THE OTHER SOUTH

TO much of the nation and the world, the South is Selma. And there will be more Selmas: more demonstrations, more violence, more blind resistance to justice, more bitter words hissed between black and white. But there is another South, a region of quiet, solid, if often agonizing, progress. That other South, all too easily overlooked, was not created this year or ten years ago; it was not brought into being only by an act of the Supreme Court or only by the exertions of the civil rights movement. It has long existed in the hearts of some men. But only lately has it begun to take over in reality and to make its true weight felt in the balance of events.

Nothing said about the South can ever be said without qualification. Cynics point out accurately that "new eras" in the South have been proclaimed before--and none was ever new enough. Still, in the past decade the Negro has gained more than in the whole century before, and in the past year, perhaps more than in the whole decade before. Today, fundamental resistance to Negro civil rights is dead or dying. Compared to the First Reconstruction, says Southern Historian C. Vann Woodward, "the Second Reconstruction is assuming the proportions of a galloping revolution." Roy Wilkins, N.A.A.C.P. executive director, adds: "We've already won. I don't mean we're all through. Sometimes a war isn't ended for years after the turning point. What I mean is we are over the hill. The back of segregation is broken."

Toward Sanity

There are still many ugly pockets of resistance. The South still accedes to Negro demands reluctantly, surrendering only token bits and pieces. But a majority of Southerners are now resigned to the irrevocable fact that the Negro's demands must be granted under the Constitution. Only a handful of Southerners cling to the illusion that they can sell segregation to the rest of the country, and hardly anyone still believes in the use of violence, except a few backwoods sheriffs and chili-parlor hoodlums. Police Commissioner Claude Armour of Memphis, a city with an excellent integration record, puts it this way: "I had to face the decision whether we were to have fear, strife and bloodshed, or whether we were to enforce the law. I decided we would enforce the law and have peace, and that's what we have done."

Only two states--Alabama and Mississippi--still approach unanimity in their bitter segregationist stand; the next toughest is Louisiana. But there are signs that even these last strongholds are crumbling. Much of the credit for the change must go to businessmen, who were troubled by evidence of economic damage: a sharp decline in the acquisition of new industries and the formation of new jobs, at least partly due to the disastrous publicity provided by the likes of Governor Wallace. Alarmed and irritated by Selma, leaders of Alabama commerce and industry recently called for protection of voting rights and an end to employment discrimination. Anywhere else in the nation, a mere call for compliance with federal law would scarcely merit special approval, but in the Deep South it signifies a marked move toward sanity.

The fact is that white community leaders, who once tacitly used the white rabble as their outriders "to keep the Negro in his place," found the rabble getting out of hand and have reasserted control. All Southern Governors remain segregationists, but with a difference. Although he won office by spouting racism, Mississippi's Governor Paul Johnson is obviously trying to move the state toward greater accommodation on the civil rights front. He still defends his state's too-lenient treatment of racist killers, but he works closely with the FBI in curbing the Klan (in fact, he himself has been threatened by the Klan lately), and he has halted the use of state money to finance racist propaganda being broadcast by the declining White Citizens Council.

Louisiana's Governor John McKeithen not long ago made a dramatic and significant gesture: he flew to Jonesboro, a small town 160 miles from Baton Rouge, where for three weeks half the 500 students in the Negro high school had been cutting classes and protesting lack of facilities. McKeithen swiftly took care of their grievances, explaining: "I didn't want another Selma." When the Klan protested his sensible action, 15 citizens burned an oil-soaked "Z" at an intersection to express their opinion of the Klan's worth--zero. The Governors' attitude is perhaps best summed up by Georgia's Carl Sanders, who says, "I'm a segregationist, but I'm no damn fool."

The New Climate

To outsiders, the signs of change in the new South often seem heartbreakingly and absurdly slight. Progressive Southerners will proudly point to facts that would be scarcely noticed elsewhere: a group of Negro schoolchildren being applauded during a visit to the South Carolina state capitol; the wife of Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus having Negro women to an integrated tea; white bellhops carrying luggage for Negro guests. But taken together, and given the South's unique history, such signs tell of an entirely new climate.

o VOTING RIGHTS. In most Southern States it is becoming far easier for Negroes to register. Between 1956 and 1964, Negro registration in Virginia rose from 19% to 45.7% of all those of voting age; in Texas it was up from 37% to 57.7% ; in Tennessee, from 29% to 69.4% ; and in Florida, from 32% to 63.7%. About 2,000,000 Negroes are now registered to vote in the Old Confederacy. The Administration's voting bill, expected to pass amid diminished Southern opposition, will probably increase this number by another 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 by next year's elections, out of an estimated maximum possible total of 5,000,000 Negro votes in the South. When Negroes achieve their full political potential, they will wield a powerful influence; they comprise more than 30% of the adult population in five of Alabama's eight congressional districts, in three of Mississippi's five districts, and in three of South Carolina's six districts. Although so far, pitifully few Negroes hold office in the South, there are some significant omens: at least two Southern U.S. Congressmen, one from Georgia and the other from Tennessee, owe their election to Negro votes; a Mississippi politician, thinking like many of his colleagues about the Negroes who will vote for the first time in 1966, contemplates running against a segregationist Congressman and explains his strategy simply: "I'd get the nigger vote." The cynicism of that view does not diminish its importance.

o PUBLIC ACCOMMODATIONS. Compliance with the new public-accommodations law, which took effect last summer, has been good, on the whole. Negroes are received at restaurants and hotels even in such notorious centers of segregation as McComb, Miss., Birmingham, Ala., and Albany, Ga. There have been some violent cases of defiance: in Mississippi one Negro was beaten when he tried to eat at a lunch counter; another was shot when he patronized a theater. Often Negroes are served grudgingly, but sometimes they get "brown-skin service," meaning they are received with such elaborate courtesy that they are actually embarrassed. In many places Negroes still have to bring suit to use swimming pools or golf courses. But in the larger cities, they can eat where they please, attend theaters and concerts without trouble; some middle-class Negroes dine and dance at the best nightspots once a week. The civil rights movement is no longer much concerned with restaurants and the like. Say Negro leaders: "We're past the coffee stage."

o SCHOOL INTEGRATION. Eleven years after the Supreme Court's desegregation ruling, school integration throughout most of the South has barely begun. In five states the overall integration rate (the percentage of each state's Negro pupils in schools with whites) is less than 1%; Texas leads the remaining six states with a rate of 7.26%. Dismal as these statistics are, it is also a fact that more progress has been achieved in the last two years than most observers thought possible. For one thing, Negro children have now been enrolled without trouble in some of the rural areas where white opposition was fiercest. Mississippi, the last holdout, bowed to court orders and admitted Negro first-graders in Biloxi, Jackson, and Leake County. At the University of Mississippi, two students have just been expelled for taking part in a demonstration against a bi-racial group of visitors to the campus. In Tuskegee, Ala., public schools that had closed rather than integrate are now open again on an integrated basis. The new federal aid-to-education bill will exert considerable influence by withholding aid from schools that cannot furnish acceptable plans for integration. In order to continue receiving aid, the U.S. Office of Education announced last week, school districts will have to desegregate at least four grades for the school year beginning in September, and all twelve grades by the 1967-68 term. Whether anything approaching true integration will be achieved rests partly on the Negro's willingness to fight--and local Negro leadership is often lax. Perhaps hardest to overcome, as in the North, will be de facto residential segregation; predominantly Negro neighborhoods are bound to have predominantly Negro schools.

o JOBS. All over the South Negroes are now holding jobs once reserved for whites only. In some cities Negroes are working as clerks in variety and department stores; some banks have hired Negro tellers "and put them in the very front window." Much of this, of course, is mere "tokenism" or business opportunism; sometimes Negroes are hired to halt boycotts or draw Negro customers. Still, it is a sign of progress, as is the fact that, partly under federal pressure, many defense firms have tried valiantly to upgrade Negro jobs and increase Negro employment. There will be greater opportunities when the fair-employment section of the Civil Rights Act becomes law on July 2; many firms take the position that they will hire Negroes then but not a day sooner. White unions still oppose wider Negro employment. But the realization is growing that in the long run a developing South cannot afford to do without the full use of its Negro labor force. To a large extent, the matter goes back to education: Negroes qualified for skilled jobs are still scarce.

Summing up, CORE Chairman Floyd B. McKissick of North Carolina says: "Generally we get what we demand. The barrier falls when we push it. But the thing is, we have to push it."

Love & Justice

Obviously a great deal more pushing is required. It would be a disastrous disservice to the Negro cause to conclude that everyone can now relax and that the present rate of advance is necessarily enough. The Southern Negro is still far from enjoying all the rights the law grants him, but he already knows that he wants and needs more than the law can give. He wants not only equality of opportunity, but social, economic and, in a sense, psychological equality. The Southern Negro family's median yearly income is still only $2,520, compared to the white Southerner's $5,565, which in turn is $935 below the national median for whites. Many Southern Negroes will remain too poor to go to restaurants and theaters now open to them, too uneducated to fill any new jobs that might possibly now be available; they will continue to live in Possum Hollows, ill fed and ill clothed. They face bitterness and disillusion, which are the natural aftermath of revolutions. A little progress only sharpens the hunger for more progress, as Charles Silberman points out in Crisis in Black and White: the closer "disadvantaged groups" are to their goals, "the harder it is to understand or justify the disparities that remain."

Only in the realm of metaphysics are justice and love the same. As the Negro obtains more justice, he does not necessarily win more love. On the contrary, the Southern white man's old paternalistic and patronizing affection for the Negro has largely disappeared but has not yet been replaced with a new friendship based on equality. The Southerner is still struggling, sometimes desperately, against accepting a new image of the Negro--because it would mean accepting a new image of himself. Southerners still refuse to recognize that the prejudice that they foster in their own children hurts and warps not only the Negro but themselves. "There has been a change of action," says one Negro leader, "but not a change in heart." The ancient cliches still abound, including the notion that most Negroes really don't want equality. As Negro Author Louis E. Lomax points out ironically in Harper's: "I have yet to meet a white man whose cook believed in integration."

Many of the old fears are still present, if often more thoughtfully expressed; Author-Editor Virginius Dabney worries about "racial amalgamation," and carefully quotes Arnold Toynbee as his authority that it is bound to happen. Southern white liberals are still often attacked as traitors, and more fiercely denounced by segregationists than even Negro civil rights leaders; waitresses have been known to serve Negroes but not their white companions.

And yet growing numbers of whites are no longer afraid to speak out for the Negro and to break what Lillian Smith called the "dreadful silence of the good." Some Negro leaders complain that many of the "new" liberals are superficial and favor the Negro cause only because in certain quarters it is now popular, almost fashionable, to do so. But the very fact that it is popular marks a tremendous change. North Carolina's former Governor Terry Sanford speaks for many Southerners when he says: "We had lived with our myths for so long that we actually believed the vast majority of Negroes were content, happy, carefree, lacking in ambition and singing in the sun."

Beyond Tragedy

The Negro revolution is destroying some other ancient myths. Jonathan Daniels once described Southerners as a "mythological people, created half out of dream and half out of slander, who live in a still legendary land." One legend, based on the dead Confederate dream and largely perpetuated by poets and writers striving for self-identity, is the notion that Southerners are a separate and homogeneous breed. The South's reaction to the Negro challenge undermined that legend; individual Southerners responded quite differently, according to their education, their financial and social position, and the precise area in which they lived. As Political Scientist Leslie Dunbar has pointed out, Southerners and non-Southerners are in fact very much alike. American society, dominated by whites both North and South, was long based on nostalgic, rural, individualistic values that are being destroyed by urbanization and industrialization. Thus the Southern crisis of the past decade, says Dunbar, does not result from the fact that the South is different from the rest of the nation; "it results instead from the dissolution of things which have in the past united us."

Many Negro leaders believe that the Southern Negro's problems are growing more like those of the Northern Negro, including de facto segregation. Some still hope that because of the Southerner's special if ambiguous closeness to the Negro--in contrast to the Northerner's ignorance of him--the South can eventually produce a more humane community than the North. That may be hoping for too much. But in the long run, the solution will probably come from the same direction. It has been outlined by Georgia's Governor Sanders, who hopes for "a new political power center, unrelated to race. It will cross color lines, will gain its members from the area between the traditional extremes of poverty and wealth, and it will be based on education."

As the Negro and the white man walk together, they are never alone; the haunting question from The Waste Land seems to ask: "Who is the third who walks always beside you?" The third is the ghost of a conscience arising from a shared and tragic past, demanding a shared but better future. That demand is at last being met. And perhaps, as regional differences fade, the South is finally approaching the point where it will cease to be an epilogue to tragedy and begin being merely a problem.

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