How the South Feels

by DAVID L. COHN

» Southern paternalism toward the Negro, whatever its vices or virtues, is slowly disappearing. What is the new feeling which will take its place?

1

THIS paper is an attempt to state what large numbers of Southern white men are thinking about problems that deeply concern them; to interpret the Southern mind in relation to these problems; to sketch the background against which Southerners move; to indicate what they will do voluntarily and what they cannot be made to do except at the risk of civil war. The issues are somber; the crisis is grave; time passes.

Although Southerners differ from state to state, and even from county to county, there is nonetheless a clearly marked and recognizable Southern mentality, and each area is roughly similar to the others in its economy, way of life, and possession of certain characteristics and attitudes. Its social order, since the destruction of slavery, has been based upon the maintenance of the “color line,” and nothing — not even the horrors of Reconstruction — has been able to shake its foundations. The region is still largely agricultural, and agricultural people tend to be slow-moving, stubborn, resistant to change, conservative in their social outlook, resentful and suspicious of outsiders, churchgoing and God-fearing as befits men who live close to the earth and whose livelihood is at the mercy of wind, sun, and rain.

The South is the poorest section of the United States, filled with rural and urban slums whose people are kept, from plumbing even lower dept hs of misery and degradation because they lie already on the stinking bottom. In this area the economic struggle is often of the most pathetic and pitiless kind, because it is of the poor against the poor, the dispossessed against the dispossessed, the hungry against the hungry, the poor farmer against the poor tenant, the poor white against the poor Negro. They snarl and fight over marrowless bones already picked clean. Hundreds of thousands of young men and women migrate to other sections because they cannot earn a living at home. Those who remain are paid lower wages than obtain elsewhere, because, as is said with much justice, Southern industry cannot pay equal wages and compete with Eastern industry so long as the powerful, banking East rigs freight rates in its own favor. (Sherman, reborn, with an army of lobbyists at his heels, is still marching through Georgia.) Yet, whatever happens, the East benefits, because Southern industries are largely owned outside the section, profits are drained off, and Southerners are left holding a bag of cornmeal and fatback.

During the past century, moreover, Western civilization has given men a choice between a higher standard of living and more children, but the process has not worked this way in the South. Here the standard of living has remained low and the standard of breeding has remained high; thus the section has a body of cheap labor on the farms and in the factories, which produces but does not consume. These workers grow cotton they do not wear, raise tobacco they do not smoke, build furniture they do not use.

In the South, home-grown and outside exploiters of labor combine to prevent the rise of wages by preventing unionism, one of their most potent arguments being that labor unionists are “foreigners” and “communistic.” They play off the Southern white against the Southern Negro; the Southern white against the Northern white. And in the midst of the confusions and prejudices thereby engendered, they manage to enrich themselves, impoverish others, and do more to harm capitalism than all the communists who ever spread their dialectic thin on the vast crust of American life.

As a result of its long and often crushing poverty, the South is the most illiterate section of the nation, although the Southern states spend nearly half of their total income on education. Being poor, they haven’t much to spend. Southern people are the poorest fed and clothed, the worst housed, the most diseased, in the United States. Here are sold the shabbiest merchandise, the vilest whiskey, and the gaudiest Bibles in merica. Here is the dumping ground for the nation’s trash, the outlet for the spectacularly dreadful trade goods made for the natives of America’s colonies-at-home.

The people are highly emotional (a characteristic of Southerners everywhere), still near to the frontier in many of their attitudes, individualistic, hottempered, and quick to take the law into their own hands. (In thousands of Southern homes — white and Negro — one may find numerous pistols, shotguns, rifles, knives, and plenty of ammunition.) They are pleasure-loving people, reckless of money, garrulous, engagingly hospitable, natively courteous, and fiercely partisan in local politics — an inevitable consequence of the Southern temperament and the one-party political system in which personalities count for more than issues.

Southerners are poor, proud, and prolific. Many of them are still spiritual refugees from the antebellum South and exhibit characteristic distortions of the refugee mentality. They are often given to excess in a land of excess (the pursuit of the golden mean is a luxury of the secure); large numbers are orgiastically religious, worshipers of a stern, revengeful Old Testament God, and of a gentle, forgiving New Testament Jesus. They are, moreover, — if you exclude Negroes and a handful of non-Anglo-Saxon whites, — the only great racially homogeneous bloc in the United States, being almost 100 per cent native-born Americans of AngloSaxon stock, Protestant to the core, and no lovers of Catholics.

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THIS society is almost primitively simple on the surface and almost incomprehensibly complex underneath. In Northern Virginia, where there are relatively few Negroes, as in the Mississippi Delta, where there are more Negroes in proportion to whites than elsewhere except in South Africa and the West Indies, the whites are one in their determination that the “color line” shall be maintained— or be modified only by their common consent.

Here each white is deeply affected by the Negro, just as each Negro is deeply affected by the white. The one is a problem for the other. If there has never been a free Negro in the South, it is also true that there has never been a free white in the South since the Civil War, — free, that is, in the sense that the Vermonter is free, — because the Southerner’s whole society and way of life are conditioned by the presence of the Negro. Consequently no one knows what a free Southerner might be like, since the Southerner now functions in an environment of which he is a prisoner.

The situation is no fault of the Negro. It is simply a fact, and the savage irony of it is that the Negro alone, of all American groups, did not come here either because he had been run out of his homeland for whatever reasons, or because he wanted to better his condition. He was dragged out of Africa, tortured, enslaved, and killed by millions to satisfy the greed of white men who preached the religion of love and peace. In Christ’s name and for his sake, amen.

The Southern Negro suffers mental aberrations because he lives among whites upon terms which they lay down, while the white suffers other aberrations because he lives among masses of Negroes. These aberrations are inescapable in a society that is kept going more by unwritten and unwritable laws than by the written law affecting the races; by an immense and elaborate code of etiquette that governs their daily relations; by an exquisite and intuitive tact on the part of both whites and Negroes; by adherence to a labyrinthine code of manners, taboos, and conventions. There is therefore a sense of strain in the air; of a delicately poised equilibrium; of forces held in leash. Here men toss uneasily at night and awake fatigued in the morning. Upon such a society one must not lightly pass judgment; nor must one seek to apply patent remedies, for to do so is to play recklessly with explosives.

It is part of the paradox of the South that while the Southern Negro has made great progress during the past half century, race relations have deteriorated during the last few years — and continue to deteriorate at increased speed. In part, perhaps, this retrogression results from the creeping barbarism of our times; from the confusions of men once secure who feel that they are no longer masters of their destinies but are the puppets of fate; from the callousness of spirit engendered in men when they are confronted by so many brutalities that after a while the mind ceases to rebel and drops into a brutish acquiescence. Does the sack of Nanking, the herd-slaughter of Jews, or the deportation of Polish girls to German brothels disturb your sleep?

Forty years ago, two Negroes were justices of the peace in Washington County, Mississippi, in the heart of the black belt. Both men were elected by whites term after term without opposition. A little earlier, two Negro representatives from the same county sat in the Mississippi legislature. They were splendid men and reflected credit upon their constituents and themselves. Today no Negro could be elected to public office in Mississippi.

The process of deterioration of race relations is hastened by factors working from within and without. The older generation of Negroes, which had established a workable — if perhaps far from ideal — relationship with the whites, is dying. So are the older whites, many of whom are almost the last exemplars of the tradition of noblesse oblige. Southern paternalism toward the Negro — whatever its vices or virtues — is slowly disappearing, and the economic relationship of the races tends more closely to approximate that of the dog-eat-dog economy which generally prevails elsewhere.

The younger Negroes, better educated than their predecessors, readers of the violent and often incendiary Negro press, sharply intent upon securing what they take to be their rights, and more resentful of the restraints under which they live, are developing a bitter hatred of the whites. The younger whites in turn are developing an equally bitter hatred of Negroes, while the older members of both races stand bewildered and helpless to prevent what may become a tragic clash between these tragic peoples. From without, Nazi, Japanese, and American fascist propaganda operates to set the races against each other, while Southern demagogues add to the hatreds and confusions and are valiantly aided by Northern white liberals and professional Northern Negroes.

As a result of these factors, many Negroes are so bitter that they talk of fighting it out with their white neighbors, while the whites are so embittered that, by a strange hate-transference, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt has become the most hated woman in the South since Harriet Beecher Stowe. She is widely blamed for having stimulated Negroes to demand “social equality” and higher wages and shorter hours in the white folks’ kitchens — if not servants’ labor unions; and in her name, it is said, Negroes have formed “Eleanor Clubs” to further these and more sinister ends.

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IN SUCH an atmosphere, it is futile to point out that any people suffering repressions will attempt to remove them; that as long ago as 1831 in Virginia, Nat Turner led a slave rebellion against the white masters; or, to come to today’s events, that the FBI has not discovered a single Eleanor Club.

There is nothing new in all this, but much that is significant. In 1904, when Booker T. Washington dined at the White House as the guest of President Theodore Roosevelt, a roar of anger went up from the South. “White men of the South, how do you like it?” asked the New Orleans Times-Democrat. The Memphis Scimitar said that Roosevelt had perpetrated “the most damnable outrage ever.” The Richmond Times, though more hysterical perhaps than other Southern newspapers, yet came nearer to plumbing the unconscious Southern mind, when it pictured the President as believing that white women should receive attentions from Negro men and that the two races might intermarry.

Here we come near to the heart of the problem. I submit that our understanding depends upon three candid acknowledgments. The first is that the Negro question is insoluble, as are all complex social questions. Only a naïve people could believe that it is soluble in the sense that a final solution can be found and the whole matter neatly disposed of.

Secondly, we must acknowledge that the question is insoluble because, in the conscious or unconscious minds of whites, it is at bottom a blood or sexual question. They are determined that no white in their legal jurisdiction shall marry a Negro, and this is the law of all the Southern states. They are equally determined that white women shall not have physical relations with Negro men except, when discovered, upon pain of death or banishment inflicted upon one or both parties to the act. Under these circumstances there can never be “social equality” between the races. There cannot even be forms of physical propinquity which smack of social equality, or which encourage or permit social relationships, open or clandestine, between the races. These iron taboos find their direct expression in — and are primarily enforced through — the physical and social segregation of the races.

If it be said that the Southern white man, allegedly zealous for the purity of his blood, has not hesitated to have physical relations with Negro women, the charge is irrefutable. Historically such relationships have always occurred everywhere when there was a master and slave relationship between races; when the aftermath of slavery was the weakening of family ties, and the richer race could buy the women of the poorer race. The fact is nonetheless indefensible and shameful to a people setting themselves up as superior, but its recognition, for a reason that we shall discuss, leads nowhere to a solution of the issues involved. It is worth noting, however, that so far as one can determine, physical relationships between Southern white men and Negro women have long been decreasing, whether because of an awakened conscience on this score or because in the South, as throughout the country, standards of sexual morality among white people have been sharply relaxed.

It is useless to tell Southerners that their fears are groundless; that Negroes say they do not want “social equality” or intermarriage with whites. Logically the Southerner argues that if Negroes do not seek intermarriage, then, from their point of view, they are fools, because if they should ever achieve it, the repressions of which they complain would be removed by the whites out of familial self-interest. Instinctively the Southerner argues that sex is at the core of life — that it is one of the most profound instincts or desires that animate the human body, and that it is capable of evoking primitive fears and demoniac passions.

Southern whites, therefore, will not at any foreseeable time relax the taboos and conventions which keep the races separate, from the cradle to the grave. They fear and believe that once a small crack is made in the walls of social segregation, the walls will eventually be breached. The separateness of the races, say Southerners, must consequently continue. And if it is concluded by anthropologists that whites and blacks will some day intermarry and the American people will become chocolate-colored, Southern whites reply that this is a question to be decided by their descendants of the twenty-fifth century.

It is William Graham Sumner’s dictum that you cannot change the mores of a people by law, and since the social segregation of the races is the most deep-seated and pervasive of the Southern mores, it is evident that he who attempts to change it by law runs risks of incalculable gravity. Yet there are whites and Negroes who would attempt to break down segregation in the South by Federal fiat. Let them beware. I have no doubt that in such an event every Southern white man would spring to arms and the country would be swept by civil war.

Writing nearly two years ago in the Louisville Courier-Journal, Mark Ethridge, the publisher of that newspaper, said: “He [the Negro] must realize that there is no power in the world . . . which could now force the Southern white people to abandon the principle of social segregation. It is a cruel disillusionment, bearing the germs of strife and perhaps tragedy, for any of their leaders to tell them that they can expect it as the price of their participation in the war.” This, it seems to me, is a statement of indubitable fact, yet Mr. Ethridge was denounced by the Negro press and Northern white liberals as a fascist, a Ku-Kluxer, and a scoundrel.

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I COMB now to the third acknowledgment concerning the Negro question. If it is insoluble in the sense mentioned, the issue is confused and harm is done to the relations of the races when leaders on both sides, out of sentimentality or refusal to face the fact, pretend that somehow it is capable of solution. This make-believe gets us nowhere. It does not follow, however, that a question which cannot be solved may not be ameliorated. No notable improvement of race relations can be achieved, in my opinion, unless the ground is cleared by a recognition on the part of both whites and Negroes that (a) the problem is incapable of solution, and (b) the issue of segregation must not be called into question. From examples of amelioration based on these premises — examples taken from all over the South — as well as from the extraordinary progress of the Southern Negro during the past half century, it would be reasonable to conclude that almost all the differences between the races — except only that of social segregation — may be gradually adjusted or removed through the exercise of patience, wisdom, and good will on both sides.

If the races made this rational approach to the problem, and ruled out the one thing that brings it into the realm of the emotional or the irrational, not only would many of the present difficulties be brought within the possibility of solution, but the burden would then rest upon the whites to do for the Negro what they have not done at all, or only in part. This would mean giving him his civic rights: the right to justice in the courts; the right to security in his person and property; the right to a fair share in the distribution of tax money for purposes of education, health, and public improvements. It would mean giving him the right to earn a living, to be paid according to his worth and not his color, to be protected in the practice of the professions and skills. And, not less important, it would mean that he would be asked to assume his fair share of taxes and other burdens of the community.

Let us not delude ourselves. This is obviously less than democracy. This is merely a step toward democracy. But there is no section of the country in which at some time other minorities, as well as the Negro, have not been discriminated against. And let us bear in mind that there is no government — indeed, no organized religion — which has not at some time compromised with the logic of its own institutions. But one does not reject democracy because it, is less than perfect — any more than one rejects other institutions for that reason.

So far I have discussed the Negro question as a Southern question, It is, of course, a national question. More than three million Negroes live outside the South, they are constantly migrating to other sections; and wherever they live, almost the same repressions run against them as in the South, except that elsewhere they are often sicklied over with a revolting hypocrisy. This is especially true of social segregation. In terms of the South, however, it is clear that both races need the sympathetic understanding of others, and not their unreasoned recriminations or pious homilies. They need it deeply in these days of high tension, and at a time when a false move or the acceptance of misguided counsel may take the whole question out of the hands of decent whites and Negroes and deliver it into the talons of demagogues, fascists, and KuKluxers, to the irreparable harm of the Negro and the detriment of the whole American political order.

Both races are caught in a tragic dilemma. No man can view the position of the American Negro without a sore heart, a troubled conscience, and a deep compassion. Nor can one view the position of the Southern whites without sympathy, for they are the sum of their inheritance and their environment, and act according to their lights. Whites and Negroes alike will each have to yield much to the other if American democracy is to survive, and each will have to yield out of conviction rather than compulsion. Let those who would attempt to solve this question by the law heed the words of the distinguished sociologist, Dr. Robert E. Park: —

“We do not know what we ought to do until we know what we can do; and we certainly should consider what men can do before we pass laws prescribing what they should do.”