In many areas, the revolution proceeds apace. William G. Carleton, of the University of Florida at Gainesville, acknowledges “great strides” by the Southern Negro since World War II. In 1944, Negroes were virtually barred from participation in Southern politics. In 1960, when he reported in the Teachers’ College Record that Negro rights were making haste slowly, 1,100,000 Negroes were registered to vote in Southern primaries and general elections. The number is considerably higher in 1962, and the United States Civil Rights Commission has conceded that except in a relatively few Black Belt localities in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, Negroes now are not prevented from registering or voting over most of the South. In most areas, it is no longer the intimidation of the white man, but far more often the indolence, indifference, and incapacity of the Negro himself that keeps him from the polls. In some Southern States, Negro registration has climbed to 35 or 40 per cent of the adult Negro population; white registration, in many communities, is seldom much more than half or two-thirds of the adult population. In Florida, Negro registration increased from 8000 in 1944 to 160,000 in 1960. North Carolina and Virginia have witnessed gains almost as notable. To Carleton, a “veritable revolution” is seen in the South: “Had the mass of Southerners in 1950 been told that by 1960 there would be considerable token desegregation in the schools of Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas; even more desegregation on city bus lines; and that segregation at lunch counters and eating places would be here and there giving way in the South, they would have refused flatly to believe it. From the point of view of social justice, the changes have been painfully slow and spotty; but from the point of view of white Southern cultural attitudes, the changes have been unbelievably swift.”
Note that the unbelievable changes of which Carleton speaks are changes from “segregation” to “desegregation,” in his own careful choice of nouns, and not changes from “segregation” to “integration.” It takes no great powers of prophecy to envision a great many other such changes, as the South cautiously explores the possibilities of retaining its segregation while abandoning it too. I write in a period of transition. Ten years hence, in 1972, the perfect clarity of hindsight will perceive much that is now obscure; but my impression is that some sort of peak has been reached by the white South with the crisis over the parks of Birmingham. In the winter of 1961-62, a decision was reached by officials to close the Birmingham parks rather than to accept a policy of permitting their joint use by the two races, but the decision brought the first audible rumblings of misgiving and disagreement in a city that previously had been united in opposition to the slightest retreat from policies of total municipal segregation. A great many persons in Birmingham, sincerely convinced of the wisdom of essential racial separation, also were sincerely convinced of the desirability of retaining the parks on a functioning basis. They were aware that other Southern cities of comparable urbanity and custom had adjusted to a system of open parks. They did not like the idea of a parkless city; and they began actively to think about all this.
To the devout believers in racial integration, it doubtless appears incredible that Birmingham’s action could have been taken in the first place, or that the wrongness of this decision (in their eyes) should fail to be instantly apparent. These impatient critics simply do not comprehend the depth of Southern feelings; they are as totally unable to accept the viewpoint of the typical white Southerner as the typical white Southerner is totally unable to accept the viewpoint of the Negro. In the course of time, each of these conflicting viewpoints will be seen more clearly; and once seen, may be understood and dealt with. But the process demands time, time, and more time. The death of racial segregation, which the integrationists see as a necessary end, will follow Caesar’s prescription: It will come when it will come.
To any objective observer, it should be manifest that such a time is not yet—not in the early 1960s. In one city after another, North as well as South, the plain and palpable fact is that where “integration” is pushed too rapidly—more rapidly, that is, than the Negro community is prepared to sustain it or the white community is prepared to accept it—a reverse action has set in. The District of Columbia offers a textbook example: Its public schools passed in eight years from segregation to desegregation to a virtual resegregation, as white families fled from mixed neighborhoods and mixed schools. St. Louis has acknowledged the same experience: William A. Kottmeyer, deputy superintendent of instruction in St. Louis, told the National Conference of Editorial Writers in October 1961 that St. Louis then had more actual segregation in its schools than had existed prior to the Brown decision. Of 130 elementary schools in St. Louis at the time, only 36 were classified as mixed; 46 were all white, and 48 all Negro. Nowhere in the South has school desegregation been attempted under more favorable auspices than in Louisville, yet in 1961-62 the trend back toward resegregation was appearing there, too. Between 1950 and 1960, Baltimore experienced a net out-migration of 175,000 white persons, and a net in-migration of 41,000 nonwhite persons. Dr. Houston R. Jackson, a Negro assistant superintendent of Baltimore schools, said in the summer of 1961 that Baltimore had more all-Negro schools at that time than it had before desegregation began in the fall of 1954: “When the Negroes in a school reach 50 per cent,” he added, “that’s when the white teachers begin to ask for transfers.” And to judge from accounts of school litigation in such Northern localities as New Rochelle, N. Y., and Englewood, N. J., the antipathy of white persons to intimate and personal relationships with Negro persons is not a wholly Southern phenomenon. One satirical lexicographer, observing conditions in Chicago, has defined integration as “the period which elapses between the arrival of the first Negro and the departure of the last white.” Manifestly, the resistance to a coerced racial “equality” is wide and deep.
Why is this so? The answer, in blunt speech, is that the Negro race, as a race, has not earned equality. And as I have attempted to argue earlier, it is a feeble and evasive response to accuse the white critic, in making that flat statement, of emulating the child who shot his parents and then pleaded for mercy as an orphan. The failure of the Negro race, as a race, to achieve equality cannot be blamed wholly on white oppression. This is the excuse, the crutch, the piteous and finally pathetic defense of Negrophiles unable or unwilling to face reality. In other times and other places, sturdy, creative, and self-reliant minorities have carved out their own destiny; they have compelled acceptance on their own merit; they have demonstrated those qualities of leadership and resourcefulness and disciplined ambition that in the end cannot ever be denied. But the Negro race, as a race, has done none of this. “We do not want to be second-class citizens,” cries James Farmer, national director of the Congress for Racial Equality. But “wanting” is not enough. It is a beginning; but it is no more than a beginning.
How is the Negro race, as a race, to earn the respect of the white race as a race? I should imagine that a cultivation of self-respect would offer an excellent starting place; and I do not see much of this now. With a few notable exceptions, most Negro spokesmen appear to spend their time condoning and minimizing the characteristics that deprive their race of a “first-class” reputation. Are Negro neighborhoods filthy? The Negro, it is said, has no incentive to clean them up. Why does this appalling rate of illegitimacy persist? The Negro, it is said, must relieve the frustrations brought on by segregation. Are Negro incomes generally low? It is all the fault of the white man: He deprives the Negro of job opportunities.
After so long a time, these repeated alibis grow stale. I have an idea that some Negro defenders themselves have ceased to believe in them. And I cherish the further idea that a really massive, significant change in race relations will not come until the Negro people develop leaders who will ask themselves the familiar question, “Why are we treated as second-class citizens?” and return a candid answer to it: “Because all too often that is what we are.”
If the Negro people have the innate capacity that Montagu, Clark, Comas, Boas and the others insist they have, the Negro people in time will overcome every obstacle that fate has put in their way. On their own initiative, as a product of their own industry and skill, they will develop the talents that command respect in the market place. They will provide their own capital, build their own enterprises, sell their own wares, compete among themselves until they have learned to compete in the whole wide world. They will exert, within their own community, the moral leadership necessary to reduce crime and illegitimacy. By participation first in their own constructive public affairs they will prove themselves capable of contributing actively to the civic, social, and economic life of their counties, towns, and cities. They will stop trying simply to imitate the white man; they will discover themselves first, and if this inner self is all that the liberal anthropologists assert it to be, the discovery should lead to wondrous exploitation. Ebony magazine made this same point editorially in 1959, when it urged its readers to stop complaining about being referred to as “Negro” or as “colored”: “The real problem is the man called Negro. If he would spend as much time dignifying his race as he does decrying its designation, if he would quit worrying about the label and concentrate upon improving the product, the stuff inside, the name would take care of itself.”
This was sound advice, and one of the hopeful aspects of the South in the early 1960s (there are not many) is that a new generation of young Negroes may even act upon it. Carleton remarks in his essay upon the increasing nationalization of the Southern Negro, who now, more often than not, has some Northern connections; and he says this:
“Not only has the Southern Negro been nationalized, he has also developed his own propertied and business classes, his own wealthy and middle classes. Every Southern city of any size has a group of economically comfortable and relatively independent lawyers, doctors, teachers, morticians, contractors, insurance agents, and owners of small businesses—garages and filling stations, restaurants, taverns, barber shops, beauty parlors, stores, and so forth. These people have education or considerable economic independence, or both.”