The South Revisited

By Stetson Kennedy

Vol. 9, No. 4, 1987, pp. 4-7

“One difference between you and most of the Southerners who pioneered in the reform movement of the Thirties and Forties is that you are still alive,” one of the editors of Southern Changes said to me. “That is why we would like to get from you, against the background of your experiences then, your view of what is happening in the South today, and its prospects for the future.”

So, across the span of the 40 years which have elapsed since my book Southern Exposure, here goes. My intent- I suppose I should warn at the outset-is not to harp upon “great progress made,” out rather to suggest that there is urgent need now for someone (else) to write a Southern Exposure II, calling for yet a Third Reconstruction.

With a view to getting our hearings, let’s start with a backward look at the South that was.

No matter how you looked at it, the 1930 Census was a revolutionary document. Not only the statistics, but the bowlegs of pellagra attested that the American South was one of the major hunger areas of the world. And the Great Depression was making an already-horrendous situation infinitely worse.

The honest observer had no choice but to characterize the South as a feudalistic, colonial, undeveloped, largely illiterate, disease-ridden Jim Crow apartheid society ruled by a racist one-party white oligarchy. (And so I did.)

Anyone interested in getting a quick fix on the way it was (if not satisfied by my Southern Exposure) need only turn to the collection of oral histories gathered by the WPA Writers Project and published by W. T. Couch as These Are Our Lives at Chapel Hill, and to the mirror held up by Erskine Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-White in You Have Seen Their Faces. Beyond that, for an in-depth focus, the literature is copious.

The feudalism which had replaced chattel slavery was characterized by the commissary system, peonage, share cropping, and tenant farming. Family “dirt farmers” were being “tractored off the land.” The specter of a mechanical cottonpicker loomed over the horizon, threatening to make rural blacks “surplus people.” (Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge’s solution was to plant cotton along Peachtree Street “so city folks could see what it looked like.”)

Industry remained largely extractive, with discriminatory freight rates conspiring to keep the South a colony of the industrial North. The last of the South’s timber fell to the “cut out and get out” lumber barons, and naval stores (turpentine) shifted from the Carolinas to Georgia and Florida and back again, as slash pines were bled to death and then given time to replenish. When in rare instances an FBI agent would venture into a camp in search of peonage, he was jailed for trespass.

Malaria, dengue (“breakbone fever), and hookworm were endemic, the incidence of the latter being one hundred percent among rural Southerners at some point in life (principally acquired by going barefoot to the outhouse). Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins observed that “A social revolution would take place if shoes were put on the people of the South,” to which Senator Duncan Fletcher of Florida rejoined, “There is a considerable colored population in the South who would regard it as a distinct punishment to be required to wear shoes.”

In the early Thirties most of the South’s roads were still made of clay, and everybody waved whenever an automobile went by in a cloud of dust. “Rural electrification” was still largely a New Deal promise, and rural housing com-

---

Page 5

monly lacked running water and window screens. FDR was putting it mildly when he said that one-third of the nation was ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed. One of my black neighbors put it even more eloquently when he described his shanty as having “so many cracks in the walls you could see as much of the outside from the inside as you could if you went out the door.” He went on to state that once a week the company commissary offered “all kinds” of fresh meat-“pig feet, pig tail, pig ears, neckbone, sowbelly, hog maw, and all such as that.”

Black children who were in school at all were typically to be found-all ages-in one-room structures, presided over if they were lucky by a teacher paid by the Rosenwald Foundation.

The Jim Crow system of compulsory racial segregation-our American prototype of apartheid-was all-pervasive, unchallenged by any but a few random black martyrs. The Klan said that Jim Crow was here to stay, and just about everyone, no matter how they might feel, was obliged to agree that it looked that way. Through the centuries, the institution had taken on the aura of the sacrosanct, and those of us who were so inclined, and took to heart Sandburg’s admonition to level “old walls and crumbling foundations,” were hard put to find any fissures.

In housing, transportation, accommodations, recreation, education, religion, employment, government, and the armed services, segregation was de rigeur. Not just the South but the USA was no less an integrally racist society than is the U of SA today. And if anyone thinks Botha is being intransigent, he should have been around (in 1935) when Oklahoma Gov. “Alfalfa Bill” Murray swore to circumvent a Supreme Court ruling against racial zoning by invoking martial law in perpetuity if need be.

I mean, those were the days when the Florida Times Union reported, “Marion* sang well last night,” and ran classifieds reading:

Neat colored girl wanted for maid. No Yankee talker need apply.

Just what this sort of thing meant to the black domestic was fully explained by one, who told interviewers from Fisk, “I feeds white folks with a long spoon.” With my own eyes I saw blacks refrain from getting in line to buy a postage stamp, until all white folks had gotten theirs. Myrdal notwithstanding, a black old-timer said it all: “When you in Rome, Georgia, you got to act like it.”

As for the halls of government throughout the South, they were “lily-white.” White rule-even in the 191 counties where (counted) blacks were in the majority-was made easy by a combination of state – and vigilante-terrorism, and such institutions as the white Democratic primary and a poll tax as a prerequisite for voting. With the electorate in these “free elections” thus reduced to a minimum, the same old rabid racists were resumed to Congress time after time. What with the committee chairmanships they garnered by virtue of seniority, the “South” was firmly in the saddle.

Up against a system so entrenched and seemingly formidable, we of Uncle Sam’s Loyal Opposition could not help but feel like Li’l David sallying forth to meet Goliath. There was never any shortage of individual blacks, of both sexes, to defy the system at the risk of life or limb. They paid the price, but results were not immediately apparent. As for whites, one could become an instant agitator merely by shaking hands with a black. Breach of the interracial etiquette was quite enough to get one driven into internal exile.

In my own case, I was still in attendance at Robert E. Lee High School when my classmates began to ask each other, “What got into Stet?” They were simply at a loss to understand why I did not want to take part in their favorite sport, sideswiping black grocery-delivery boys on their loaded bikes.

Not many years later, one of my sisters remarked at table, “I do believe you would rather be with n-s than with us,” whereupon I rose and said, “As a matter of fact, I would.” It was on those terms that my family and I parted company, and the separation has continued by mutual consent through all the decades since, with no other communication than an occasional poison-pen letter addressed to “Mr. BLACKsheep.”

Such cases are not uncommon in Southern history. They had their prototypes during Reconstruction, when the press exhorted “Southern womanhood” not to “bestow any favors” upon any man, Southern or Northern, who allied himself politically with blacks. A more recent example was that of Federal Judge J. Waites Waring of South Carolina, who in 1947 handed down a major decision against the white primary. He was obliged to take his family out of the South, at least for a time.

All thought of somehow changing the system was up against the fact that there was no organizational channel through which to do it. A few people, taking a fundamentalist view of Marxist texts, tried to sell the notion that the only hope for black liberation was through proletarian revolution. But blacks refused to listen, much less buy.

The only mass black organization around was the church, but it was no longer the church-militant of Reconstruction, when the AME had led its flock out onto the railroad tracks in a forlorn effort to halt the first Jim Crow coaches.

Although Thurgood Marshall, as chief counsel of the NAACP, was waging his perennial fight in the Supreme Court against that cornerstone of American apartheid, the spurious “separate-but-equal” doctrine, leadership of the Southern NAACP branches was largely in the hands of “hanky-head” churchmen-with some notable exceptions, such as the Evers brothers in Mississippi, and Robert Saunders and Harry Moore in Florida. As for the Urban

---

Page 6

League, it was locked into its traditional preoccupation with the problems of the rural blacks who were flocking to the cities.

And as for the widespread economic and social problems besetting white and black Southerners alike, the worldwide Depression had stirred critical faculties to a degree seldom equaled before or since. There was general apprehension that such crises would prove to be cyclical, and therefore the system itself must be at fault, and in need of integral revision. Under the heading “Never again!” it was not only legitimate but fashionable to probe for roots of the problem.

My father, an agrarian turned merchant, avowed that all of man’s problems began when he began to take his food from a paper bag instead of the good earth. “Back to the land” subsistence farming movements proliferated, but to little avail. Town or country, those were “root-hog-or-die” days.

The New Deal came by way of response. By surrounding himself with guys and gals of goodwill (as contradistinguished from gimlet-eyed corporation lawyers), FDR came up with a broad array of redemptive measures: Social Security, unemployment compensation, a twenty-five cent minimum wage, the right to organize and bargain, WPA and CCC jobs on public works, farm loans, public housing, and regional development projects like TVA and Grand Coulee. Except for subsidies of their own operations, the “economic royalists” denounced the entire package as “inspired by Moscow.”

Roosevelt also appointed a Commission of prominent Southerners, who in 1938 produced a Report on the Economic Condition of the South, labeling the region “the Nation’s economic problem no. 1.” This document was destined to prove even more of a turning-point in Southern history than the compromise peace sealed by Booker T. Washington or the New South speech of Henry Woodfin Grady.

Indeed, the Report was to become the Magna Carta of all of us who were interested in regional reform, and it was pursuant to it that the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) was launched later that year. Compelled by police to segregate at its first meeting in Birmingham, the SCHW pledged never again to meet where it would be required to segregate, and it did not.

We inveighed, resolved, educated, exposed, petitioned, and protested with all our might, but it was mostly indoor activity, and a far cry from the sit-ins, freedom marches and confrontations that were yet to come. Even so, it was the victories won then, the exercise of the rights to organize and vote, and the campaigns to curb lynching and Klan terror, which paved the way for the Big Push of subsequent decades.

It was in the mid-Thirties that the CIO announced it was coming South “to organize the unorganized, white and black in the same union.” To this the KKK responded, “We shall fight horror with horror”: What the Klan had in mind was exemplified shortly afterward, when five men picked up CIO organizer Frank Norman at his home in Lakeland, Fla., and drove off with him-forever.

It so happened that while the Klan et al. were going about the business of perpetuating apartheid and white rule in America, a man named Hitler set out to impose “Master Race” dominion over Europe.

The coming of WW II was seized upon by employers all across the country as an opportunity to tell workers that it was their patriotic duty not to strike, and for white supremacists to tell blacks it was their patriotic duty not to protest. Happily, blacks refused to listen to such nonsense. My fellow Floridian, A. Philip Randolph, put it neatly on the

---

Page 7

letterhead of his March on Washington Movement: “Winning Democracy for the Negro is Winning the War for Democracy.”

As wars sometimes will, WW II gave rise to speculation as to what it was we were fighting for. At the outset, the Army put out a four-page indoctrination pamphlet on “Fascism,” but it was speedily withdrawn, and no one in official U.S. circles has used the word since. FDR eventually came up with his “Four Freedoms” (who can name them now?), and the CIO waxed eloquent about “jobs for all” and a voice in management. From Britain came the Beveridge Report, with its vision of the “Garden Cities of Tomorrow.” Seemingly out of nowhere came the war song:

There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover Tomorrow when the world is free…

In short, all over the world, everybody who was anybody (or thought they were) was inspired to expound upon “The World We Fight For.” I saved every bit that came to hand, and, a scant 20 years later, sent a file drawer full to the New York Public Library. From Acquisitions came the tart reply: “In future kindly query us before sending such stuff, as we have no room for it.” Sic semper casus belli.

After the manner of Lincoln, who sugar-coated the Emancipation Proclamation by billing it as a war measure to weaken the Confederacy, Roosevelt promulgated by executive order a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), billing it as a win-the-war necessity for employers to make the most of manpower reserves. The foot leading to black liberation was in the door. The Klan’s contribution to the war effort was to try to slam the door shut by running want-ads “Are You on the Job? The KKK Is Watching You!”-the intent being to keep blacks picking crops at pennies-per-pound instead of seeking more lucrative defense jobs. FDR in effect countered by having the IRS tack a $670,000 jeopardy tax lien on the KKK’s Imperial Palace in Atlanta, effectively shuttling it down for the duration, the Wizard simply boarding it up and retiring to Miami.

It had been a very long time indeed since blacks had issued any ultimatums, but in the Durham Statement, adopted in 1942, they served notice that Jim Crow would have to go. By way of response, the Southern Regional Council was formed later that year, absorbing the old Commission on Interracial Cooperation. At birth, the SRC was engulfed in controversy as to whether it should stand four-square with the Durham Statement against segregation per se, or-as a matter of conviction or strategy-delimit its programme to seeking amelioration of discrimination. The fear was that if “Mr. Charlie” were told up front that the end goal was desegregation, he would stonewall every attempt at movement.

The magazine Common Ground, edited by Margaret Anderson, became a focal point for airing the controversy. Lillian Smith got in the first words: “Not much is going to be done to bring about racial democracy by this group until its leaders accept and acknowledge publicly the basic truth that segregation is injuring us on every level of our life and is so intolerable to the human spirit that we, all of us, black and white, must bend every effort to rid our minds, hearts, and culture of it.”

In a subsequent issue, SRC director Guy Johnnson was given the opportunity to respond:

“Our goal is democracy and equality of opportunity. We are striving to improve the social, civic, and economic life of our region in spite of a deep-seated and undemocratic pattern of segregation…Personally, I should rather capture the foothills…than merely to point out the distant peak…”

Then, “to kick the controversy another step forward,” Anderson published a chapter, “Total Equality, and How to Get it,” from my forthcoming Southern Exposure. The strategy I proposed was for blacks to arm themselves with ballots in one hand and union cards in the other, and then, arm-in-arm in solidarity with their white union brothers, launch an all-out frontal assault upon all barriers.

Sad to say, wartime America was not all that keen on white/black solidarity. Although some GI Joe was being quoted as saying, “up front, you’re damned glad to see somebody in the right color uniform, regardless of what color his skin is,” on the home-front what were virtually anti-black pogroms took place in Texas, Detroit, and elsewhere.

There was talk in some circles, not only of war against the Reds when the war against the Axis was over, but war against blacks as well. When in 1944 the Supreme Court dealt a death-blow to the white primary, a portent of the struggles to come could be heard in the typical reaction of South Carolina state senator John D. Long: “As for the Negro voting in my primary, we’ll fight him at the precinct meeting, we’ll fight him at the county convention, we’ll fight him at the enrollment books, and, by God, we’ll fight him at the polls if I have to bite the dust as did my ancestors!”

Stetson Kennedy wrote extensively for the labor and black press, was Southeastern editorial director of CIO-PAC, and is the author of Southern Exposure, Palmetto Country, and I Rode With the Klan. He lives near Jacksonville, Fla.

Lost Causes &Then Some

By Stetson Kennedy

Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, pp. 16-24

This is the second of two articles on the once and future South, as viewed from the perspective of a life-long organizer, activist and writer. Forty years have elapsed since publication of the author’s book, Southern Exposure. The players have changed, but in too many respects the game remains the same.

World War II, as anticipated, generated a degree of black disaffection which came up against American apartheid after the manner of the proverbial irresistable [sic] force against the immovable object.

“They ain’t agonna do it–not so long as Gene Talmadge is Governor, they ain’t!” the “Wild Man of Sugar Creek” was bellowing.

As is the wont of those enamored of the status quo, ’twas said that legislation would be of no avail against race prejudice, and that only education could do the job “in time.” But America’s blacks had had enough of gradualist soft-soap. When a Southern judge admonished a black woman before the bar, “You people can’t expect equal justice all in a minute,” she retorted, “God knows it’s been a long minute!”

In all of my scrawling and drawling I contended that there was no more educational a process than the experience of working, studying, playing, praying, living and traveling together-and hence the efficacy of civil rights legislation in all these fields.

I went on to point out that Southern blacks, during Reconstruction and ever after, had proven that they had no desire to supplant white supremacy with black. And to my white compatriots I argued further that desegregation would not hurt, and that they would feel much better about themselves when it was all over. And I often concluded with the observation of the preacher who said, “Since we’re all hopefully headed for an integrated Heaven, we might as well start practicing now.”

My first book, Palmetto Country, appeared at the outset of the war. Charged by someone to pick it to pieces, Florida academia concluded sadly that it could find no error. A “premature anti-fascist” before the war, I was prevented by a back injury from joining the armed forces. With all my classmates headed for the shooting war, I resolved to fight fascism at home by infiltrating the Klan and other terrorist groups. There were plenty of people inveighing against the Klan, but no one seemed to have the hard evidence needed to take it into a court of law.

First on my list of some twenty groups eventually infiltrated was the White Front of Miami, which even after Britain got into the war was still distributing Nazi Propaganda Ministry materials, and threatening to drive “all the Jews on Miami Beach into the sea.” As the war progressed, I put together a manuscript for another book, under the working title The Four Freedoms Down South.

Meanwhile, Palmetto Country had caught the eye of Dr. George S. Mitchell, who in 1944 invited me to join him in Atlanta as editorial assistant at his post as Southeastern director of CIO/PAC. My job was to write educational materials suitable for the union’s rank-and-file.

“Stick to four-letter Anglo-Saxon,” Mitchell said. “I don’t want to see any Latin derivatives whatever.”

I did as directed, turning out a series on the poll tax, white primary, and other restrictions on voting in the South. After being first published in the SRC’s Southern Frontier, reprints were ordered in the 100,000-range, and distributed to CIO locals throughout the region, apparently with good effect. One of my union buddies, Georgia-boy R. E. Starnes, organizer for Steel, had a way of enhancing the effect by handing them out with the admonition, “I wouldn’t spit on a union man who wouldn’t give a dollar to help reelect FDR!”

In 1945, word came from Frank McCallister of the CIO’s advisory council to the War Labor Board that the president of the Senate had relied heavily upon my “Plain Facts About the Polltax” in introducing an anti-poll tax bill. Rather than let Uncle Sam do it for them, the poll tax states busied themselves abolishing it on their own. In Georgia, even Ole Gene Talmadge jumped on the bandwagon, writing in his Statesman, “I decided that the best way to keep the negroes from voting is to let all the white folks vote, and then pass the word that Mr. N—–r is not wanted at the polls.”

When I approached him in my nomme de Klan guise as

---

Page 17

“John Perkins,” I tried to pull his leg by saying that Ellis Arnall was claiming credit for abolishing the tax. Ole Gene just smirked, “Well, you know credit is like water–it sort of flows around.”

The disunity/cheapness of Southern labor was no less of a depressant than black exclusion. While Operation Dixie was striving mightily to organize the unorganized, I ventured to voice to director Van Bittner my concern that while his staff was doing its job of getting people signed up, the unions were doing an abysmal job of making confirmed unionists out of them once they were in. After scant reflection, Bittner replied, “Millions for organizing; not a penny for revivals.”

I was not surprised, therefore, when for example the Lockheed plant shut down in Marietta, Georgia, the brethren and sistren of the union local voted unanimously to empty its treasury for a farewell beer and barbeque binge, after which they went back to being the same old non-unionists they had remained at heart.

In those days journalist George Seldes (now 97 and still producing) was putting out his newsletter In Fact, dedicated to “exposing falsehood in the press” (it would take a lot more than four pages today), to which I sometimes contributed. Seldes knocked himself out, trying to convince labor that if it didn’t launch its own media it could not hold its own, much less prevail, against all the anti-labor propaganda being leveled against it. The union bosses paid him no “nevermind,” and labor has paid the price ever since.

By 1946 my wartime book manuscript had changed its name to “Southern Exposure,” and was scheduled for publication by Doubleday. But then came a telegram from editor Bucklin Moon: “Get here fast as you can. Bring all documentation. Lawyer says everything in it libelous.”

When my cartons and I reached the lawyer’s offices on Wall Street, he howled, “Whadaya mean calling Prentiss a fascist? I play golf with him every weekend!”

But those were the days when publishers had a measure of principle and courage, and we went to press with nothing changed.

The impact of the book was all I had hoped for, and more. In Atlanta it was banned, ostensibly for using (once) that fourletter word (Hemingway had just done it in To Have and Nave Not, so I thought I could too). Sales jumped appreciably.

Mississippi’s Sen. Theodore “The Man” Bilbo was more to the point. From a hospital bed where he was being prepped for surgery for cancer of the mouth he called in reporters and read to them from Southern Exposure and Lillian Smith’s Color Blind. He much preferred his doctor’s throat-cutting style, he said–they were going to cut up and

---

Page 18

down, while books such as these cut across.

On the other hand, Ellis Arnall graciously reviewed it for the New York Times, and sat down to write his own The Shore Dimly Seen. Dr. Clark Foreman asked me to help research one for him, and I started under the title Moneybags Scalawags, but the money ran out. From the black and labor press came endorsement of my strategy for achieving “total equality.” Perhaps most encouraging was a review in a Virginia paper, titled “Under Exposed.” After dutifully castigating it, the writer concluded, “But perhaps you should read it after all, and search your own conscience, and make up your own mind.” I took this to be one more sign that the South might yet change its apartheid ways with less bloodletting than was generally being prophesied.

TOGETHERNESS A MANY-DOORED THING

Integration was destined to enter through many doors. For a long time, whenever some “visiting fireman” from up North came to town, anti-apartheid Southern whites and blacks received them with what hospitality they could muster, but behind tightly-drawn blinds, lest someone hurl a stick of dynamite. At Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, small groups of whites and blacks braved fire and shotgun blasts in order to studying organizing, and do a little square-dancing. At Clayton, Georgia, Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling hosted interracial weekend rap sessions on the iniquity of Jim Crow.

The unsegregated annual meetings of the SCHW demonstrated that what had not been possible in Birmingham was entirely possible in New Orleans. And the SRC, true to its promise, was using its good offices to persuade, for example, the city fathers of Macon to hire a black policeman (with the proviso that he not carry a gun, and not arrest any white folks). History took it from there–

From my vantage point, however, it seemed to me that the CIO deserves more credit than any other single organization for softening-up the white South for righteousness. Without regard to the degree of success which its Operation Dixie achieved in terms of members of locals, it was the CIO which gave the South’s white and black working folk their first taste of solidarity, and I saw it happening.

When we first started holding union meetings at CIO HQ, 75 Ivey Street, Atlanta, Mitchell and I were dismayed to see that whites and blacks segregated themselves, front and rear. We thought we had found the solution when we jumbled all the chairs in such manner that there were no discernible horizontal rows. But we had left the aisle down the middle, and the brothers and sisters promptly segregated themselves left and right. Finally we wiped out the center aisle, too. This time they got the idea, and sat down wherever they could find an empty chair.

Another of those traditional chasms was crossed when a union local decided to have a covered-dish supper. The perplexing problem of who would serve whom was solved by the white ladies taking it all upon themselves.

Then there was the matter of the drinking fountain at union headquarters. In the dark of night, some journeyman plumber took it upon himself to run a pipe three feet off to one side and attach to it a smaller auxiliary fount. No signs were affixed, but everybody knew which was who’s. Again under cover of darkness, someone disconnected the auxiliary, and it stayed that way, a mute symbol of a South in transition.

Many a native white organizer “came through” in a well-nigh religious sense on the race issue. Steel’s Starnes was a sterling example. Inside the lionheart which enabled him and others to stand before a mill and say “I’m going to organize it” there was a poet, and he often sent me samples. One came with the handwritten note:

Stet look this over. Be sure to correct the spelling the typewriters they are making now days dont know how to spell. Let me know if the PAC can use it but don’t put it in the Union Leader with my name on it if these people knew how I felt on this subject they would lynch me before night. In fact I think they have already got the tree picked out to hang me on.

What he sent me was:

Since we Rebels joined forces with the Yanks
We’ve felled the Axis with their hateful pranks.
Our Bosses tell us to “hate the n—r,”
But thair is one thing that I can’t figure–
We all go to work day and night
Regardless of wheather [sic] we’re black or white.
The pay we get decides our fate
In spite of all our petty hate.
So it’s time we workers were getting wise,
and forgetting our hates, organize!

---

Page 19

There were also the likes of Bishop Shaw of the AME Church, Birmingham, who got up before a CIO regional convention and said, “When I first heard of this CIO, I asked ‘What does it stand for?’ The answer I got was, ‘White and colored in the same union.’ when I heard that, I put on my war-boots and my preachin’-coat, and I been preachin’ the principles of CIO-ism ever since!”

Bishop Shaw went on to relate how, as a member of a CIO bargaining committee, they got into the “front elevator” of the mill boss’s skyscraper, and rode up to his offices on the top floor. They told the secretary to tell the boss that the bargaining committee was there and wanted to talk to him. In no time at all the boss popped out, saying “Come right in, boys! Seddown and have a chair! Have a cigar!”

“Power was on the throne!” Bishop Shaw exulted. He concluded by relating how he had told the boss, “We made you rich, now you let us live decent!”

Nor will I ever forget the black coal miner from Kentucky, who spoke of the difficulty of telling, when the miners emerged from the pit all covered with coal dust, what color they were underneath.

“White or black, you’re a coal miner still,” he said. Referring to the equal rights language in CIO charters, he went on to say, “I think we ought to either live up to it, or take it out.” And he concluded, “If we ever goin’ to get anywhere, we got to get there together!”

WHEN THE SIGNS CAME DOWN

I am not going to take space to tell how it was that blacks and whites did get together in the fifties and sixties, and march on and on until apartheid had been overcome and they could shout “Free at last! Great God Allmighty, free at last!” While I marched with King at Albany, Oxford, Selma, and St. Augustine, and chronicled the period in the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier, those events are still fresh in human memory, and need little recounting just yet.

What may be worth stressing is that the motive power came from blacks themselves. And while there was adult leadership and participation, in a very real sense the freedom marches were a children’s crusade (as what war isn’t?). It was the spectacle of skinny-legged sub-teen girls who did not flinch when inches away police dogs gnashed their teeth that finally moved the American public and all three branches of Government to remedial action.

I recall how, on the morning after the Supreme Court decision of ’64 rending asunder the integument of apartheid, the first black I saw was riding a bike.

“Okay,” I said silently to him and myself, “you’re on your own from here on out. At last you’ve got the same legal legs to stand on as all the immigrant groups who have hacked their way into the Mainstream.”

It wasn’t that I begrudged the lifetime I had spent in The Cause–far from it. I was as elated at having lived to see the outcome as he must have been. But I was tired, and there

---

Page 20

were so many causes crying out.

My personal contribution to the Jubilee was to gloat in The Courier, “Every day, gains are being made which can never be taken away!”

Some speech-writer for that other Kennedy (the one in the White House) must have picked up on it, for soon the Nation had the message on no lesser authority than that of JFK.

I, as a student of Reconstruction and human struggles for liberation generally, should have known better. I don’t know why he was so confident, but my faith was based upon black militancy. I didn’t think blacks would ever allow anyone to take any of it from them. Now, a single generation later, it is all too apparent that the gains of the Second Reconstruction, like those of the First, can and are being whittled away.

It is not the bedsheet brigade this time (though they are with us yet), but plainclothed Klux in Washington, whose stock-in-trade is not to terrorize but bamboozle.

Before getting into that, let me say what a great day it was when the “White” and “Colored” signs came down all over America. I raced from dumpster to dumpster, retrieving them as artifacts for some future Museum of Horrors. (Alas, termites got them, which may be just as well.) Best of all was watching Woolworth’s clear its shelves of what had so long been best-sellers. Perhaps they can recycle them as “Open to the Public,” or even “Welcome” signs, I mused.

I must say I was extremely proud of the good grace which I most of my white Southern brethren were able to muster for the desegregation process, after having sworn for so long that they would “die first.” Perhaps the fundamentalist churches, albeit unwittingly, deserve a bit of the credit, having so often put them through the paces of redemption and being born again. In any event, Mr. and Mrs. Charlie came through with flying colors. I was utterly enthralled when the ladles of both colors sat down to luncheon together for the first time. For once the tradition of chivalry stood the South in good stead, as they vied with one another not merely in civility but conviviality. Nor was my enthusiasm more than slightly dampened when I recalled that lynchings, too, had sometimes been carried out with a certain air of noblesse oblige.

CHANGING, FOR BETTER OR WORSE:

To be sure, the South has changed mightily–oft-times for the better, but not always.

Ever since its conquest by Europeans, until recently, the South was something of a self-contained continuum, with nobody much to deal with but damn yankees. Yet today the future of the South does not rest exclusively in the hands of white Southerners, nor white and black Southerners, nor those folks up yonder. While all of these still count, the fate of the South may hinge upon decisions made in such faraway places as Geneva and Tokyo.

This is not to say that the old hallmarks of Southern progress–the Constitutional formula for counting blacks as three-fifths of a person, Dred Scott, Secession, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Klan terror, Deal of ’76, Booker Washington’s half-a-loaf and Henry Grady’s New South–have lost any of their historical meaning. It is just that if you’re dead, you’re dead, and all causes are lost ones. We need to watch out, in other words, for such things as mushroom clouds, aerosol cans, AIDS virus, and the penis rampant.

The very logo of the SRC–progressing as it has from map of the South, to map of region within the Nation, to region upon the globe–reflecta our emancipation from the old provincialism. While there will always be a role for old-fashioned regionalism, the only regionalism which holds forth the hope of salvation nowadays is that which looks upon Earth as a region of the solar system.

The very concept of progress, as applied to the Southern scene, has itself been subject to change. During the first half of this century we were quite confident that one gain led to another, and that the path of the species led onward and upward. If we look to Starnes on the cutting edge once again, in 1947 he was going around saying, “Things really are getting better. They used to kill you for trying to organize a union. Now they just knock all your teeth out.” Starnes is still around, but I do not know what he would say today, when anti-union propaganda has reached such a state-of-the-art as to almost make unionists hate themselves.

By mid-century I had already become sufficiently’ alarmed to conclude my remarks with the caution, “Great

---

Page 21

progress is being made; but reaction is making great progress too.” Within a few years, the terror known as McCarthyism had demolished much that was decent and caring about America (in much the same fashion that government’ industry, agriculture, transport, environment, and solvency are being wrecked now). In one of those Question Answer periods a little old lady who had given her entire life causes to help make a better world asked me tearfully, “Was it all in vain!”

I did not know the answer then, nor do I now. It all depends–

HOW NOW TO PROTEST?

Someone, after reflecting upon mankind’s unending struggle to create that better world, concluded somewhat cynically “The forms of exploitation change from time to time.” That being true enough so far, it would seem to behoove us to consider whether forms of protest and struggle should also change accordingly. How best can we defend, consolidate, and advance–during what remains of this century–the gains which have been made?

Many of the traditional forms will never become outmoded–we need all the petitioning, lobbying, voting, organizing, sitting-in, meeting, marching, and confrontation we can get. One thing we do not need more of, however, are the liquor-and-TV riots which erupted during the “long hot summers” of several years ago. While I for one am capable of looking upon these as a form (albeit inappropriate) of reparations for the nest eggs blacks never inherited because our ancestors robbed their ancestors of the fruits of their labors, going after TVs and Jack Daniels is no way to go after civil rights. I happened to be in Budapest during the Hungarian revolt of ’56, and while all shop windows were smashed, nothing was touched. “A testament to the purity of our revolution,” a Hungarian said to me.

As for the “burn, baby, burn” approach some blacks resorted to when Mainstream America turned a deaf ear to the demand that doors be opened, it was an effective attention-getter (like hitting the mule over the head with a 2 x 4), and even had its roots in folksay, “Throw your trunk out the window, and let the whole damn row bum down!” Whether the scene be Watts, Miami, Philippines, S. Korea, Haiti, or some place else, the gasoline cocktail has been one of the few weapons within reach for the assertion of People Power. Burning down one’s own neighborhood, however, can hardly be described as a well-directed form of protest. It is too much like the foreclosed mid-western farmers who blew out their own brains, as if they were somehow at fault.

I do have a couple of suggestions on tactics for the future, one of which I would call “Non-Stop Protest.” Discrimination has a way of being non-stop, of going on forever unless someone puts a stop to it. In the sixties it was so gross and omnipresent you could strike out in almost any direction and land a telling blow. Nowadays it is more insidious, and needs to be ferreted out and targeted.

Once an offending public or private enterprise has been identified, the offended community would serve notice for it to cease and desist, or face non-stop picketing until it did so. Ephemeral pickets are one thing, but picketing “in perpetuity if need be” by community organizations on a rotating basis would be a prospect few establishments would care to face.

The other suggestion is that we make massive use of protest posters. Throughout Europe the poster is not only a potent weapon but a recognized art-form. We have the artists, ideas, and plenty of walls which could use some decoration and dedication.

American labor would also do well to look to its defenses and consider new forms of struggle. Actually, labor is in need of an awakening not unlike that brought on among blacks by the Montgomery bus boycott and Winston-Salem sit-in. There is no way that labor can “overcome” until it comes up with a mind, programme, platform, and media of its own, capable of contending successfully against the phalanx of industry-subsidized institutions arrayed against it. So long as American labor continues to swallow the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid that its interests and employer interests are one and the same, its doom is sealed. Knowledge of which side one’s bread is buttered on is essential to the survival of any group, labor included.

What’s more, labor must make common cause with women, minorities, and other short-changed groups, and not let its well-known patriotism get it suckered in by any jingoist who comes out of the wings. Any time you find labor and management backing the same candidates, you can bet your boots that somebody is being suckered–and that it isn’t management.

Beyond all this, the globalization of industry and the labor market is posing–in the form of wage rollbacks and plant closings–a threat to American labor of the same magnitude as the Klan terror which negated black rights after the Civil War. The unions may be able to follow

---

Page 22

industry from Ruse Belt to Sun Belt, but the bottom line question is: How can even a Japanese-run plant in the South compete with its own Made-in-Japan models, except by paying U.S. workers Japanese wages?

Anyone who has lived in as many has-been world powers as I have would hate to see it happen to us, for the economic and psychic consequences are traumatic indeed. Toynbee (of whom let it be said that no man ever amassed so many facts or drew so many erroneous conclusions from them) said with reason that the fate of nations is decided by their response to challenge. Are we a flash-in-the-pan nation, or aren’t we? How can labor participation help American management, design, and engineering compete? Must the world’s industrial wages be brought up or our’s go down–

---

Page 23

or is there some other answer to this dilemma?

TOWARDS THE THIRD RECONSTRUCTION

While I may or may not have been the first to raise the standard of a Second Reconstruction to carry out the unfinished business of the First, I do not want to miss this opportunity to call for yet a Third.

That the South does indeed stand in need of further reconstruction is self-evident. The agenda is replete with items of both Old Business and New.

To arrive at specifics we need only look back to what we were, around at what we are, and ahead to what we would like to be (as compared to where we seem to be going).

Where once our region was beset by a complex of problems somewhat peculiar to it, today we are caught up, along with every other region on the planet, in an on-going freeway pile-up of problems which make the Flood, Plague, World Wars, and Great Depression seem like Sunday School picnics. While some of these problems are amenable to regional amelioration, many are not. It took virtually the entire human race, actively or passively, to get us into the messes we are in, and it will take no fewer to get us out.

Even so, the day of Operation Bootstrap is not done. States and regions can still take it upon themselves to clean up their own acts, and hope and prod that others may do likewise. It is high time something more constructive was being done in the name of state’s rights and regional cooperation than secession, Dixiecrat bolts, and the abortive attempt of the erstwhile-Confederate states to avoid the integration of higher education by setting up a jointly funded regional college in Atlanta to which each state could ship its blacks. Time now for regional action on such matters as dumping, acid rain, offshore drilling, pesticides, and unplanned development.

To whom should we look for salvation? While there is much talk of God and Country, Mammon is on the throne, devouring all things, including the elements. Is our only hope perhaps to make remedial measures more profitable than the on-going destruction?

In a simpler age, we fancied that all we had to do was join a good union, register, and vote. Now it is plain to see that nothing less than a network of Debriefing Centers can keep us from voting against ourselves. We used to take pride in our ability to see through bunco-artists, but after being twice hooked on Reaganism, what can we say?

There are some who are saying, “Thank goodness, we’ve put all that racism behind us!” But don’t you believe it. It would be nice if it were all over and done with, and we could sit back and enjoy the Promised Land of Equal Opportunity and Justice. But we are not there yet. In a great many essential respects, we are very far from it. There is such a thing as desegregated racism, and we’ve got it.

We may no longer be Jim Crowed, but we are just as black ghettoed as ever.

Instead of just a token black here and there, we have a whole token black middle class, but the black masses remain as impoverished, jobless, and hopeless as before.

There is one item of unfinished business that we may as well forget–the forty acres and a mule promised all Freedmen during the First Reconstruction. We can charge that one off to Profit Loss, since it now takes upwards of 1,000 acres to make a go of it in agribiz, and we stopped making mules. Even if we were to start them up again, there wouldn’t be anybody around who knew “Gee” from “Haw.”

Cottonpicker came, and blacks went; but here come the robots, who can’t tell a blue collar from a black skin, and won’t do nothing for you anyway unless you can talk to them in Japanese.

Nobody dares call anybody “n—-r” anymore, but injury without insult is injury right on.

We may have the vote, but where can we find a people’s candidate who can afford to run?

Lynching has gone into limbo, but look who’s on Death Row.

Sure, we stopped putting the blowtorch to Bootjack McDaniel, but any time the bugle sounds we join forces with the Yanks to firebomb thatched villages, with the best intentions in the world.

No more chaingangs, just concentration camps for black males.

No more sweatbox, just a rapacious cellmate with AIDS.

Ole Strom Thurmond and the latter-day Dixiecrats all gone over to the GOP–an outfit which folks say isn’t exactly anti-black, it just doesn’t care about people.

Nowadays you hardly ever see the attorney general of Mississippi up before the Supreme Court, arguing against things like school busing and affirmative action; mostly it’s the U.S. Attorney General.

Same old Klan out in the woods rehearsing for a black holocaust, but decked out now in battle fatigues and armed

---

Page 24

with automatic weapons.

Time was (1940) when the per capita income of Southerners was $309. That presented problems of sorts, but nothing like the $2,370,000,000,000 national debt that somebody has run up on our credit card. This is not conservatism, nor even reaction; it is anarchy and drunken-sailorism. (Reminds me of the refrain of a poem penned by a tippling classmate of mine: “There’ll be muckle moaning at the bar, when my turn comes to pay.”)

One remarkable thing about our plight is that we seem to be blissfully unaware of it, like the patient who having been prepped for surgery goes to the table in such a state of euphoria he doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. In our case, we have been administered tranquilizers and painkillers in the form of lowered taxes and increased plastic spending power–a sort of nothing down, cash rebate, pay later proposition which few seem able to refuse.

Where all the talk used to be of Black Belt and Bible Belt, now all we hear is Rust Belt and Sun Belt. The big idea seems to be to persuade industry to forsake the Rust Belt altogether and get a fresh start in the Sun Belt. Still baiting our hook with those old-reliables–free land, tax exemption, and non-union labor. (What we fail to realize is that it was organized labor, and nobody else but, who made the American standard of living what it is today.)

Strike-breaking and union-busting “ain’t what it used to be,” since the command post was moved from the Pinkerton Agency to the White House.

Mean old slave trade a thing of the past; nowadays we just leave ’em and work ’em wherever they’re at. All it takes is a few dime-a-dozen whipping bosses to keep them from getting any notions about free speech, solidarity, elections, and stuff like that.

No need to worry so much now about a Southern wage differential, as a S. Korean.

Stopped bringing in coolie labor a long time ago; doors still open to wetbacks and islanders, but American industry is solving that problem for us by pulling up stakes and moving offshore and across the border.

Offshore industry is not all we’ve got. We used to say that America would never be in any danger of takeover by a military junta, but now we have seen how offshore government has been formulating foreign policy and waging wars in our name and at our expense, but outside of our laws and Constitution.

An unlamented loss is the Southern demagogue, whose distinctive flavor was exceeded only by his deviltry. In place of Ole Gene and The Man in the Senate cafeteria demonstrating the respective merits of crumblin’ or dunkin’ cornbread into pot-likker, we have such mainstream models as a Marine colonel playing Rambo and a Dude Rancher cast as President.

Dies, Rankin and McCarthy all gone to their graves, but who needs thought-control when all you have to do is scatter a few cliches and flags around, and people will vote “Right” every time.

Problem used to be: unfree people who wanted to be free; problem now is, unfree people who think they are free.

Thought we had a Magic Bullet to stop VD, but now you need a wetsuit to go out on a spree.

Long before anybody else had heard of drugs, some residents of the black ghetto were sitting around “on the nod” from cocaine. Now all the world seems to be on the nod from one thing or another. Can it be because we are fast turning the world into one big ghetto, with all that that entails in emptiness and despair?

Anybody remember the good ole days when we had the likes of ITT for absentee owner, instead of the Sheik of Bahrein?

Sho nuff, Ole Massa and Mr. Charlie done both gone with the wind, but here come Mr. Takahiro!

Our agenda could go on and on, but you see what I mean when I say that ye olde problem-of-the-South has not only been transmogrified but transcended. We may have been Problem No. 1, but we don’t need any final solutions. Like the man said, all the world’s a stage, and if the thing catches fire there will be no way to save the South Wing.

Talk about Lost Causes–if Life and Earth make the list, the UDC and SRC alike can hang it up. Old South and New; North, East and West; white, black, brown, and yellow; rich and poor; free and unfree; sinners and saints–we’re all in the whale’s belly together, and the whale is headed for the beach.

Somebody do something, quick!

Stetson Kennedy, a Florida native, played a prominent role in the pioneer civil rights movement of the thirties and forties. Taking it upon himself to infiltrate the KKK and a score of other racist/terrorist bands, his books Southern Exposure, I Rode With the KKK, and Jim Crow Guide were the first by a white Southerner to raise the standard of “total equality.” They not only helped “soften up the South for righteousness,” but, translated into a score of foreign languages, served to give Uncle Sam a global hotfoot to “do something.” At 71, Kennedy lives near Jacksonville, Fla., where he is putting together a selection of his writings under the title, “Land Be Bright,” and an autobiography, “Dissident-at-Large.”

One Less Voice for Discrimination

By Stetson Kennedy

Vol. 11, No. 4, 1989, p. 16

Any time a racist organization or hate sheet goes out of business is a time for rejoicing. The recent obituary in The Spotlight announcing the demise of The Citizen, standardbearer of the White Citizens Councils which flourished at mid-century, makes very good reading indeed.

The appearance of these Councils on the local and state levels in many parts of the country was part and parcel of the last-ditch effort to perpetuate apartheid in America.

The agreed-upon division of labor was for the Councils to wage terror by day, and the Klan by night. To rope and faggot were added firing, foreclosure, eviction and denial of credit.

There was nothing new about this conjoining of economic lynching with the more conspicuous forms. The same “double whammy” was employed during the holocaust which overthrew Reconstruction, restored white rule and institutionalized apartheid. Again, at the turn of the century when blacks thought they saw hope in Populism, demagogues like Tom Watson prescribed the same medicine.

The White Citizens Councils of more recent memory were wont to refer to themselves as “respectable elements” but they were terrorists nonetheless. Denial of livelihood has always been tantamount to denial of life itself.

We would do well to ask ourselves why it is that The Citizen, after thirty-four years, decided to give up the ghost.

Hopefully, the cause for which it labored, an apartheid America, is a lost one, no less than that of the Confederacy. Except for the black ghetto, Jim Crow has been dumped upon the ash heap of history. And yet, I submit, where once we had segregated racism, we now have desegregated racism. If in this modified environment the Klan can find plenty to do, why is there not enough to fill the sheets of The Citizen?

Part of the answer, in my opinion, is that its editors have concluded that with plainclothes counterparts in the executive branch, and black-robed counterparts on the federal bench, they can afford to relax and go back to “discrimination as usual,” i.e., on a more covert, individual basis.

What has happened is that recent administrations have been doing the job of the Citizens Councils for them. Capitalizing on the so-called “white backlash” against busing, “reverse discrimination” which they helped conjure up, these administrations picked up the ball in the ongoing game of keeping blacks, women, and others in a disadvantaged status. The lynching, in one form or another, still goes on by day and by night . . .

To put it into another metaphor, in the great American crap game blacks, women and other minorities have always been up against loaded dice. School busing and affirmative action have been the only means in sight for evening the odds. In one of the great turnarounds in human history, a nation which had virtually prescribed discrimination proscribed it.

But the odds are a very long way from being even yet, and if we let anyone take us bade to the loaded dice, we will all be in for a hard twenty-first century.

Some cynic among the philosophes once said, “The forms of exploitation change from time to time.”

Woody Guthrie was also well aware of the versatility of exploiters when he sang:

As through this world I’ve rambled,
I’ve met lots of funny men;
some will rob you with a sixgun,
some with a fountain pen.

But Woody was an activist, not a philosopher, and he wasn’t buying any.

With this issue, Stetson Kennedy joins Southern Changes as a contributing editor. His four books, which at mid-century raised the standard of total equality and called for an end to Jim Crow–Palmetto Country (1942); Southern Exposure (1946); The Klan Unmasked (1954);and Jim Crow Guide (1955)–are all being brought back into print by the University Presses of Florida (15 N.W. Fifteenth St., Gainesville, FL 32603). Palmetto Country has already appeared, and the others, as well as a new work on Reconstruction, After Appomattox, are scheduled for 1990.

Blood On Our Hands

Reviewed by Stetson Kennedy

Vol. 15, No. 2, 1993, pp. 22-24

Terror in the Night, by Jack Nelson (Simon & Schuster, 1993, 287 pages).

What Stalingrad was to World War II, Mississippi was to the Overcoming; and what Jack Nelson has given us here, while not purporting to be the whole story of all that took place on that crucial battlefield in the 1960s struggle to purge America of apartheid and white supremacy, is one of the most revelatory accounts yet.

Everyone who found the film “Mississippi Burning” to be an eye-opener would do well to focus now on Terror in the Night, which belongs on every shelf having to do with America’s on-going struggle to fulfil her ideals. The general reader too (who most needs to get the message) will find this true cloak-and-dagger story as engrossing as anything in fiction.

Jack Nelson is familiar to millions as a panelist on the PBS show “Washington Week in Review.” He grew up in Mississippi, and was Atlanta bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, supplying it with on-the-scene coverage of many of the events detailed in his book. A Pulitzer Prize winner, his exposes of some of the excesses of Hoover’s FBI almost got him (Nelson) fired.

Although Terror in the Night comes a quarter-century after Nelson first reported on these happenings, the book is by no means a rehash of his original frontline dispatches. He recently went back into Mississippi and interviewed many of the surviving principals (colleagues accused him of ingratiating himself with these scoundrels by “walking the walk and talking the talk”).

Be that as it may, he did persuade the once-comely Marie Knowles, secretary to Meridian’s detectives, to let him see a lot of confidential memos she had hidden away all these years. To get the FBI to do the same, it took a demand under the FOIA.

The net result of Nelson’s backtracking is a lot of old evidence that is brand new, in that it has never before been exposed to public view. As it turns out, those who kept it out of sight had good reasons for doing so….

As we have known all along, the arch villain in the Mississippi scenario was Wizard Sam Bowers of the White Knights of the KKK, which by the mid-60s had an estimated five thousand members in the state. An FBI tab turned up by Nelson points to Bowers as the authorizer of nine murders and three hundred bombings, burnings, and beatings during the reign of terror. No one got blown away unless Bowers first issued a “No. 4” death warrant which stipulated that all assassinations be carried out in a “quiet Christian-like manner.”

Mississippi blacks bore the brunt of the terror. In May of ’64 Charles Eddie Moore, twenty, and Henry Dee, nineteen, disappeared, their dismembered bodies surfacing downstream in Louisiana two months later…. In January of ’66 Hattiesburg NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer perished when his home was firebombed…. In July, Ben White, a Korean war vet, was picked up at random and executed by the Klan’s “Cottonmouth Gang”…. Seven months later, Wharlest Jackson, treasurer of the Natchez NAACP, was blown up by a bomb placed in his truck…. As early as 1964 forty-four black churches had been bombed or burned.

But the main focus of Terror of the Night lies elsewhere: it was when the Klan started planting its dynamite beneath synagogues and the homes of rabbis that the terror took on a new dimension. First to be bombed was Temple Beth Israel in Jackson. Founded in 1861, the new structure was but seven months old when the blast oc-

---

Page 23

curred in September of ’67. Its rabbi, Canadian-born Perry Nussbaum, had been letting interracial ministerial groups meet in it, and furthermore had been helping raise a $750,000 fund to rebuild bombed black churches. He happened not to be in the Temple when the bomb went off, but he and his wife were in their home when the Klan dynamited it soon afterward. They escaped, but narrowly.

The synagogue in Meridian was next to go, in May, 1968. From inside the Klan the FBI had gotten firm word that the next time a synagogue would be bombed it would be while it was conducting services. Then FBI agent Frank Watts got his hands on the local Klan’s hit list. The “Big Four” names at the top were Police Chief Roy Gunn, followed by Jewish businessmen Meyer Davidson, I.A. Rosenbaum, and Al Rose. Also high on the list was Watts’s own name. Needless to say, all concerned were agreed that something had to be done, fast.

Jackson FBI agent-in-charge Roy Moore told some Jewish business leaders that it would take big money to buy informers high enough in the Klan to give advance warning of when and where the next bombing would take place. The sum of $100,000 was raised for the purpose. Two such Klansmen were found, but in addition to the money they wanted an absolute guarantee that they would not have to appear in court and thus risk the virtual certainly of being liquidated themselves. The FBI and Chief Gunn concluded that this meant there was but one way to go: ambush with intent to kill.

They got just two days notice that Bowers had issued a No. 4 to bomb the home of Meyer Davidson on the night of June 29, 1968. Active on interracial councils, Davidson had incurred the wrath of the Klan by proclaiming that the bombing of Beth Israel “was an attack on all Jews.”

The stakeout was a formidable one, and included three carloads of FBI agents. Almost everyone wore black T-shirts. Detective Luke Scarborough was designated pointman, and FBI agents Frank Watts and Jack Rucker took up vantage points atop an adjoining home which they commandeered for the occasion.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the Klan hit car turned out to be an old green Buick with two people in it. Just such a Buick, with a woman driver, had been previously reported as possibly casing targets, but it seemed so un-Klannish no one had checked it out.

According to Nelson, a man got out carrying a Clorox carton in his left hand and a 9mm automatic in the other. Still according to Nelson, Det. Scarborough went through the formality of shouting “Halt! Police!” and “thought be saw” two flashes from the 9mm before opening fire with his shotgun. A fusillade followed, and turned into a gunfight.

Hits were scored on both the dynamiter and his dynamite, but it failed to explode, and he managed to get back into the Buick. A chase ensued, ending in a crash and ramming. The driver came out running and spraying the officers with a machine gun. An electrified fence finally knocked him out, and officers crawled to within fifteen feet and emptied their shotguns into his body.

The dynamiter turned out to be twenty-one-year-old Thomas Albert Tarrants III. Although shot to pieces, he lived, pled insanity, went to jail, and got “born again.” His accomplice, Kathy Ainsworth, a twenty-six-year-old school teacher, died in the fusillade.

In and around the bloody Buick police recovered a 9mm submachine gun, a Walther 9mm automatic pistol, a 6mm Browning automatic, two hundred rounds of ammo, a hand grenade, fourteen blasting caps, a seven-foot fuse, mace, and handcuffs.

FBI director Hoover insisted that his men were only there as “observers,” but the fact was that they played the lead role in everything—the fundraising, negotiating (they chiseled on the $100,000 promised), and the fusillade.

A reviewer for The New York Times complained that Nelson was remiss in not at least ending his reportage with some analysis of its portent. I will undertake to fill that gap.

---

Page 24

Champions of democracy will be sorely tempted (as I confess to being) to condone, in the circumstance, this ambush of racist terrorists by officers of the law. But we are obliged to remind ourselves—without waiting for the ACLU to do it for us—that, given any such green light, lawmen would no doubt ambush far more rights activists than racist terrorists. That is what happened in the assassination of Florida NAACP leader Harry Moore in 1951, in Mississippi Burning in 1964, and countless other times before and since.

In taking his scalpel to the scar tissue which had overgrown the terror in Mississippi, Nelson has laid bare the festering question—fundamental in every society—of whether the policeman’s function is to apprehend suspects, or to also act whenever he feels like it as judge, jury, punisher, and even executioner. That the question is not at all moot even in our fair land is known to all the world, thanks to the televising of the beating of Rodney King. We can’t indulge in such as that and this, and still hope to find acceptance as “leader of the free world.”

Law enforcement has enough problems with trigger-happy cops (who see “probable cause” in every dark skin) and beating orgies, without turning to assassination as an alternative to crowded dockets and prisons, as in Haiti.

It is bad enough that resort to force is so often the option of choice in law enforcement; it is far worse, in this reviewer’s opinion, that it is also so often the option of choice in foreign policy. What the rationale of “self-defense” does for the former, “national interest” does for the latter.

Everybody else knows, if we do not, that it was the CIA on a do-it-yourself or contract basis that blew away Mossadegh in Iran, Diem in Nam, Allende in Chile, and did its best to do the same for Castro, Noriega, Khadafi, and Hussein. What’s more, those Meridian hit men were kissin’ cousins to the Death Squads—often funded, armed, and trained by the CIA—whose job it is to liquidate heads of state, rebel chieftains, labor leaders, and dissident poets in many a Third World nation. And I for one American can’t help but feel that many of the shooting wars we humped into in this bloodiest of centuries were also manifestations of this same predilection for force as problem solver.

It is too much to ask cops, who are underpaid even for risking their lives to protect us, to take on the added burden of deciding who is guilty and who is to be executed.

By the same token, it is too much to ask those Supercops at the CIA or Big Brass at the Pentagon or Tycoons in the Foreign Service, to decide who our overseas enemies are, and order them to be bumped off in our name and with our money. All such actions are unconstitutional, criminal, and immoral. And so long as we smirk and go along, the blood is on our hands.

“Which-n-all-is-why” Terror in the Night, though it comes late, is as timely as can be.

Stetson Kennedy is a lifelong full-time rights advocate who, at 76, is still at it in his hometown, Jacksonville, Florida. A contributing editor of Southern Changes, he first wrote for the SRC in 1946.

Salute to the Vanguard

Letter from Stetson Kennedy

Vol. 17, No. 3-4, 1995 pp. 30-31

I feel obliged to take processor in hand to take exception to David J. Garrow’s review [Southern Changes, Spring 1995] of John Egerton’s Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, which chronicles the largely untold story of the civil rights movement from 1932 to 1954.

It is bad enough that Garrow has sought to brush off so notable a contribution, but intolerable that, in so doing, he should also seek to dismiss as “timid liberals” that vanguard generation which provided its full share of militants and martyrs whose struggles and sacrifices made The Overcoming of the ’60s far less bloody than it otherwise would have been. Too much timidity there was, but there was also audacity aplenty.

That is not just my generation that Garrow is derogating; it is the one which gave birth to the SRC, SCHW, CIO, Highlander, and the book What the Negro Wants, among innumerable other things. Not many of us are left alive, and in deciding to undertake the task of rebuttal I have asked myself–as I did upon infiltrating the KKK during WW II–“If I don’t, who will?” Besides, I owe it to Myles Horton, who said to me shortly before he died, “They like to think they have defanged and declawed us, but we know better, don’t we?”

There wasn’t a timorous bone in Myles or Zilphia, nor Florida NAACP leader Harry T. Moore, who together with his wife Harriett was blown up in bed on Christmas night, 1951. Nor in Lucy Randolph Mason, James Dombrowski, Mary McCleod Bethune, Virginia Durr, Kit Schryver, Louis Burnham, Mrs. Dorothy M.E. Tilly, Witherspoon Dodge, Fred Shuttlesworth, Aubrey Williams, Frank Graham, Josephine Wilkins, and a whole host of others whose names do not appear on that monument in Montgomery, but upon whom Egerton bestows long overdue credit.

Actually, what we are up against is in part a problem in semantics, living as we now do under a Dark Age tyranny of misdefinitions, when all one has to do to be elected President of the United States is to point at one’s opponent and say “L-word!”

Garrow’s primeval error lies in not taking into full account the fact that in those days the South and Nation constituted an integrally racist, white supremacist (not to mention male supremacist) , apartheid society. The hard-won Civil War amendments to the Bill of Rights were still writ on paper, but had been dead letters for more than half a century.

Back then, no hint of dissent, no matter how slight, could take refuge behind the liberal shield, but was promptly branded as arch-radical and positively subversive. The Klan said the Bible said that Jim Crow was God’s will and therefore eternal, and anyone, white or black, who dared say nay thereby made themselves a likely candidate for social, economic, and even rope lynching.

In short, our Jim Crow wall had a lot in common with the Berlin Wall (which was yet to come). But even so there were a great many of both colors and sexes–and just as liberal or radical as you please–who armed with crowbars and sledgehammers paced the wall looking for cracks and crevices to widen.

“Softening up the South for righteousness,” I called it at the time.

Neither Egerton nor Garrow take adequately into account the fact that to challenge Jim Crow head-on was to invite capital punishment. One very good reason why Lillian Smith and I were among the very few Southern white writers who dared proclaim that Jim Crow had to go

---

Page 31

was that we were unemployed. Put another way, all the publishers, editors, teachers, and preachers who were on somebody’s payroll could no more have thrown down the gauntlet with impunity than, say, Sakharov in the Soviet Union.

But Garrow is right about one thing: it was black people power, on the march and sitting in, that finally laid low the Jim Crow wall and let the cleansing tide flood in. Had black America sat back and waited for the con-science of white America to assert itself, it would be sitting back right on! To which it should be added that it was preeminently black youth, constituting a veritable children’s crusade, that prodded their elders into action.

To be sure, our Jim Crow prototype of apartheid was the cornerstone upon which the entire edifice of white supremacy rested. But that edifice consisted of myriad inequities which could be mitigated and sometimes even rectified severally. In the circumstances, the question “what were we to do?” was not just one of morals, but of strategy and tactic, aka realpolitik.

What we did in that context amounted to a tacit division of labor. George S. Mitchell, while southeastern director of CIO/PAC during the latter ’40s (prior to heading SRC), said to me, “It’s good to have the likes of you raising hell way out in left field, because it makes it easier for those of us in the center to move things along.”

Acting on that premise, he and I together scrambled the chairs at the CIO meeting hall until there were no discernible aisles, horizontal or vertical, along which anyone could possibly segregate themselves. The rank-and-file looked, laughed–and thenceforth sat wherever they pleased. Neither Egerton as author nor Garrow as critic give due credit to the role played by the CIO in bringing working class white and black Southerners together as “brother and sisters in the union.” There was nothing timid about those organizers, Southerners almost all, whose blood and lives provided the catalyst.

Similarly, some “liberal” members of the SRC con-spired with some “radical” members of the SCHW, in persuading Macon to hire the first black policeman in the South since Reconstruction. He wasn’t allowed to tote a gun, or arrest white folks–but it went from there to where we are now.

As one of those who chided Ralph McGill during his decades of silence, I am entitled to applaud him for charging the South to obey the law once the die was cast. Make no mistakes: that was major.

While he was writing his book I presumed to urge Egerton to stress the issues with which we struggled in that pre-Overcoming era. Issues are the stuff of which all history is made, and historians are all too wont to ignore or gloss over them. The list in our time included lynching,poll tax, white primary, racial zoning, restrictive covenants, gerrymandering, whites-only quotas, racial and sexual wage differentials, feudalism, peonage, share-cropping, the commissary system, sweatbox, chain gang, illiteracy, hunger, pellagra, hookworm, malaria, no shoes, no screens, no lights, no running water, union busting, and masked terrorism. We–“liberals” and “radicals” alike–strove against these day and night, year after year, and racked up quite as many victories as did the freedom marchers of the 60’s. Ours may not have come in such large packages, but they added up and have endured.

It is to be regretted that Egerton’s sub-title helps perpetuate the popular misconception that “the civil rights movement” was confined to the 1960s. Fact is, all of history is a continuum and can only be comprehended as such. The beginnings of the civil rights movement in America go all the way back to the likes of Nat Turner and John Brown, and, if present trends are any indication, it may have to “keep shuffling” (as Woody said) forever.

As far back as 1947 when someone in my audience insisted that “great progress is being made,” I felt obliged to point out that “reaction is making great progress too.” And so it has. In many respects we were a half century ahead of the present, not behind it. Instead of casting aspersions on the vanguard generation, Garrow would have done better to address himself to the headlong flight of the present generation.

Whatever the shortfalls of Egerton’s book (and whose book is without them?) he performed a dedicated, meticulous, and monumental service in backfilling a major chasm in the history of America’s quest for equal rights, and we will be forever indebted to him for it.

Stetson Kennedy is a lifelong human rights advocate who, at 78, is still at it in Jacksonville, Florida; he first wrote for SRC in 1946. His most recent book is After Appomattox: How the South Won the War