A Southerner in South Africa

By Paul M. Gaston

Vol. 8, No. 6, 1986, pp. 9-15

Few visitors return from South Africa these days with good news or give us much reason to be hopeful. Like those who have visited the country, most Americans fear and expect the worst from it. We are all a little like those northern Southwatchers of the early 1960s who shook their heads in amazement each night, transfixed by the latest visual evidence of some new outrageous violation of human dignity, some new strain on conscience and credulity.

Like them, we have good reason to believe that the worst is happening in South Africa. A few constructive-engagement emissaries indulge Reaganesque fantasies and dress P. W. Botha in imperial reform raiment, but few of us are deceived. Despite government censorship, reporting on south Africa overwhelms us with awareness of police-state brutality, victimization of the nation’s black masses, and the obstinancy of Afrikaner nationalism.

It is easy to submit to a sense of doom. The terrors of the apartheid regime are so pervasive and its powers so vast and impregnable that the Armageddon we see on the horizon seems sure to end in a tragic victory of the forces of evil over the forces of good. Blacks will not accept the fate the ruling whites have decreed for them and their rejection of it, given the present odds, insures the bloodbath against which we are daily warned.

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Many of us also believe that only pressure from the outside–from the world that is South Africa’s “North”–can change the white intransigence and avert the calamitous bloodletting. Southerners in particular ought to understand this kind of thinking. We know that it took northern intervention to break the logjam of our history, once to end slavery and later to dismantle segregation.

Thoughts like these were among those running through my head as I prepared to take my first trip to South Africa. I had wanted to go there for many years, partly because friends there urged me to come to teach my Southern history course. Perhaps, we reasoned, the study of liberation struggles in another racist society might help South African students understand better their own situation.

Eventually I received an invitation to come to the University of Cape Town to teach a course on the history of the Southern civil rights movement. My wife, meanwhile, was invited to participate in the work of a Cape Town group that helped communities in the black and so-called colored townships who wished to set up educational day care centers and helped to train teachers and administrators to staff them.

By the time the formal invitation arrived we had both begun to feel that the idea was one whose time had passed. The country was in turmoil. For months we had been seeing on television the awesome Casspirs (military tanks) roaming the city streets and crushing black protest in the townships.

At the same time, letters from Cape Town friends told us much we didn’t see on television or read in the newspapers, and gave us a vivid sense of the mounting repression and anxiety:

* “The phone rings all the time and it is lawyers, friends with more news. The latest is that the eighty-five who were taken yesterday are to be placed under the emergency laws, which are immensely wide. Cape Town was declared to be in a state of emergency yesterday. Meetings are banned, of course.”

* “I have just returned from the fruit and vegetable market where I have a friend whose husband was arrested at 4 a.m. yesterday. She is a lovely, energetic, sensitive and immensely warm person. Her eyes fill with tears which she quickly brushes away.”

* “Last week-end a friend telephoned us from her home in Guguletu (a black township on the outskirts of Cape Town) to say that the police were lined up outside her house, were taunting the people, who were taunting them back… A tiny incident in a myriad of horror and death.”

* “This has been a heavy week for me. The morning of the emergency meant the arrest of one of our staff members, the Tuesday morning the detention of another plus the husband of another, plus the necessity of another to become unavailable. People have been picked up left, right and centre. One has the sense of ruthless determination.”

* “Our history is poised on the brink; you can almost smell it. And what will it be?”

What might it be, indeed! And who would make it? Those questions, and the chance to be where history was “poised on the brink,” urgently called us to press on with our plans to visit, despite the rising tide of repression and resistance. People whose judgment we trusted reassured us about safety, even after a crushing new state of emergency was declared on June 12.

My wife and I arrived in South Africa in early July, I to stay ten weeks, she seven. Most of our visit was in Cape Town, where we worked, but we had a long weekend in Johannesburg and a week at a mountain retreat in the Eastern Cape.

Those weeks of immersion in South Africa’s “history on the brink” were moving and totally absorbing. Privileged to meet many of what in the civil rights days we would have called “movement people,” we came back enriched by their friendship and their example. And we discovered in them, in their struggle for a new South Africa, comradeship, character, courage, and vision that inspired hope for the future. Far from feeling America should be a good “North” and lead South Africa to freedom, we came back wanting Americans to listen to the voices of the new South Africa, struggling to be born.

To return from South Africa optimistic, let alone with what one of my friends cynically labels my newfound South African utopianism, is to be out of the mainstream of reportage and judgment. But I cannot make this response credible without some report on the

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state’s repressive power and apartheid’s web of cruelties. Evils are there in great abundance. We met them, were personally touched by them, wrestled with them in one way or another every day we were there, even though we were white and privileged.

The newly arrived visitor is first of all struck by the amazing reach of segregation. Even an unreconstructed southerner would blink at the legislation that assigns living and working space exclusively on the basis of racial classification and confines blacks in urban townships, rural reserves, and single-sex workers’ hostels–all hidden away from the white world. The blacks who have built and whose labor runs the modern, urban, industrial state are shuttled away at the end of each day, hidden from the eyes of white people in cement-block ghettos or hovels and shanties huddled on the sandflats.

On the outskirts of Jollannesburg we visited Alexandra, a one-square mile township housing 100,000 people. I wrote in my diary of watching a shanty being built of poles that support corrugated tin sides and roof, about 15′ x 10′, will house 8 to 12 people, perhaps more. One has a sense of huge numbers of people shoe-horned into squalid hovels. Crude outdoor privies. No houses have plumbing, few electricity. And this is said to be “one of the better townships.”

We were told about the political crisis in Alexandra–the struggle of young community people to overthrow the rule of co-opted black officials–and of a “great sense of community solidarity, much support from comrades of clinic and community-service endeavors.” But this was not the community spirit the government approved: “army pitched tents just outside townships,” I wrote in my diary that night. A police car took some notice of us, but drove off in another direction without asking questions.

One must go looking for Alexandra to see it something most whites in Johannesburg have probably never done. It was the same everywhere we went. Outside Cape Town, where a new township had recently been established adjacent to a main highway, the state’s bulldozers had raised high sand dunes to block the view. No motorist need look on those homes. One wouldn’t have known there were black people on the other side of those dunes of it hadn’t been for high light poles which we were told kept the community as bright at night as in the day time–all for good security reasons!

Along with segregated lives comes a peculiar immunity from reality. Most ordinary whites we met, people uninvolved in any sort of dissent or political activity, sooner or later brought up “the troubles,” indicating the crisis and conflict were on their minds. But their daily lives, we felt, insulated them from the harsh world apartheid sustained. One can live in total isolation from all this, as most do, I wrote in my diary. Newspapers say little about the ‘unrest,’ as it is called. In fact, they are muzzled so they can’t. Television news is unbelievably bland uninformative. All ‘unrest’ areas are surrounded by police or cordoned off by road blocks. Few whites see them or have a picture of what is happening there. Life in middle-class neighborhoods like ours goes on cheerfully: folks see only ‘cheerful’ blacks who smile and say ‘yes, master.’

In Parliament one afternoon I watched a fierce debate between Helen Suzman, of the opposition Progressive Federal Party, and the leaders of the ruling Nationalist Party. Here I thought I might learn what the country’s leaders thought about the “unrest,” get some hint of how far the world of apartheid had shielded them from what seemed obvious realities to us. I was lucky to see a debate at all. Parliament has almost become an anachronism, abandoned by many serious antiapartheid leaders. Frederik Van Syl Slabbert, one of the several inspiring Afrikaner foes of apartheid I met, had resigned his position as leader of the opposition party earlier in the year, despairing of parliamentary politics as a means of bringing change

The occasion for the debate I witnessed was the August massacre of blacks in Soweto. There were conflicting reports over what had happened with eyewitness accounts differing sharply from the government version. Mrs. Suzman, a tenacious woman in her fourth decade in Parliament as an eloquent critic of the government, had introduced a resolution calling for the appointment of a judicial inquiry to determine the facts. No one gave the resolution any chance of passage but the debate promised to tell something about the myths and assumptions the Nationalists lived by. Mrs. Suzman seemed tired when I first met her a few days earlier. But there was fire in her this day.

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Armed with published eyewitness accounts and her own inspection-tour findings, she accused the government of covering up its complicity in provoking the violence. It was not the first time, she said, recalling earlier massacres followed by predictable government distortions and denials of the truth. With rising emotion she looked directly across the narrow aisle at Minister of Law and Order Louis le Grange: “There has been a terrible spiral of death, and I lay it at the feet, the very large feet, I must say, of the minister.”

Government replies, and a level of abuse and heckling I found astonishing even in this astonishing country, came from top-level cabinet ministers. Led by the state president, some studiedly insulted her by chatting while she spoke. Others shouted insults. The minister of Constitutional Development said the trouble was caused by communists and comrades, another thought Mrs. Suzman’s remarks were “scandalous,” and the minister of information spoke for the rest when he denounced her “1ack of patriotism.”

Mrs. Suzman’s words were strong ones. “Shooting people in the townships will not bring the new South Africa,” she said, lamenting what seemed to her the obvious truth that “the entire world has become our enemy.”

No decent respect for the opinions of mankind, certainly not for Helen Suzman, was evident in Parliament that afternoon and I returned to the home where I was staying full of an innocent’s outrage. Former opposition party leader Slabbert was there, amused by my innocence. My host marched me into the house, stood me in front of a floor-length mirror and asked me what I saw. At a loss for the right answer, I was given it: “You are looking at a man who has seen the South African Parliament for the first time!”

The segregated lives, the insulation from reality, and the siege mentality of the Afrikaner ruling class were all vital parts of the South African social order we were struggling to understand. So also was detention, the South African term for political arrest. The new state of emergency, declared on June 12, was nationwide and all encompassing. The greenest new police recruit had authority to arrest any person he suspected of being a threat to the state. Once detained, the victim had no recourse to anyone on the outside and might be kept hidden away in prison indefinitely. No one yet knows how many persons have been locked up since June 12, but reliable estimates are in excess of twenty thousand, a very large portion of them children.

Political arrests were nothing new to South Africa in 1986. The state had depended on them, along with the banning of dissident groups and individuals, for its very existence almost since the moment the Nationalists came to power in 1948. Systematically it had been cutting off new opposition leadership at the knees every time it appeared. The new emergency decree, wider than any previous one, was therefore only an extension of the fundamental state policy of maintaining rule by intimidating and terrorizing its opponents.

Our introduction to the world of intimidation and arrest was immediate. On our first day we learned from one woman of a family member’s idealism, brave resistance, imprisonment, and death from cancer in jail. The second day a warm and gentle academic told me of his arrest, of interrogation without being allowed to sleep for twenty-four hours at a stretch, of solitary confinement, and, as I wrote in my diary, “of his struggle to find ways to maintain his dignity, to carve out areas in which he would not cooperate, areas of some privacy, some way of distancing himself from the police.”

By the time we got to Cape Town our best friends had been jailed briefly and arrests were constantly on our minds. We found the woman who directed the program my wife was to work with in distress because her daughter, a university student, was in Pollsmoor prison. She would remain there for two months. Other friends were concerned about a high school classmate of their daughter, also at Pollsmoor.

At the University of Cape Town, where I was to teach my course on the civil rights movement, I began making mental notes about the many similarities between it and my own university. But the differences were more striking. In the familiar looking student lounge a bulletin board carried notices of students in detention and announced meetings to protest the state of emergency. Every Wednesday a vigil for the detained students was held. The student newspaper, vigorously anti-apartheid, carried a communication in one issue from the student-body president under the headline “President speaks out from hiding,” telling us that he had gone underground to avoid arrest.

In the previous year, during the time I was debating whether to come, UCT students had marched against apartheid. Police broke up their demonstrations and came on campus more than once with tear gas. By the time I arrived the new state of emergency was in effect

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and there were no more demonstrations. Chafing perhaps more than before under the police-state rule, the students knew that demonstrations would send them directly to prison. A fresh report from UCT’s Institute of Criminology, which I found in my packet of faculty orientation materials, was headed “83~o Claim Torture in Detention” and went on, with soberingly persuasive statistics and graphic examples, to justify that claim.

There were thirty-three students in my class, twenty white and thirteen black. (The government assigns three classifications to those persons it does not call white: Black (African), Indian (Asian), and Colored (mixed race). Politically sensitive Indians and Coloreds call themselves black in protest against the government’s racially-based classification system and as an expression of their solidarity with the African majority.*) UCT is an “open” university, refusing to accept a quota system mandated by the government. Its student body of 11,845 is fifteen percent black.

The course was not a study in comparative history and social movements, but the students were drawn irresistibly to comparisons. Toward the end of the semester I asked them if they had been more impressed by the similarities or the differences betwen the two liberation struggles. Unanimously they replied the differences, and quickly ticked them off. Their conversation then turned to the similarities, for it was those that engaged them most: the mixture of material and psychological forces undergirding white supremacy; the common experience of suffering and exploitation; the heroic will to overcome oppression; and the search for appropriate liberation strategies, leaders, and ideologies.

Most of all, my students were impressed by the resilience, hope, and vision of the future they saw in the Southern movement.

Echoing them, I said that I would take back with me the same impression of their liberation struggle -a deep respect for the resilience of the people, their hope, and the vision of a new South Africa I had encountered so often.

Explaining this sense of optimism in the face of the despair and human destruction we saw can perhaps best begin with an account of my visit to Crossroads.

I was told it might be impossible to visit Crossroads. Army Casspirs were everywhere and it was sealed off. The huge squatter community had gone up in flames in a violent small war just a few months earlier. That was before the television censorship had become complete, and we had seen the shanties burning and the people fleeing. Thousands of persons had been made homeless and much of the talk when we were there was about how best to provide for the dispossessed.

Crossroads has a special place in the history of the South African liberation struggle. I had first learned about it in 1979 when I saw a film that explained its origins as an act of defiance and resistance against influx control and pass laws–against the state’s grand scheme for what it called separate development. Under this plan black men were allowed to come to the cities to work, but their wives must remain back in the homelands to which the husbands might return for a brief yearly visit. Protesting against this, the founders of Crossroads, with women in the forefront in the early days, built their own shanty town out of materials their ingenuity secured. Crossroads grew and so did the government’s determination to wipe it out. International pressure mounted at one point to prevent it from being bulldozed, the fate the government had in mind for it.

By 1985-86 it still stood–vast and sprawling and now wracked with internal dessension that had been fostered by the government. Playing a crucial role in May of 1986, the government saw part of its aims achieved when many of its worst enemies were burned out. Still, Crossroads stood there and was apparently finding its way back to some form of stability, despite the enormous strains that had been place on it and despite the resident autocrat, well ensconced with government support.

At the end of August word came that the Casspirs previously patrolling the section of the township we wanted to visit had moved elsewhere, at least for the day, and that we might slip in for a brief visit. My guide, a physician associated with a nutrition clinic we were to visit, drove past charred remnants of the May war, including a burnt out small bus, and led me on foot through the maze of shacks down a sandy path that a street sign told me was a recognized thoroughfare, even though it was largely under water left by a recent rain. I had watched the Crossroads documentary, seen the township on television, and read a long research paper on its history, but I was not prepared for the feel of it, the vastness, the closeness of the shanties to each other, the narrow sand roads, the sense that a stranger could get lost here and never find the way out.

The clinic was small and packed with women and children. On a table resting on a scale–the first thing I saw as I entered–was a baby with a distended stomach. I was quickly introduced to a woman, a Crossroads resident, who would take us on a brief tour. We saw the rest of the clinic, then went outside to admire the vegetable garden, a small patch of green that was a powerful statement of faith in the future as were the occasional fruit trees I saw planted in sandy front yards. We sat briefly in one of the homes. The walls, lined with newspaper, made me think, as I had several times since I had arrived, of James Agee and of his Let Us Now Praise Famous Men with its meticulous,

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evocative, and loving description of the homes of three Alabama tenant families of the 1930s. I wished for his ability to see and record.

Outside again I exchanged greetings with small children, smiling, playing games, eyes alert. I thought of Agee again, and almost recited a passage from Famous Men: “In every child, of whatever condition or circumstances, is born again the potentiality of the human race.” Crossroads, far from depressing me, was lifting my spirits. The adults had a vibrancy, an ability to make contact, to put a stranger at ease, that I am not likely to forget. Later the doctor answered my questions about how it felt to work with the women and children in such circumstances. I recorded the answer in my diary that night: “Isn’t discouraged or depressed by working with these people: they give life more meaning because you see they are not beaten down. They look to have a future.”

I also recorded some of my own responses that night drawing political lessons from the day’s visit: Thoughts on Crossroads: Again impression of enormous resilience of SA people and incredible friendliness. Warm welcoming people determined to make a life for themselves in this place, their own turf. Immense blindness of PW Co. to the reality of their own people. How to get them to see it? Probably impossible. Probably too blinded by ideology, privilege circumstances of their lives to be reached. Only way is for power to transfer, circumstances of lives to change, and new views and senses of reality to emerge out of altered circumstances.

Of course I had no idea how power was to be transferred to change the circumstances of their lives. No one seemed to believe that incremental reform would phase out apartheid and introduce power sharing within the existing social framework. Here was a fundamental difference between the South African liberation struggle and the American civil rights movement. As one friend put it to me: “In the U. S. the civil rights movement was fighting for incorporation into the American dream while we are struggling for a new society.”

It was this struggle for a new society that we came back remembering most vividly, impressed by most deeply. We did not see much of the young people in the townships, the controversial comrades who are filling the vacuum created by the state’s systematic elimination of adult leaders. Brave in many ways, they engage in acts of violence that trouble deeply those in the struggle we came to know.

Our closest contacts were with the intelligentsia–writers, academics, filmmakers, clerics, lawyers, and doctors (black and white)–who had linked their professional lives to the struggle. They contrasted sharply with their counterparts in the States, blurring almost completely the distinction Americans make between activist and detached observer. They had all the professional integrity we prize, but they seemed to value it primarily for its power to facilitate social change. Thus, they moved easily into what we would call “activist” organizations without sacrificing their professionalism.

Sharing such company was exhilarating. The intensity caused by the constant threat of the security forces gave life a keen edge and nurtured a sense of sharing and support. It also gave a richness to ordinary social intercourse where we found none of the inanity that poisons the social gatherings of American professionals. Instead, virtually every group we joined turned its moral and intellectual energies to the crisis and to discussion of the social order of the new South Africa.

As a scholar, I was struck by the flood of writings about the country. At a conference on the history and problems of the Western Cape, nearly every monograph had implications for the liberation struggle. I said to one of the participants that South Africa seemed to me the most studied society in process of change of any I knew. He agreed. After this I began to ask authors why they wrote. What did their books mean to them? The answers

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followed a pattern. Like scholars everywhere, they wrote to understand, to explain to themselves. They also wrote to make the truths they saw part of the record, to undermine the myths of the state. But most of all, perhaps, they wrote because they believed their ideas would have consequences and this meant, as one influential political scientist told me, that “we have faith there will be a future.” Like the people of Crossroads who plant their vegetable gardens and fruit trees, these allies in the academy believe their ideas about the new South Africa will take root and flourish.

Shortly before I left I had a long luncheon with a friend whose educational training ranged from eleven years as a political prisoner on Robben Island, where he was a classmate of Nelson Mandela, to graduate seminars in a European university. What, I asked him, should I tell Americans about the South African struggle?

“America,” he began, “needs to be educated about the truly revolutionary changes that are in South Africa’s future.” Describing the tight web of American involvement in South African life–from philanthropy to multinationals–he warned against thinking of a new South Africa in American reformist, liberal-democratic, capitalist terms. The nonracial democracy of the future, he told me, will not be built on an American model. But neither will it follow a Soviet model. Nor would it be a Cuban or Mozambican model. Non-capitalist, because only with some form of socialism could there be any hope for a decent distribution of wealth and opportunity, the model for the new South Africa was constantly emerging from the ferment of specifically South African conditions.

It was this ferment that I found infectious and encouraging. Discussions–in luncheons like this one, at clandestine meetings, in public forums–ranged over every aspect of the ideal society. “All kinds of fundamental rethinking, at odds with traditional society, is going on,” my luncheon companion explained. “It’s not enough to talk of the politics of a nonracial democracy or the economics of a socialist state. We are examining, and planning for, new educational institutions and philosophies appropriate to a free society, rethinking the roles of the sexes, and questioning all forms of elitism.”

It was from conversations like this one as well as the daily encounters with compassionate people joined in a struggle they know will not end soon-and from the resilient people of Crossroads-that I drew the optimism I brought back. Optimism may be the wrong word. I don’t mean by it that I see clearly the best possible outcome. In fact, the opposite may well happen. These gentle revolutionaries I have come to admire may well be crushed by the fanatacism of counterrevolution. It has happened before.

But no one can predict the future, and if by optimism one means that there are hopeful aspects of the situation to stress, then there is abundant basis for optimism in South Africa. From the people who give rise to this optimism one can draw courage. One can also identify with them and look to them for guidance in the long struggles ahead.

Paul M. Gaston, Professor of History at the University of Virginia, is president of the Southern Regional Council and a contributing editor of Southern Changes.

New South Creed: Looking Backward, 2001-1970

By Paul M. Gaston

Vol. 24, No. 3-4, 2002 pp. 17-18

An Excerpt from the Afterword to the New Edition of The New South Creed:

Thirty years in the life of a book, not to mention in the life of a book writer, rush by swiftly. The New South Creed, conceived as the tumultuous 1960s were about to begin, was completed as they were about to end. Or almost completed. The manuscript submitted in the fall of 1968 ended with chapter six, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” I had no intention of following the creed’s trajectory in the twentieth century, a risky undertaking at best. My editor, however, persuaded me to take the risk. The result was the epilogue, “The Enduring Myth.”

That epilogue has been a persistent magnet, regularly drawing my thoughts back to the unending ways in which societies thwart their own best natures, justifying their undemocratic actions and ideologies by the myths they let envelop them.

At the end of my pessimistic summary of the legacy the New South movement bequeathed to the twentieth century, I wrote that ‘I could record no solid achievements, only a “widely spread image of its success, a mythic view that was as far removed from objective reality as the myth of the Old South.” My reflections then on what in fact followed included some heartening material progress along with substantial loosening of Jim Crow’s grip on the region, thanks to the Civil Rights Movement’s revolt against the values of the New South creed. Now three decades on I would have to add that the escape from rust-belt stagnation coupled with mounting disappointment in the promise of life “up South” sent whites and blacks alike to glimmering (and air-conditioned) sun-belt cities and their surrounds to join in unprecedented Southern boom times.

………….

To sort out the complex interacting forces underlying the reactionary mood of the past thirty years will be no easy task for future historians. Among other things, they will have to explain how manipulations of the history of the Civil Rights Movement have served to justify reaction. At the center of this will be the image of the mythic Martin Luther King, Jr. It will be equally important, perhaps more important and likely more difficult, to capture the ways in which the transformation of the political and demographic worlds of the South and the nation engendered both material and psychological needs for mythmaking.

At the beginning of the 1970s the Southern political scene appeared to some observers to be on the verge not only of accommodating the liberating changes brought by the civil rights movement but of actually expanding them. The confessional remarks of South Carolina’s Senator Hollings, which I quoted on page 220 in the Epilogue, showed that the region’s leaders could admit that poverty and racial discrimination had resulted from conscious choices that could and should be undone. The decade then opened with the inauguration of a series of progressive governors–Linwood Holton, John C. West, Jimmy Carter, Reuben Askew, and Dale Bumpers–who brought fresh hope. Governor Holton, the only Republican among them, courageously stood up for integration in a way almost never seen in Southern political leaders. For that he was stripped of further influence in his party, a clear posting of the Republicans’ invitation to wavering Southern Democrats to join them in forging a new party of resistance. The invitation was accepted, thus snuffing out the brief hope of a decisive break with the rock-ribbed conservative past. In time the promise of a new era of prosperity, national reconciliation, and racial harmony, voiced at the beginning of the decade by the New South governors, was appropriated by the transformed Republican Party in ways that reminded one of how the Redeemers had embraced the New South creed a century earlier.

Composed primarily of ideologically committed white males, leaders of the emerging Republican Party, generally wealthier than their fellow citizens, encouraged and profited from the civil-rights backlash. Their task was made easier, as Dan Carter puts it, by “the general increase to the region’s suburban population.”

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Among the migrants from the cities to the suburbs were many of the moderate whites who had earlier won plaudits for saving the region from the worst excesses of Massive Resistance, staring down the hard-line segregationists who threatened to privatize the educational system. Once public education was saved, however, they let pass by the opportunity to create a genuinely integrated school system (in fact few of them ever had such a commitment), let alone an integrated society. Instead, they endorsed so-called “freedom of choice” and other schemes that soon became the favored means of maintaining token integration. The mass exodus that followed then separated white Southerners from the deeper and unresolved issues of the Civil Rights Movement and furnished the environment in which they grew increasingly comfortable with the gathering force of the counter-Reconstruction sweeping across not just the South but the nation as a whole.

It was in the suburbs that the new constellation of prosperity, moral innocence, Southern redemption, and national reconciliation was seen most brightly. There, as Matthew Lassiter writes, Southerners “became the architects of a “colorblind” discourse that gained national traction as an unapologetic defense of residential privilege and suburban spatial boundaries.” The gated community symbolized the new suburban society, distanced both spatially and ideologically from the city. Well-guarded out-of-reach property values insured the perpetuation of a homogeneous society of middle- and upper-middle-class families, thus helping to insure a new form of segregation.

As this separation was accelerating, class now joined or even supplanted race as the primary dividing line. Both the South and the nation grew more prosperous while the gap between rich and poor widened. Henry George’s century-old identification of the association of poverty with progress as the. nation’s great enigma once again called for acknowledgment and resolution. The Southern economist and one-time Secretary of Labor, Ray Marshall, was among several who answered the call. He concluded, a 1992 study with the finding that the United States “now ranks last among the industrialized democracies of the world in achieving, as a whole, the goals of a democratic society.” Martin King would have understood for he had come increasingly to see that his country’s goals were too heavily tilted toward the virtues of laissez-faire capitalism and individual greed. Marshall’s conclusion that “inequality as extreme as ours destroys democratic institutions,” however, seemed perverse and alien in the suburbs.

…………

I wrote in the 1970 epilogue to The New South Creed that “wars commonly redefine the nature of domestic concerns and cause old issues to be shelved.” The Vietnam war, then approaching its end, had a profound effect on American self-confidence for a while, seeming to undo the nation’s historic sense of invincibility and exceptionalism. With wars as a shaping influence, much of American history since then has been the story of reasserting old claims to the twin virtues of innocence and invincibility. C. Vann Woodward believed the felt need for such comfort had led to an escape in the 1980s from Vietnam malaise. “Not only was the pulse of self-esteem strong,” he wrote; “it pounded with self-righteousness. A fatuous complacency quieted the rigors of guilt, and innocence was restored by fiat.” The subsequent military ventures in Africa, the Middle East, and southeastern Europe called in various ways upon the mythic view of the nation to sustain and justify its actions. In the aftermath of the September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Americans turned for succor to the myth as never before. Once again, as if by executive order, bonds of community were declared to be strong and enduring, the divisions and contradictions within quieted by the uniquely menacing threat from without. None of this augured well for deconstructing the values by which Southerners and’ other Americans lived or for understanding the legacy bequeathed them by the architects of the New South creed over a century earlier.

Paul Gaston is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Virginia, where he taught southern and civil rights history. He is a Life Fellow andformer president of the Southern Regional Council as well as a contributing editor to Southern Changes.

Missing Martin

By Paul M. Gaston

Vol. 25, No. 1-4, 2003 pp. 6-7

Forty years ago, a quarter of a million Americans came to Washington in a march for jobs and freedom. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “I Have a Dream” speech, the riveting highlight of the occasion, began with a prediction that the day would “go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.” And so it did.

Now at its fortieth anniversary, the March on Washington is being commemorated all over the world, putting me in mind once more of the warning flag the southern writer James Agee hoisted many years ago. “The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor,” he wrote. “Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again, and is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas.”

Strong language. Vintage Agee. And, like most sweeping generalizations, it obscures some truths as it illuminates the big ones. Furious struggles for liberty are not universally robbed of their power to inspire; but they are routinely appropriated to serve other agendas and ambitions.

King’s “Dream” speech has become especially vulnerable. For one thing, it has been used to turn the Civil Rights Movement into yet another example of the heroic and dramatic story of American democracy. His dream, he said, was “deeply rooted in the American dream.” And so the Civil Rights Movement, as it swept away segregation and disfranchisement, came to be understood as a heroic and dramatic example of the self-corrective nature of America’s unique democracy. One can hear Agee warning us to see that this is “the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas.”

For many white Americans, probably most of them, the Civil Rights Movement’s success in dismantling Jim Crow was proof that their nation could reform itself to get on with the business of making the American dream possible for all. It affirmed their need to believe in the essential beneficence of the American republic. It echoed their belief that racism could be excised from the body politic without altering the structure of their society. It vindicated their faith in the unique superiority of their country.

This was not Martin King speaking. Those who thought it was missed his meaning. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he said it was necessary to move beyond the reformist tactics of the previous decade. The abolition of segregation and the acquisition of the right to vote were important but they were not the goals of the Civil Rights Movement, not ends in themselves. The meaning of freedom, he was to say often, reached far beyond those building blocks.

“We must recognize,” he said, “that we can’t solve our problems now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” Among other things, this would require facing the truth that “the dominant ideology” of America was not “freedom and equality” with racism “just an occasional departure from the norm.” Racism was woven into the fabric of the country, intimately linked to capitalism and militarism. They were all “tied together,” he said, “and you really can’t get rid of one without getting rid of the others.” What was required was “a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society.”

That phrase–“a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society”–was not uttered in the “Dream” speech of 1963. The time was not right for it. The Jim Crow shackles had to be smashed first. But the phrase carries the essential message and embodies the enduring legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.–and it is a message virtually air brushed from history. His radical critique was drowned out from the beginning by angry White House rejections, white fear of the Black Power movement, escalating riots in Northern cities, and liberal integrationists’ continuing loyalty to their reformist principles of contained social change. Even before the reaction of the Nixon Administration set in, the King who would remake the “architecture of American society” was absent from school books, anniversary celebrations, and political oratory. Julian Bond had it right when he wrote that ‘We do not honor the critic of capitalism, or the pacifist who declared all wars evil, or the man of God who argued that a nation that chose guns over butter would starve its people and kill itself….We honor an antiseptic hero.”

This antiseptic hero was the product of the whole culture, a culture innocently unable to imagine itself as fundamentally flawed. The right-wing assault on civil rights over the last generation, however, has been anything but innocent. It has appropriated King himself as its

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ally in rolling back the things for which he and his comrades stood, fixing on the “Dream” speech as its primary text. King’s “My dream is deeply rooted in the American dream” statement is interpreted to discredit his radicalism; and his hope for the day when people would be judged “by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin” is enlisted in the battle against all legislation and programs that might help to undo the effects of three and a half centuries of racial exclusion and exploitation.

Pundits and politicians of the right, lavishly supported by an ever-increasing number of think tanks, have fixed on, and shamelessly distorted, these two fragments. George Will, conceding the existence of continuing poverty and disadvantage, explains them as the “terrible price” blacks have been made to pay “for the apostasy of today’s civil rights leaders from the original premise of the Civil Rights Movement.” That premise, he declares, was that “race must not be a source of advantage or disadvantage.”

Will’s fellow journalist Rush Limbaugh wonders how “the vision that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had for a color-blind society has been perverted by modern liberalism.” Newt Gingrich and Ward Connerly, blasting what they call “the failure of racial preferences,” conjure up King’s “heartfelt voice” wishing for an end to judging people by skin color. Linda Chavez, prominent crusader against affirmative action, came to my university a few years ago to admonish us to cease judging applicants “based on the color of their skin.” Dr. King, she told us, would be opposed because our policy “smacks of the kind of racism that has long plagued this nation.” She and a legion of others have given life to what George Orwell, in his novel 1984, called Newspeak, the use of words in ambiguous and contradictory ways, telling lies by appearing to tell the truth.

Were he to come back to make a fortieth anniversary speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, reflecting on the manipulation of his legacy to discredit his mature prescription for his country, we should not be surprised to hear an oration entitled “I Have a Nightmare.” One can imagine the long catalogue of abandoned commitments to racial justice. Then, recalling his wish for “a radical redistribution of economic and political power,” he might note the cruel irony of deepening poverty, a widening gap between rich and poor, and a tax policy designed to make it wider. Remembering his hostility to militarism, he might summon his powerful rhetoric to condemn his nation not only for the massive destruction it wrought on another country but for apparently justifying its actions with untruths. Then he might recall words he spoke to the United States Senate shortly before he was assassinated: “The values of the marketplace supersede the goals of social justice.” Looking out toward the White House, he might conclude by reflecting on the nation’s identification of its democracy with those very marketplace values and how it seemed to be on a messianic mission to spread the values of what it called “free market capitalism” to its newly conquered lands and their neighbors. It would not be a pretty speech.

We miss the man who might say these things and regret the way we missed understanding what he did say to us; and we hope for the day when his message will be heard in the voices of an aroused citizenry ready finally to bring about “a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society.”

Paul M. Gaston, Professor Emeritus of Southern and Civil Rights History at the University of Virginia, is a past president of the Southern Regional Council and a contributing editor of Southern Changes. He is the author of The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (NewSouth Books) and other books on southern history.