5 | 83.4 | 77.2 | 57.1 |
| Florida | 3,661,383 | 1,290,177 | 4,951,560 | 79.7 | 63.5 | 44.9 | 26.0 |
| Georgia | 2,180,236 | 1,762,880 | 3,943,116 | 84.4 | 74.9 | 65.6 | 44.7 |
| Kentucky | 1,353,215 | 1,684,941 | 3,038,156 | 78.2 | 73.8 | 70.2 | 55.4 |
| Louisiana | 2,060,606 | 1,196,416 | 3,257,022 | 74.5 | 65.1 | 58.5 | 36.7 |
| Mississippi | 820,805 | 1,357,336 | 2,178,141 | 92.3 | 86.6 | 80.2 | 62.3 |
| North Carolina | 1,801,921 | 2,754,234 | 4,556,155 | 91.1 | 80.8 | 72.7 | 60.4 |
| Oklahoma | 1,464,786 | 863,498 | 2,328,284 | 92.6 | 73.5 | 62.4 | 37.0 |
| South Carolina | 981,386 | 1,401,208 | 2,382,594 | 87.2 | 82.5 | 75.5 | 58.8 |
| Tennessee | 1,864,828 | 1,702,261 | 3,567,089 | 86.5 | 73.9 | 64.8 | 47.7 |
| Texas | 7,187,470 | 2,392,207 | 9,579,677 | 82.9 | 67.6 | 54.6 | 24.9 |
| Virginia | 2,204,913 | 1,762,036 | 3,966,949 | 81.7 | 70.8 | 64.7 | 44.4 |
These figures, as I hope to demonstrate after a while, should be treated with some reserve, but on their own they tell a revolutionary tale. Of the twelve States that were firmly rural in 1940, only North and South Carolina, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Mississippi were found predominantly rural in 1960. This migration from the countryside has seen the number of farms in the South drop from 3,100,000 in 1910 to 1,650,000 in 1959; the number of farms either owned or operated by Negroes has dropped from 890,000 to 272,000 in the same period.
In many aspects, to be sure, the census of 1960 found the South hardly changed at all. The region still is composed overwhelmingly of native-born Americans; except for Florida and Texas, none of the thirteen States has as much as four-tenths of 1 per cent foreign-born population. Southerners still are moving out of the South more rapidly than non-Southerners are moving in, but the Southern tendency to stay put remains much in evidence: 90 per cent of the citizens of Mississippi were born there, and the percentage is almost as high in Alabama and the Carolinas.
In terms of material wealth, our people remain relatively poor. Per capita incomes in 1959 ranged from $1162 in Mississippi to $1980 in Florida, against a national average of $2166. Wages in the thirteen States then averaged $73.31 weekly and $1.82 hourly, far below national averages of $90.91 and $2.29. As one consequence, housing conditions are sadly below par. The 1960 census found, in the country as a whole, 18.8 per cent of all dwellings “dilapidated or lacking plumbing facilities”; the percentages were 49.2 in Mississippi, 44.9 in Arkansas, and 41.2 in Kentucky; and no State outside the South approached these poor ratings.
The picture is not entirely bleak. Poor as they are, the Southern States in general are exerting a much greater effort than their wealthier Northern sisters. Over the country as a whole, State and local governments in 1959 raised $102.12 per capita from their own tax sources. Seven of the thirteen Southern States were far above this average: Mississippi, for example, raised $128.76 per capita from local sources, a figure that compares with $108.92 in New York, $83.56 in Connecticut, and $81.51 in Delaware. With much less to levy upon, the Southern States proportionately are pouring more into their schools. And the outlook is brightening steadily. Between 1929 and 1959, while the nation as a whole was increasing its per capita personal incomes by 208 per cent, South Carolina was jumping 393 per cent and Louisiana 280 per cent.
Permit a few more statistics. The South’s traditional distaste for government remains quite evident. Florida, Louisiana, and Oklahoma have slightly more than the average number of State and local government workers in terms of population, but the others are far below the national average. The South has small appetite for the welfare state; our relief rolls are large, owing chiefly to social difficulties among the Negroes, but grants are kept relentlessly low. Our people are churchgoers, in fantastic numbers. We continue to produce more moonshine whiskey than any other region. In 1961, there were 486 daily newspapers in the South, with a circulation of 12,500,000. Almost 40 per cent of the country’s radio stations are in the South; North Carolina has more AM stations than the State of New York, and Texas has more radio stations than anybody.