
          The Civil_Rights_Act After Twenty Years Later.
[Response]
          By Gaston, PaulPaul Gaston
          Vol. 7, No. 1, 1985, pp. 14-15
          
          Prompted by Harold and Harry's discussion of the new mythology--and
particularly by Julius' recollection of his student days at Chapel
Hill and his recent return visit--I would like to tell a brief anecdote
about my own teaching at the University of Virginia.
          It seems to me that I see among white students in my Southern
history class greater evidence of this conservative wave of recent
years, and it's been extremely troubling.
          About the time I started to teach Southern history I read an
article that James Baldwin published in Harpers'--this was in 1958. He
said that for white_people in the South to watch segregation taken
apart and dismantled was going to be to watch an entire way of life of
being discredited and that was going to be an enormously painful
experience for them.
          It was about that time that some of my students started dubbing my
course in Southern history "Pain Infliction 102."
          Well, this pain infliction course was a great joy to teach because
increasingly larger numbers of Southern students would shift from a
belligerent attitude of open hostility to one of more open
inquiry. Then, during the 1960s, a large number became converts and
they wanted to join the movement and see that Southern history was
made whole.
          This year, the course in pain infliction continues to be
taught. The students are required to read--among other books--Dan
Carter's book about Scottsboro, and we spent a long time on Richard
Kluger's monumental study, Simple Justice, which is an absolutely
brillant and moving account of how the Brown
decision came to be written. 
          There's a significant group of white students in this class who, it
seems to me, typify what's happened. They don't deny that all of the
achievements that we've made are good, but these students are
unreachable. A group of eight of them led a discussion of sixty
students last week. Their subject was Kluger's book and the origins of
the Brown decision.
          They were logical. They didn't say anything offensive. They were
coherent in their analysis. They discussed the move from Gaines to Sweat vs. Painter to
 Brown vs. Board of Education, and they weren't
touched by one bit of it.
          After awhile I couldn't stand it anymore. About fifteen minutes
before the end of the class I got up and said, "You know you're
reading one of the most . . . you're reading a magisterial
work. You're not likely to read many books like this in your
lifetime. And it's a book about one of the great movements for human
liberation that you've never experienced. Where is the feeling? Where
are the guts? Where are . . ."
          Well, there was great silence.

          I'm not sure that they were touched. They know that I have these
periodic outbursts. But I present them as evidence of this growing
sense of conservatism-the teflon-coated group that can't be reached,
but they're going to say the right thing.
          The happy part of the story is that there are still some white
students in the class who are on my side, but more importantly there
are some black_students in the class now and they, more than 1, make
it uncomfortable for those students simply to pass this off as another
work of history that you have to memorize and pass a test on. I came
out of this a born-again historian.
          
            During the fortieth anniversary meeting of the Southern
Regional Council, held in Atlanta this past November, Pulitzer Prize
winning journalist Harry Ashmore, Julius L. Chambers-director of the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and former SRG executive director Harold
Fleming reflected upon the status of civil_rights twenty years after
the passage of the 1964 Civil_Rights_Act. An additional comment was
offered by Paul Gaston, professor of history at the University of
Virginia and current president of the Southern_Regional_Council. In
the following pages, we present the perspectives of these long-time
observers of, and participants in, Southern changes.
             Paul Gaston, professor of history at the University of Virginia,
is president of the Southern_Regional_Council.
          
        
