
          The South Revisited
          By Kennedy, StetsonStetson 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- 

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 

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 

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.
          
        
