In plain fact, the relationship between white and Negro in the segregated South, in the country and in the city, has been far closer, more honest, less constrained, than such relations generally have been in the integrated North. In Charleston and New Orleans, among many other cities, residential segregation does not exist, for example, as it exists in Detroit or Chicago. In the country, whites and Negroes are farm neighbors. They share the same calamities—the mud, the hail, the weevils—and they minister, in their own unfelt, unspoken way, to one another. Is the relationship that of master and servant, superior and inferior? Down deep, doubtless it is, but I often wonder if this is more of a wrong to the Negro than the affected, hearty “equality” encountered in the North. In the years I lived on a farm, I fished often with a Negro tenant, hour after hour, he paddling, I paddling, sharing the catch, and we tied up the boat and casually went our separate ways. Before Brown v. Board of Education, it never occurred to me that in these peaceful hours I was inflicting upon him wounds of the psyche not likely ever to be undone. I do not believe it occurred to Robert either. This is not the way one goes fly-casting on a millpond, with Gunnar Myrdal invisibly present on the middle thwart. We fish no more. He has been busy in recent years, and I too; and when I came across the flyrod recently, I found the line rotted and the ferrules broken.
I say this relationship “has been,” and in the past perfect lies a melancholy change that disturbs many Southerners deeply. In my observation, a tendency grows in much of the white South to acknowledge and to abandon, with no more than a ritual protest, many of the patent absurdities of “Jim Crow.” Many of these practices, so deeply resented in recent years by the Negro, may have had some rational basis when they were instituted in the post-Reconstruction period. When the first trolleys came along, the few Negroes who rode them were mostly servants; others carried with them the fragrance of farm or livery stable. A Jim Crow section perhaps made sense in those days. But in my own nonage, during the 1920s, and in the years since then, few Southerners ever paused to examine the reasons for segregation on streetcars. We simply moved the little portable sign that separated white from Negro as a car filled up, and whites sat in front of the sign and Negroes sat behind it. This was the way we rode streetcars. After Brown v. Board of Education, when the abiding subconsciousness of the Negro turned overnight into an acute and immediate awareness of the Negro, some of these laws and customs ceased to be subject to reason anyhow; they became, confusingly, matters of strategy; they became occupied ground in an undeclared war, not to be yielded lest their yielding be regarded as needless surrender. Many aspects of our lives have gone that way since. The unwritten rules of generations are now being, in truth, unwritten; in their place, it is proposed by the apostles of instant integration that there be no rules at all. It seems so easy: “What difference does the color of a man’s skin make?” “Why not just treat them as equals?” “There is no such thing as race.”
Ah, but it is not so easy. The ingrained attitudes of a lifetime cannot be jerked out like a pair of infected molars, and new porcelain dentures put in their place. For this is what our Northern friends will not comprehend: The South, agreeable as it may be to confessing some of its sins and to bewailing its more manifest wickednesses, simply does not concede that at bottom its basic attitude is “infected” or wrong. On the contrary, the Southerner rebelliously clings to what seems to him the hard core of truth in this whole controversy: Here and now, in his own communities, in the mid-1960s, the Negro race, as a race, plainly is not equal to the white race, as a race; nor, for that matter, in the wider world beyond, by the accepted judgment of ten thousand years, has the Negro race, as a race, ever been the cultural or intellectual equal of the white race, as a race.
This we take to be a plain statement of fact, and if we are not amazed that our Northern antagonists do not accept it as such, we are resentful that they will not even look at the proposition, or hear of it, or inquire into it. Those of us who have ventured to discuss the issues outside the South have discovered, whenever the point arises, that no one is so intolerant of truth as academicians whose profession it is to pursue it. The whole question of race has become a closed question: the earth is a cube, and there’s an end to it; Two and two are four, the sun rises in the east, and no race is inferior to any other race. Even the possibility of a conflicting hypothesis is beyond the realm of sober examination. John Hope Franklin, chairman of the history department at Brooklyn College, sees Southern attitudes on race as a “hoax.” Their wrongness is “indisputable.” To Ashley Montagu, race is a myth. A UNESCO pamphlet makes the flat, unqualified statement that “modern biological and psychological studies of the differences between races do not support the idea that one is superior to another as far as innate potentialities are concerned.” And when one inquires, why, pray, has it taken so long for the Negro’s innately equal potentialities to emerge, the answers trail off into lamentations on the conditions under which the Negro has lived. Thus, the doctrine of environment, like the principle of charity, is trotted out to conceal a multitude of sins. The fault, if there be any fault, is held to be not in men’s genes, but in their substandard housing.
All this is to anticipate some of the points this brief is intended to develop, but it is perhaps as well to know where the argument is going. The South does not wish to be cruel, or unkind, or intolerant, or bigoted; but in this area it does not wish to be unrealistic either. We do not agree that our “prejudice” in this regard is prejudice at all, in the pejorative sense in which the word is widely used. The man who wakes up ten times with a hangover, having had too much brandy the night before, is not “prejudiced” against brandy if on the eleventh occasion he passes the brandy by; he has merely learned to respect its qualities. And what others see as the dark night of our bigotry is regarded, in our own observation, as the revealing light of experience. It guides our feet. As Patrick Henry said, we know no other light to go by.
IV
The consciousness of the Negro, I have said, is one common thread in the fabric of the South. There are others, identified by countless observers who have looked upon this tapestry, that merit some discussion also. Let me expand for a few moments on three themes: The Southerner as Conservative, the Southerner as Romantic, the Southerner as Realist.
Russell Kirk, in The Conservative Mind, examined the philosophy that generally is identified as “Southern conservatism” and found it rooted in four impulses. Apart from the Southerner’s sensitivity to the Negro question, he said, there is (1) his half-indolent distaste for alteration, (2) his determination to preserve an agricultural society, and (3) his love for local rights. These are good starting points. It was John Randolph who laid it down, as a first principle of political activity, never needlessly to disturb a thing at rest. The pace of life is slower in the South, and the tendency cannot be accounted for simply in terms of a climate that often makes it “too hot to move.” We are by nature a contemplative people, and I am inclined to believe this stems from the agrarian tradition. A farm boy learns early that some things can’t be hurried—the birth of calves, the tasseling of corn, the curing of tobacco. On the farm, life is governed by patience, by the inexorable equinoctial rotation of the seasons, by factors beyond man’s control. It is, we say, “God’s will.”
And until quite recently, as the census records show, the agricultural society was our prevailing society. Moreover, the 1960 census figures on urbanization, within the context of the South, can be highly misleading. A great part of this statistically “urban” population lives in towns so small that the towns are spiritually and economically a part of the rural countryside around them. There were in 1960 only seventy metropolitan areas of more than 50,000 population in the thirteen States, and twenty of these were in Texas. In Mississippi, Jackson has edged past 100,000, but no other city in the State is even close to that mark. Outside of Fort Smith and Little Rock, Arkansas is a State of small towns. This is even truer of North Carolina; fewer than one-fourth of the State’s four and a half million residents live in the six principal cities (the largest is Charlotte, with a metropolitan population of 272,000). The others are scattered through scores of towns and villages. Georgia is statistically “urban” now, but urban attitudes are largely concentrated in Atlanta, and perhaps four other cities. Beyond Charleston, Columbia, and perhaps Greenville, South Carolina is almost as countrified today as it was in the time of Calhoun.
The slowness of life in the country, where diversions are few and the reasons for haste almost nil, tends to breed men who are highly resistant to change. They know, as well as they know anything, that change and progress are not necessarily to be equated; and for all the tub-thumping that goes on in local chambers of commerce, many a Southerner is not so sure he is in favor of progress anyhow. The Northern Neck of Virginia, for one example, has a positive antipathy to altering anything.