Reading the American Past: Printed Page 238

DOCUMENT 27–3

George E. McMillan Reports on Racial Conditions in the South in 1960

The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional created a passionate backlash among southern whites, while engendering anger among African Americans about the glacial pace of racial change. George E. McMillan, a white reporter from Tennessee, surveyed the mood of the South in 1960, six years after the Brown decision. McMillan's essay, excerpted below, highlighted the bitter conflict between whites and blacks, analyzed attitudes among both groups, and explained why gradual change was not the answer.

Sit-Downs: The South's New Time Bomb, 1960

I have just made a trip through the [South]. Everywhere I went, I felt the current raw, ugly temper of the South. Although I live in a small Southern town myself, what astonished me most during my survey was how rigidly and inflexibly the “sides” have lined up. The mood of the South today is frequently compared with what it was 100 years ago — as the South stood at the threshold of a civil war.

The most frightening thing now is the air of resignation with which Southerners of both races view the inevitability of violence.

On my trip, I talked with many kinds of Southerners. I interviewed police chiefs, sheriffs, highway patrolmen, state and city safety directors, mayors and city managers. I also talked with Negro students, Negro school principals, Negro college teachers and administrators. And I talked with many white and Negro people who were not immediately involved in the [civil rights] demonstrations, but whose interest in and knowledge of Southern race relations is immediate and extensive.

It is not so much that anyone wants violence, I discovered, as it is that nobody sees any alternative to it.

The Negroes are infused with a new determination, and are ready to risk violence to get some of the gains they believe are due them.

The middle-class whites seem hopelessly committed to violence. They've said so long, “there'll be trouble,” if the old balance between the races is disturbed, that they now find themselves almost counting on trouble as a solution to their problem.

Even the Southern “liberals,” an almost professionally hopeful group in the past, are today saying, as one of them did to me, “I don't see how this thing can be settled without slugging it out right down the line.” ...

Elsewhere throughout the South, violence has coursed through community after community. ... In Biloxi, Miss., whites used dog chains and, later, shotguns on Negroes who showed up at a segregated public beach; in Portsmouth, Va., they armed themselves with hammers; in Montgomery, Ala., they swung baseball bats.

The crisis of law and order is so real, so immediate, that it calls for a new look at what has been the nation's approach to, and its responsibility in, the Southern racial problem.

That approach has been gradualism: slow and evolutionary change. But when looked at against today's urgencies, gradualism shapes up as a failure. ...

When the evidence is weighed today, gradualism not only looks wrong, but also appears to have been mistaken in intent.

Gradualism is deeply ingrained in the American tradition, and Americans outside the South, recent surveys show, are reluctant to believe that gradual social change isn't the best way to solve the South's problems.

But the simple logic of the future of Southern race relations is that somebody outside the South is going to have to intervene. That intervention will almost certainly have to come from the Federal Government.

The question that remains is whether the Government will intervene after damage is done, including perhaps serious international damage to America's prestige, or whether national public opinion will support positive and constructive steps of prevention.

The persistent American image of the South's situation is that there are two extreme sides, with a happy middle ground between them and that this middle ground must be occupied in the South, as it is almost everywhere else in the U.S., by people who are essentially moral and law-abiding.

Almost exactly this view has been expressed by President Eisenhower.

“The South is full of people of good will,” he told a press conference in 1956, after the riots in Clinton, Tenn., “but they are not the ones we now hear. We hear the people who are adamant, and are so filled with prejudice that they can't keep still — they even resort to violence; and the same way on the other side of the thing, the people who want to have the whole matter settled today. This is a question of leading and training and teaching people, and it takes some time, unfortunately.”

The President's view seems to be similar to the present mood and temper of the country. ... [A Newsweek poll] concluded, “The prevailing view among opinion leaders is one of understanding and sympathy. From California to Maine, men recognize that decades of strict social custom in the South cannot be overturned quickly.” ...

But the answer from the young Negro college students in the South is plain. “Mr. Local Custom Must Die,” read a placard carried by one of them in a recent demonstration.

If there is a lesson in the current racial crisis, it is that the Southern climate is not democratic, and that gradualism will not work there because the essentials of gradualism — a flexible society in which competing claims are freely heard and fairly adjusted — do not exist.

In the first place, the Negro's claims for his legal and constitutional rights, not to mention economic opportunity and personal dignity, have run into a stone wall of denial and defiance from the white South.

In the decade and a half since World War II, the Southern Negro has pressed his claims through the courts, in the democratic tradition, only to win his suits and lose his case. Today, he is fed up with legalism. ...

The crowning disappointment to the Negro, and the most disastrous failure of moderation, lies in the six-year history of enforcement, or lack of enforcement, of the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision on the schools.

In the spring of 1960, six years after the Court handed down its ruling that racial segregation in schools is illegal, 94 per cent of the South's Negro students were still attending segregated classes, according to the authoritative Southern Education Reporting Service. ...

Behind the question of tactics and speed lies another source of disillusionment for the Negro. In a society whose keynote is its chance for individual economic advancement, the Negro is not even standing still; he is losing ground. ... In 1950, America's Negro families earned about 54 per cent as much as whites, but in 1958, the ratio had dropped to 51 per cent. Negroes in the South fared even worse. In 1958 ... family income for Southern Negroes was $2,014, or 44 per cent of the white income. Gradualism clearly has not helped at all in that area.

“You can't argue,” said one Negro, “that there's any question of time in giving a man a job. You either hire a man or you don't. You can't hire a leg today and an arm tomorrow.”

There is almost no hope for a Negro, no matter what his skills or training, to land professional employment in the South outside of rigidly segregated facilities — and very little there. In private industry, there is nothing but “the mop and the broom,” and little more in state and municipal governments. ...

If the Negro's spectrum is dark almost everywhere he looks, the classic failure of legalism and gradualism seems to have been the Supreme Court decision. Gradualism, the democratic way, assumes that leadership groups will lead, and lead in the right direction, if they have the facts and the moment of opportunity. The school decision was designed to give moderation a fair chance to work.

In allowing the South a year's breathing spell after its initial decision, and in leaving implementation to Federal district judges, the Court showed that it believed the South deserved time, and would use the time well. But it didn't work out that way.

A perceptive Southern newspaperman described what happened:

“Everybody was in shock for a few weeks immediately after the decision. Many people concerned with government or schools were convinced the time had come. They thought they were going to have to comply. Many school superintendents went right ahead with plans for integration. If the Court had ordered Southern school systems to submit plans within 12 months, all, or all but a few, would have done so.” Then, legislatures erected new legal barriers and delay followed delay. ...

The pertinent question today is not whether there are any white “people of good will” so much as it is: Under what conditions would the white people who normally play leadership roles in the South take positive and constructive leadership on the racial question?

Do they need time? Would they do more if they had more time?

One of the least understood facts about the South is that there is a wider atmosphere of professed acquiescence there than few people outside the region realize. In the country clubs, on the terraces, in the new ranch-house living rooms where middle- and upper-class Southerners gather, there is general agreement that “the Negro's got to make some progress,” or “something has got to give” or “someday we've got to integrate the schools.” It has almost become a matter of class status to say: “As far as I'm concerned, I wouldn't care if they integrated tomorrow.” Thus, the upper-class Southerner distinguishes himself from the lower-class white person — whose principal characteristic in the past has always been his overt hatred for the Negro.

Middle-class whites — ministers, teachers, professionals — say it is not prejudice that holds them back but practicality. “There'd be trouble,” they say. What they do not say, and would not admit, is that they are as much in bondage as the Negro himself. In the past, when members of this class have let their consciences guide them into attempts to change the status quo, reprisal has been visited on them just as effectively, if not as violently, as it has on the Negro himself.

Time has little to do with their attitudes or their behavior.

They are simply disenfranchised, caught in the grip of an archaic, rigid and oversimplified power structure welded long ago specifically to fight off all changes in the racial situation. ...

The South is in the midst of a deep economic as well as social conflict. It is torn between the values of an almost feudalistic agricultural society and a modern industrial one. Much of its new industry has been attracted to the region by low taxes and no unions. But the bargain that the textile mills made with their workers years ago still seems to hold for the plant that came to town yesterday: “We'll keep the niggers out if you'll keep the unions out.”

Thus, despite all the signs of a “new” South, despite hundreds of new factories lining Southern highways, despite the prosperous suburbs that stretch around the big cities like Atlanta and Charlotte, the political energy of the region is still single-mindedly devoted to an anachronistic cause.

The banks, the large corporations, the utilities and the rural landowners — the people who hold economic and political power in the South — are not yet convinced that it is not best to let the traditional people handle the traditional problem in the traditional way. ...

The question of how much time the South should be allowed in which to drop its “strict customs” is in some ways a very complicated problem; in others, a very simple one. It involves prejudice, taboos, culture, folklore and mores. But change can be made.

Ironically, every day throughout the deepest recesses of the Deep South, some Southern whites are peacefully working with, living with and eating with Negroes on an integrated basis. In military camps all over the South, Southern boys are serving uneventfully in completely integrated military units, and have been doing so for several years. ...

The rule seems to be that Southerners will abandon their customs more rapidly when it is a matter of economic necessity, but insist on them when they can get by with it. ...

Much evidence suggests that ... the best way to handle integration is the quickest way, giving the South's long-nurtured irrationalities the shortest possible shrift.

From my own observations ... , three realities must be faced: that racial discrimination is the number-one social problem of this decade in American life; that the situation is now in a deadly and dangerous stalemate and that the only agency that can do anything meaningful at this juncture is the Federal Government.

From George E. McMillan, “Sit-Downs: The South's New Time Bomb,” Look, July 5, 1960, 21–25.

Questions for Reading and Discussion