The South’s identification with “conservatism” will survive, among other reasons, because it fits so perfectly into the real or imagined Southern manner. These days, liberalism is identified with the masses, and not merely identified with them but equated with them. The race issue to one side, this equation simply is not a process that comes easily to the Southern temperament. Implicit in the conservative faith is a high respect for individual variations, for class, and order, and rank; and all these are implicit in the Cavalier ideal as well. Aristocracy is wasted in a shower room; and to the extent that public institutions are reduced to the level of a public bath, the Southerner is bound to object. The graces, the little elegancies, the privileges of birth and office and position—these too are long ingrained; they persevere.
To be sure, a good deal of cynical evidence may be amassed to suggest that this Southern manner, this Southern romanticism, is as unreal as the myths on which it is based. When a gang of foul-mouthed Mississippi white men lynch a fifteen-year-old colored boy, the Southern manner seems a long way away. And when a rabble of black-jacketed young punks assemble to jeer at law-abiding Negro students, notions of noblesse oblige may seem just that: notions.
But if Southern conservatism may yield now and then to the temptation of the pork barrel, and Southern romanticism be attenuated by the impatience of an impatient age, the last of my four threads may prove stronger than ever: Southern realism, and with it, the tradition of Southern defeat. For decades to come, despite the phenomenal population shifts (and in many instances because of these population shifts), the South will have to live realistically with the interracial realities it alone, among all the regions of the country, has known well. “It is a condition which confronts us,” said Cleveland of the tariff, “and not a theory.” Just so with race relations in the South. The gentlest concepts of brotherhood, the broadest reaches of the law, the finest theories of integration, go through a sea change in crossing the Potomac. These comfortable Liberal attitudes emerge from the gauzy mists of illusion and encounter the blazing sun of fact: These rural schools, these country people, these children, white and black, in these particular towns and villages. The Negro is not moving in any substantial numbers to the remote rural counties of the North; he is moving predominantly to the cities, where everything works in his favor during a period of transition: job opportunities, the melting-pot tradition, the impersonal anonymity that protects him in a larval time. Yet millions of Negroes remain back home in the South, salt-and-peppered across the rural countryside, and they and their problems and aspirations are daily, personal realities to the Southerner. He knows he must cope with them somehow.
And the Southerner knows more than this. He knows, in the marrow of his bones, that new defeats are entirely probable. He takes this much profit from the lessons of the past, that he learns something for the future. Desegregation, as a legal principle, is accepted inwardly by many of the Southerners who cry out most vehemently against it. Something of the spirit has been surrendered. One more defeat has been experienced, and we know it. In the first few years after Brown, we perceived in this judicial Gettysburg nothing finally decisive. The talk then was of sending Governors to jail, or of challenging the Justice Department to arrest whole legislatures. Let them call out the troops! Well, Mr. Eisenhower did call out the troops; and our Governors had second thoughts about going to jail, and not even the Louisiana legislature could devise a way to get itself arrested. Little by little, the hopeless conviction has begun to seep in that it has happened again, that the courts really mean this, that so far as laws and litigation are concerned, nothing remains but the long road to Appomattox. Proud Virginia gazed upon the voluntary desegregation of her schools with bitter distaste, but in the end we were like Byron’s heroine who “vowing she would ne’er consent, consented.” Defeat.
And yet; and yet. The fabric of the South is snagged with a beggar’s lice of contradictions. The jesting exhortation that the South will rise again has a hard kernel of truth at the bottom. It is precisely because the South has experienced defeat, again and again, in Nullification, in the Missouri compromise, in the War, in Reconstruction, in the postwar generations, time and again, in contradiction to the success of our neighboring regions, that defeat has become an old friend. We meet it, and survive; we rise again. And paradoxically, the prospect of defeat in lunch counters, waiting rooms, public schools, places of assembly, is no harbinger of ultimate despair; the prospect is an old friend, the face of defeat, and in the South it is a symbol not of disintegration but of unity. Misery loves company. It does, indeed; oh, it does indeed! And we are our own best company.
I speak with a mild cynicism, and do not mean to: It floats to the surface. The mystical entity that is the South is held together, in a lovely, helpless, hapless bond, by its consciousness of the Negro, by its abiding conservatism, by its dedication to romanticism, and by its inexorable sense of realities, and whenever one of these threads wears thin, another is redoubled and twice twined together to knit the fabric whole. The defeated South is never wholly defeated; the romantic South cannot be wholly disillusioned; the conservative South can flirt with liberalism and remain as chastely conservative as before; and to the twin inevitabilities of death and taxes we philosophically add a third: the Negro, in saecula saeculorum, world without end. Amen.
V
Let me move on, may it please the court, with fewer digressions and random interpolations, to the South’s case against “integration.” The quotation marks are intended to suggest that the noun has a distinctive meaning. This is as good a place as any for a definition of terms.
Increasingly, in the Southern lexicon, words that are used interchangeably elsewhere in the country have come to take on a special and well-understood meaning. By “segregation,” for example, we now mean the body of practices enforced by State or local law. Prior to Brown, our schools were legally segregated. As this is written (though probably not for long), places of assembly, athletic contests, certain public records, also are segregated by law in several States. As these laws and institutions one by one are bowled over by court decree, a process of desegregation sets in. It is an abominable word, by any philological standpoint, as madly illogical as “irregardless” or “inflammable,” but a new spirit of lexicography is abroad in the land: Whatever is, is right. Our schools, save in Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, are entering upon desegregation.
By racial separation, we mean something much less precise. In almost every aspect of Southern life, the races are separate, though not necessarily (or even very often) are they segregated. Day in and day out, white and Negro inevitably are thrown closely together in the South—shopping in stores, working in factories, riding in elevators and buses, standing in queues at banks or liquor stores or post offices—but this is the normal condition of existence. I have termed it an intimate remoteness. It is a condition that goes beyond the ordinary impersonal encapsulation of strangers; it is a subconscious recognition that ours are separate races, separate worlds. This does not imply that there is no communication. On the contrary, the Southern white and the Southern Negro are gregarious animals; thrown temporarily together, they will make agreeable conversation: “Think this rain will ever stop?” “It suttinly is po’in, it is that.” This is the relationship that conditions all human intercourse in the South. A murder has been committed; the police reporter’s first question, before he thinks of who or where or why or when, is simply “white or colored?” A candidate qualifies for public office: Is he white or colored? News values start from this point. (Even as I write this paragraph, the telephone rings, and it is an informant at the State penitentiary calling to tell me that clemency has been granted a prisoner in death row. I am not familiar with the case. “White boy or colored boy?” I ask. Doubtless it makes no difference; they are equally fallen sparrows, but the question is automatic, instinctive, inescapable. It is a consequence of racial separation, and this is a part of the world we live in.)