
          Democracy Looks At the New South
          By Dunbar, LeslieLeslie Dunbar
          Vol. 4, No. 2, 1982, pp. 1-4
          
          The news is full these days about people returning to the South,
black and white, poor ones as well as those better off. The question
is, will democracy return with them?
          I don't, of course, mean the democracy of actual life, for the
South never had that, not even in the stumbling, wavering ways
realized in the rest of our country. I mean that democracy of
aspiration, which dwelt in the spirit and grand hopes that
Southerners, as much as people anywhere in the world, have in times
past thrust upward for the challenging of our lives. In the greatness
of such as Jefferson, Madison, George Mason, and--closer to our own
time--Hugo Black, James McBride Dabbs, Clifford Durr, Frank Graham,
Paul Green, Fannie Lou Hamer, Estes Kefauver, Martin_Luther_King, Jr.,
Lillian_Smith, Dorothy Tilly, John H. Wheeler and Aubrey Williams, the
South taught men and women everywhere to love and labor for liberty
and equality.
          In their own region, the thought and example of those like
Jefferson went into a long, sad neglect after their passing. Will the
same be true of the legacy of these later leaders, who rekindled the
spirit that made the Civil Rights Movement an example to be cherished
wherever the wind of democracy moves?
          My own odyssey as a follower of those, our recent and deeply missed
prophets--for that is what they were, persons speaking truth to
power--began on a Spring afternoon in 1949. As the then youngest
member of Emory University's political science faculty, I had been
assigned the generally unwanted task of adviser to the Club of
Departmental Majors. I had already, in my first months at Emory,
voyaged once or twice to that foreign world where the Negro campuses
of Atlanta were; and so, casting about for a speaker for a club
meeting, I'd suggested inviting a man I'd met, Professor William Boyd
of Atlanta University, to come out and talk about race
relations. Rather nervously, and feeling bold, the students acceded. I
extended the invitation, it was accepted, and Boyd came and spoke to
our small group. While sitting in the back of the room and listening
to him, I was suddenly troubled by a new thought; in old-fashioned
language, I might say, was touched by grace--and as we all know, that
happens but seldom to any of us. It came to me that 

my invitation had
been wrong, even insulting. Here was this man, our professional
colleague, responding to his first invitation to appear among us at
the "white" school, and being asked to speak not about his own
professional field--which happened to be international politics--but
about race_relations, as if that were all he had the competence to
teach us.
          When the meeting was over, and he and I had sat down in my office,
I apologized to him. Bill Boyd, whose untimely death a few years later
took from us one of our natural leaders, smiled in his ironic but
accepting manner and then as the afternoon wore on gave me alone his
second talk of the day. Without reference to laws or political
controversies, he, out of his own goodness, calmly told me what being
a black in the South entailed, of what it meant to him and his family
in their daily lives, of the heartbreaking dilemmas involved in
rearing his children of the never-ending succession of little things
that had to be coped with in traveling through the South or getting
about in Atlanta. The elephant at the Grant Park Zoo had died and a
campaign was on in the schools to get the children to contribute their
coins to help buy a new one. How, he asked, does one tell his eager
youngster that you may give your dime, but you won't be allowed to see
the elephant when it's bought? There was more, much more, of that; and
as I listened I suddenly had my second thought of the day: I did not
need it because had I ever given a moment's thought, I could have
known it on my own.
          That illumination has come back to me over and over again. I have
trod about ever since in the tangled morass of America's racial
struggles, not only those of blacks, but of our Hispanics and Indians
as well. Time and again, I have been taught and have been made to see
realities to which I had been blind theretofore. And nearly every
time, I have had ruefully to reflect that I should not have needed the
instruction, that the lesson could have been--should have
been--deduced from my own knowledge of what American society is.
          Discrimination is a social product, a fact to which the present
Supreme_Court, in its insistence that only that discrimination which
can be proven to have arisen from the specific intentions of specific
officials is prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment, seems to have
willfully shut it eyes. And, not the Supreme_Court alone. Does, for
example, any thinking person need to be shown that poverty and housing
discrimination are root causes of criminal behavior? In recent years,
we have had to have large studies to show a direct connection between
poverty and hunger and malnutrition; did we truly need to be taught
that? There comes a point when our craving to be shown, to be given
documentation, is a mask for irresponsibility, a resistance to
realities which we know full well but which to admit would threaten
too strongly our willful belief in the morality of our social
order.
          The lesson that Bill Boyd taught came back to me anew when years
later I read Dr. King's "Letter From A Birmingham Jail." Do you
remember where he said:
          
            "I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging
darts of segregation to say wait. But when you have seen vicious mobs
lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and
brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse,
kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with
impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro
brothers suffering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an
affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your
speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year old daughter
why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been
advertised on television, and see the tears welling up in her little
eyes when she is told that Fun Town is closed to colored children, and
see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little
mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by
unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white_people; when you
have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing
pathos: 'Daddy, why do white_people treat colored people so mean?'
When you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep
night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile
because no motel will accept you. When you are humiliated day in and
day out by nagging signs reading 'White' men and 'Colored'; when your
first name and your last name becomes 'John,' and when your wife and
mother are never given the respectable title 'Mrs.' when you are
harried by day and haunted by night by the fact you are a Negro,
living constantly at tip-toe stance never quite knowing what to expect
next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are
forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness'--then you will
understand why we find it difficult to wait."
          
          Shortly after that "Letter" was written, the Southern Regional
Council, of which I was then Executive Director, was asked to join
another agency in its printing and distribution. I declined. I suppose
I had practical reasons

--of money and such like--for doing so, though
what they were I can no longer recall. It was a bad mistake, one of
which I am ashamed. It did not keep that classic statement from being
printed, but it did keep what was then the South's principal bi-racial
organization from standing with it and for it. It was another missed
opportunity, of which there have been so many, when the voices of
black_people were turned from in the South.
          All that which Dr. King described happened in a past that, although
but a few years ago, now seems distant. This is the New South, men
say. And they are right. The Civil Rights Movement did accomplish
great deeds, the South is vastly changed, and is the better for
it. Yet much lies ahead to be done, to build democracy here, as well
as in our nation. And sometimes one wonders if the cutting edge, as we
used to call it, is still sharp. Way back in 1946, W.E.B. DuBois made
a speech in Columbia, S.C. In the course of it, he said:
          
            "White youth in the South is peculiarly frustrated. There is not
a single great ideal which they can express or aspire to that does not
bring them into flat contradiction with the Negro problem. The more
they try to escape it, the more they land in hypocrisy, lying and
double-dealing; the more they become what they least wish to become,
the oppressors and despisers of human beings. Some of them, in larger
and larger numbers, are bound to turn toward the truth and to
recognize you as brothers and sisters, as fellow travelers toward the
dawn."
          
          Whatever else must be said about the experience of being white in
the pre-1970 South, there was always that bothersome conscience which
DuBois described. I may be wrong, and hope that I am, but I doubt if
it has still the same force, among either white youth or their
elders. The war is over and done, the burden of conscience has been
discharged, the duties it imposed are no more, it is time to cease
doing good and instead simply start doing well for ourselves. The edge
has gone out of too many of our young_people. Compassion seems to have
become unfashionable. To be heard, one must appeal to material
interests, as such are perceived by what today passes for political
parties and by our media.
          If the future is now, it is a grim forbidding one. The Civil Rights
Movement did its great work, just as men like Jefferson in their day
did theirs. It has left us the next and even greater task and that is
the combating of war and poverty, and the South is central in both.
          We must never allow ourselves to take our sights
off the main event, and that is the terrible bombs ready to
explode in the center ring of all our our existences. One bomb, is
quite literally, the bomb of nuclear warfare, to which the governments
of the world approach closer day by day. The other is the bomb of
world-wide poverty, compact of the misery of probably the majority of
human beings now living, of whom all too many dwell here in the South
and in urban and rural ghettos throughout our land.
          It is instructive to go back in our thinking to Gunnar
Myrdal. Perhaps you will recall the famous "rank order of
discrimination" which he set down in The American
Dilemma. Researching prior to and during World_War_II, he
believed that he had found that white Southerners were and would be
most resistant to any change that had to do with sex between black_men
and white_women and with intermarriage. Following this, he found that
the white South would yield most slowly on, in order: personal
relationships and the "etiquette" between the races; the use of public
facilities: political disfranchisement; discriminatory law
enforcement; and finally, would yield most easily on economic
discrimination.
          His survey of Negro Southerners gave him just the opposite
conclusion; namely that they cared most about economic opportunities,
least of all about sexual mingling. Myrdal went on to acknowledge that
he might be wrong about the white South's dominant interests, and of
course he was. We know now that, when push came to shove, the white
South has far more cared about maintaining its economic privileges
than its sexual codes or traditional etiquette. The harsh fact is that
today at least one-third of black Southerners live below the poverty
line and that upwards of two-fifths of the nation's poor, white and
black, live in the South. We have reached that disappointing
level--and that is what it seems, a level ground which year to year
does not rise or fall--after and despite all the great, and they were
indeed great--events and victories of the intervening decades: the
court battles over the white primary and higher education, the work of
President Truman's Civil Rights Committee, the suppression of the
Dixiecrats, the 1954 and 1955 decisions on segregated schools, the
bitter and finally successful battles against "massive resistance,"
the sit-in movement and the magnificent demonstrations and voter
registration campaigns of the sixties and early seventies, the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, the Voting_Rights_Act of 1965, and the "War On
Poverty" declared in 1964.
          But all that accomplishment left poor_people still poor, and some
of them poorer than ever; and left the white folks mostly still in
charge. Working alongside Mack Jones, a successor of my old mentor,
Bill Boyd, as a professor of political science at Atlanta University,
I have in the last year and a half helped out the Federation of
Southern Cooperatives, as it fought off the harassment of the
Department of Justice. That episode showed, among other things, how
determinedly and resourcefully the white economic and political powers
of the Black_Belt will act to put down a poor_people's organization
that is perceived as threatening their control.
          The episode suggests another possibility. It is that the economic
reform which this country so desperately requires may not come about
until poor_people organize themselves at local and state levels to
insist upon it; that the reform to be effective must include new
structures, as in the co-ops, which end the dependence of poor_people
on established economic and political powers; and that just as the
struggle for civil_rights did not gather strength and momentum until
black Southerners took charge and gave leadership, so will the
struggle for economic justice not really move very far until its
leadership comes from the poor and those who have earned the poor's
trust.
          The "beloved community" which the Civil Rights Movement in its
glory days proclaimed may exceed our grasp. Must it also be beyond our
reach? I would if I could call us back to those mind-changing,
nation-rocking, soul-lifting ideals of non-violence and equality and
freedom for all. I would because they are, ultimately, the only
realistic and practical guides for our action. It is impractical and
unrealistic to expect millions of people of our nation--and of a
couple of billion, more or less, world wide--to endure indefinitely
their poverty and degradation and not to tear down somehow the peace
and prosperity of the rest of us. It is utterly unrealistic to believe
that we and the Russians, not to speak of a host of lesser
governments, can continue the grossest arms build-up in all history,
one which features nuclear weapons of civilization destroying potency;
can continue "projecting our power" all about the globe without
uncontrollable war erupting. The madness of our times is that what is
palpably irrational 

and even insane passes for pragmatism, while
realism is dismissed as soft-headedness. Yet it is only through that
idealism of the Civil Rights Days, which was in fact hard realism,
that our nation and the world and the civilization that keeps us from
being mere brutes stand any chance of survival.
          It was through it that the possibility of democracy was brought
back to the South, from which it had departed with Jefferson's
generation. Will it become more than a possibility? Democracy means
the rule of the people. Its attainment and keeping are never-finished
tasks. First of all, comes the establishment of equality, for the rule
of the people without at least enough equality among the people so
that self-reliance is everywhere is a contradiction in terms. Then
comes justice, for that means that every person is to be treated
fairly and with equal rights. And then true democracy requires peace,
for without it the people will never rule, for commanders must, and
justice will not prevail, because force and regimentation will.
          We are generally led and ruled by men who though often as not good
and conscientious individuals are by their policies unwitting killers
of the dream, foulers of the nest, sellers of the birthright. And not
America's birthright only but that of the civilization to which we
were born and which has given edge and strength to our character,
given us eyes to see and to be aware of the world's beauty and the
world's callings.
          But I have too pessimistic a faith in political leaders, in the
absence of ground swells of public opinion, to call upon them. As I
said before, if I could I would call upon us to reclaim the ideals,
the realism, of the old movement. If we did, I think we should now be
saying, and acting on the saying, that we stand for no political or
economic system, no ideology; that we stand instead for women and men,
boys and girls, living freely, everywhere. We stand for the hope of
equal chances for all, and the demand for good chances of all, now, in
our own time. We stand for peace; peace between nations: peace with
each other. To be for peace is to be against violence. It is to be
against inculcation of the values of violence, the training of the
world's youth in violence, the all-absorbing preparations for
violence. We can no more make peace by threatening war than we can
make friendship by threatening enmity. Sooner rather than later, that
game will not work.
          From the great nuclear plants at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Savannah
River, S.C., to the Pantex Plant in the Texas pan-handle where the
bombs and warheads are assembled, the South is deeply embedded in
preparation for nuclear holocaust. From the hollows of Appalachia to
the migrant farm labor camps of Florida the South is still the poorest
of regions. Here, if anywhere, is the place to redirect America from
policies and values that will not work, toward those that have been
tested--and do.
          
            Dr. Leslie Dunbar is the former director of the Southern
Regional Council and of the Field Foundation. He now works with the
Fund for Peace, Washington, D.C. The article here its adapted
from. remarks to the Blue Ridge Institute for Southern Community
Executives, July 26, 1981.
          
        
