
          Arthur Raper, 1899-1979: A Life Looking 'for the Heart of the
Thing'
          Interview by Kuhn, CliffCliff Kuhn
          Vol. 9, No. 2, 1987, pp. 4-10
          
          Introduction
          No Southerner had a deeper commitment to regional reform than
sociologist Arthur Raper. Born on a farm in Davidson County, North
Carolina, in 1899 and schooled at the University of North Carolina,
where he studied with Frank Porter Graham and Howard Odum, Raper
mirrored the South's problems and promise. His books on
sharecropping-Preface to Peasantry, Sharecroppers All and Tenants of the
Almighty-powerfully described the causes and devastating human
and environmental consequences of plantation agriculture. His work The Tragedy of Lynching remains the classic work on
the subject. Through his work with Gunnar Myrdal on An American
Dilemma and as research director for the Commission on Interracial
Cooperation, forerunner of the Southern Regional Council, Raper played
a leading role in interracial activities that informed and anticipated
the transformations of the 1950s and 1960s.
          In 1979, Arthur Raper gave what proved to be his final interview
for community radio station WRFG's "Living Atlanta" series, depicting
life in Atlanta between the World Wars. The interview ranged broadly
and represented a looking backward by one of the South's seminal
figures shortly before his death. Following are excerpts.
          Parts of the interview can be heard on two radio documentaries
produced by non-commercial station WRFG. In addition to the fifty-part
"Living Atlanta" series, in 1986 WRFG produced a three-part series, "A
Southern Profile: The Life and Times of Arthur Raper," addressing such
issues as Raper's place among the regional sociologists and
intellectuals, the etiquette of race relations in the South, and the
transformation of Southern agriculture through a look at Greene
County, Georgia. For more information, contact Cliff Kuhn c/o WRFG,
P.O. Box 5332, Atlanta, GA 30307.
          Radio Free Georgia Broadcasting Foundation, Inc. 
          BEFORE I CAME to Atlanta I was at Chapel Hill with the Institute for
Research in Social Science, Odum's operation, and there I worked with
Guy Johnson and Rupert Vance and the other fellows. I was very much
interested in what Vance, particularly, was doing in his work.
          The way I got to Atlanta was that I was in my little cubbyhole one
day and I heard Odum and Alexander-Will Alexander-coming down the
hall. I'd met Will Alexander at Fisk or when I had been at Vanderbilt,
one or the other, in '24 or '25, getting my master's. They were coming
down the hall at Chapel Hill, and I heard Odum say to Alexander, "Now,
let's stop in here. You might like to talk with this fellow a little."
So they came in and Alexander-I recognized him of course, and I think
he remembered me a little bit. And he said, "Why don't you come down
to Atlanta where the people are? You have brick buildings
and things here. Why don't you come down there and work with us?
          He said about two more sentences and I said, "When do you want me
to come?"
          And so he named some time which wasn't very distant away. Maybe
that was in the spring and I went down there in the fall.
          My original position in Atlanta was secretary of the Georgia
Interracial Committee. The Commission on Interracial Cooperation had
state committees, and my original job was to be secretary of that
state committee. They had urban or county committees, mostly urban
committees in the leading urban communities in Georgia. Practically
every place it was the elite whites and the elite blacks in their
separate worlds that were on these committees. I don't think that's
wrong. I think that's the kind of committee you need. If you're going
to do something in a Southern community as of at that time in the
field of race relations, that's exactly what you needed. Now, what
could come later in a way was built on that, because that had to
happen first, I think. I think those people had to be so they could be
in touch with each other and be known and be appreciated and respected
across the line. I think much of what happens grounds back on that.
          And they would talk about what the situation was. Maybe some
trouble is threatened over here because there's so many people
unemployed, or there's people over here--

likely to be some trouble
because it's said that a black man, a Negro, insulted some creditor
when he challenged his debt, or something like that. These people
would sense when something was coming up that was going to get hot,
and they tried to take care of it before it got to that stage. It was
not a committee to solve problems. It was a committee to anticipate
where problems might arise. And in that extent, it's a very, very
basic concept, and you can't have-you can't have a good interracial
committee without that kind of insight and that kind of
commitment. They were committed to this community and to this
relationship.
          There was the assumption that if you didn't have more equitable
educational facilities, if you didn't have more opportunities for
people to participate in the political process, if you didn't have
more opportunities for people to have access to health facilities,
equitable health facilities, why, you were building up problems for
yourself. Well, this one I remember was used in the field of health,
and this was told with great relish at one of the annual meetings,
about the Negro maid who was in the home of her employer, and she
says, "Why, that child there is coming down with diphtheria just
like my children have had for a couple weeks." Okay. You can see
that. You can respond to it. You can get a public health facility
understood and financed. You can illustrate the whole way through the
same type of things. You don't ignore and demean a part of your common
life of a community without paying the price for it.
          And I began going to those communities and talking with these
interracial committees, and I soon found that I wasn't too excited by
that. It wasn't too challenging. But something that was tremendously
interesting to me was that when I got to Atlanta I realized, of
course, that Floyd Corry who I had been very closely associated with
at Vanderbilt, lived down in Greene County. He was there, was running
his own store, and his uncle was one of the leading lights left in the
county.
          And when I got there, Father Corry, Floyd's father, just latched
onto me. He had lost his property. He was sort of a scion of a rundown
part of the family. But he still had the name and he had the kinship
contacts. He was buying cows and selling them. This was in the
Depression there. And he would tell me about, well, now, this old
house up here on the hill with these pines all around it and
everything gone to pot here, but this was where somebody lived, and he
told me his name and who his connections were and what had happened to
him and the whole business. And so part of what comes out in Preface to Peasantry and later comes out in Tenants of the Almighty was because I had this entree
to this family that had roots there way back, and had status. Because
I was accepted so utterly by this family who was so genuinely a part
of the picture there.
          The plantation was already crumbling. It was already propped up
with very high-priced gear and fertilizer, and propped up with a lot
of borrowing and propped up with a lot of tenants that couldn't pay
back their credit-priced stuff that they had consumed while they were
producing a crop, and then that threw the landlord into a hard place
to handle. Well, all of that was going on, and then came the boll
weevil, and it just knocked it down. And that was well before the
'30s. It was ten years before the '30s, in 1918,'19 and '20 in that
particular area. Plantations closed down. In Greene County, more than
half the people left some parts of the county. The cotton crop fell
from 20,000 bales one year to-I don't remember the exact figures, but
this is the order of it-from 20,000 bales to, say, 6,000 bales to
1,500 bales to 323 bales, I remember, from 20,000 just two or three
years before that. And, actually, the fertilizer that they had spent
on the cotton crop-not this last year when it was 323, but the crop
before that-the cotton hadn't even paid for the fertilizer bill, to
say nothing of all the rest of the expenses you have in growing
cotton. It just simply went broke.
          And when I'd get back to Atlanta I would go over to the city
welfare office there in Atlanta where Ada Woolfolk was director, and
she wanted me to help her think about, now, what can we do with these
people that are coming in here, and they're stranded and they don't
have anything and they're not well and they have no skills and no
education, very little, most of them, and what can we do with them?
And I began to develop maps to see where they came from 

in Georgia,
and a lot of them had come from Greene County and surrounding counties
where the situation was practically the same as it was in Greene. And
it was then in 1926 end '27 that I got the lead into this refugees to
the city that later became tremendously significant and an evident
fact. But I saw it very, very early.
          Then they set up this study of Lynching and they asked me to be
secretary of that, which I did. They had 20 more Lynchings in '30, and
they said, "What the heck happened here? Let's find out."
You've got to prevent Lynchings with facts about why people
Lynch. Well, who got Lynched? What was he accused of?
          See, the irrationality quotient in the Lynching phenomenon was
tremendous. There was just an assumption in some areas that you had to
have a Lynching every now and then to preserve equitable race
relations. The phobia was black men abusing a white woman. And part of
that is reflected in this tremendous emphasis that your Southern
politicians in the filibusters and what not had always been talking
about, Southern white womanhood.
          Before we'd gone very far we had these statistics about how many of
them had been-the South, how many of them had been black, how many had
been for this crime and the other, and what the relationship was
between the number of lynchings and the price of cotton, and all this
and that and the other. Most of it was not for sex or sex-related
crimes, as reported by the white newspapers. It was mostly economic
and etiquette matters. Even the statistics that we had where about
one-sixth of them were accused of sex-related crimes-it wasn't that
much. It wasn't as much as a sixth, because there was an element-and
everybody knew it-there was an element of fabrication built into that
to protect the status quo.
          When we had got that research together and got the thing said, and
it was getting into the newspapers getting accepted, because the kind
of people we had on the Lynching commission in the South, you don't
say-when those men-and, incidentally, there wasn't a single woman on
that Lynching commission-but when those men came out and said,
"This is our report. These are our findings," they were
accepted, and they've been accepted ever since. Well, when you find
out what you've been Lynching for, and when you get it from a source
that you can't challenge-and it wasn't challenged-well, then you are
on a different basis to call the sheriff or say, "Well, let's just
don't let this thing happen." And of course the women did come in
and played a tremendous role there.
          WOMEN HAD been sort of shut out of the church: they couldn't become
preachers. They were shut out of the courts: they couldn't be
judges. They were shut out of the sheriff's office. They wanted to do
something. They were hurting to do something. So here, now, was this
Lynching thing, and we'd done the statistical work on it. Jesse Daniel
Ames just grabbed onto it like a puppy that's hungry for a bone-or
like a big dog that's hungry for a bone. "This we will do." And
she got them organized very quickly. They were women that had ability
and they wanted to do something. And she had this emphasis on working
with women and knowing how to work with-and she did know how. So she
got the women organized here pretty quick, and she'd call them in
there to a meeting, you know, and they would come. And what these
women have done-they have signed that they are going to prevent
Lynchings in any way they can, and that they are going to call on the
sheriffs and they are going to call on the police and they are going
to call on the judges and they are going to be active in this
thing. And, my gracious, they were. And they were going to tell the
politicians, "Lynchings don't protect our virtue. We don't need
anybody to protect our virtue. And if you get up in the Congress of
the United States and say that you are Lynching to preserve our
virtue, we're going to call you down. Now, don't you do it." And
all of this filibustering, that's full of that stuff, up till 1930 and
'31, it dropped out.
          It gave them something to do, something that was important,
something that was vital. And they had a very good organization there
for nearly a decade, and I think it did have something to do with the
decline of Lynchings. I think the overall situation was moving in that
direction anyway, but that was one of the things that was in the
overall situation was these alerted women throughout the South to be
on their toes about this thing.
          When the federal anti-lynch legislation came up, she was very much
opposed to that. I don't think she ever concurred in it as a desirable
thing. I didn't think it would be easy at all. I'd never been in a
community where I'd really gotten acquainted with the people where I
didn't find some people willing to testify against the Lynchers, if
they could do it without their barns getting burned down or without
their church being split wide open or people stop buying at their
drugstore. They wanted to. They wanted--it seemed 

to me, they wanted to
be put in a position where they would take an oath and say, "Well,
yes. I didn't want to bring this into the open, but I had sworn on the
Bible to tell the truth. They asked me this question and I answered
it." They sort of wanted to do that, I thought, and I thought we'd be
way ahead if they did and had the opportunity, had a protected
situation within which they could give their testimony, because when
you've got a Ku Klux Klan judge and a prosecutor who sympathizes with
him, and then jurymen that they select by their own processes with
Negroes not on it and women not on it, at that time. a very closed
operation.
          Why, you could do anything in the courts. And they did. And this, I
thought, would open that thing up some and would be real boon for the
region.
          I was with Myrdal, because I thought, well, what Myrdal was doing
here was important. I didn't run away from Alexander. I just, with
Alexander's not too enthusiastic permission, went to work with
Myrdal.
          Myrdal comes down to Atlanta and says he wants to talk with two
people. Well, who are the two people? The head of the Ku Klux Klan and
Mrs. J. E. Andrews, the head of the Association of Women for the
Preservation of the White Race. So he gets out with Mrs. Andrews and
is talking with her, and she was saying that what I was doing at Agnes
Scott was that I was over there pretending to teach but what Raper is
really doing is making white women available for nigger men. And
Myrdal knew me somewhat, and he said-it just got too much beyond him,
and he said, "Well, wait now, Mrs. Andrews, have you ever had
sexual relations with a Negro man?" And she didn't know what to
say and couldn't say anything hardly. And they went on with their
conversation and he left.
          AND MYRDAL CAME back to our office. He was somewhat agitated and
what not. And we went on out to the house with Ralph Bunche and we ate
a meal out there at our house, which was verboten, of course, but we
did it anyhow. And then we went on down to Greene County. And by the
time we got to Greene County we learned that Mrs. Andrews had sworn
out a warrant for Myrdal, that Myrdal had insulted her. She got to
thinking about it later and she decided she had been insulter!. So she
could get a warrant all right, because she had connections in the
political set-up with the Klan. So she got her warrant, and called up
Martha to know where I was. She wanted this warrant served. I was with
Myrdal. So Martha kept her on the phone for-how long? Half an hour?
Forty-five minutes? Then she got in touch with me as soon as she
could.
          Incidentally, we'd had dinner that night with the chain gang in
Greene County. Because somebody raised the question some little
pipsqueak said, "What do we do with Dr. Bunche?" And once the
question was raised, everybody had to protect his flanks, you see. But
if the question hadn't been raised, why, they'd have done the same
things that we did with Ralph Bunche when I took him to my house and
we had dinner. We'd have just eaten and then gone.
          Oh the piece de resistance on this one
is the people, when they decided that they wouldn't let Bunche come in
and eat with the whites, they had sent him a plate of filet mignon,
just like all the rest of us, out into the black camp.
          I said to Myrdal, "Now, look, they've got this warrant sworn out
for you."
          He said,"What do we do?"
          I said, "Whatever you decide to do."
          He said, "Well, hmmm. What do we do?"
          Oh, he'd been asking me to run for governor of Georgia. I should
run for governor of Georgia. "What else can you do here if you
won't take political responsibility and stand up to these bozos and
he]p educate them? Let them count the votes. Go out there and do
it. You're scared, Raper."
          I said, "No, I'm not scared. I live here."
          He said, "What we going to do?"
          I said, "Well, the best lawyer in town was with us down at that
convict camp dinner tonight-Colonel Fawlkes. You can go talk with him
and he can tell you."
          The sheriff was there, too. So we went down to Colonel Fawlkes
house, and Colonel Fawlkes called the sheriff. The sheriff said,
"Well, I will not be in my office for official business until 9
o'clock tomorrow morning." This was about 10 o'clock at night. So
I said to Myrdal, "You just decide what 

we're going to do. I live
here all the time, and this stuff is going on always, as you heard
Mrs. Andrews this afternoon."
          He says to Colonel Fawlkes, "Well, look. What would they
do?"
          "They'd have a trial."
          "Have a jury?"
          "Yeah, they'd have a jury."
          "Who would select the jury?"
          "Well, they'd be selected by the outfit in Atlanta."
          "This would get in the papers, wouldn't it?"
          "Yes, it would get in the papers."
          "Well, I'm an international figure."
          And although he wanted me to run for Governor of Georgia and stand
up for my principles, I noticed that he wasn't taking the warrant and
standing for his. He said, "This would make it an international
incident, and I'm here for the Carnegie Corporation. They put a lot of
faith in me. I'm a well-known social engineer." So we decided that
he'd better leave before that warrant got there at 9 o'clock the next
morning.
          So we rode all that night and we went across the rickety bridge-it
was then-down between Fort Benning and Phenix City, Alabama, 2 o'clock
that morning, and got over to Tuskegee, and we took our rooms and they
had a little bath connection between us, you know. We went to sleep,
and the next morning about 8 o'clock he came stomping in
there. "Raper, what in the hell happened at Runnymeade? Now, you
tell me. What happened at Runnymeade?"
          I said, "What happened at Runnymeade was that the people made
King John sign some papers."
          "Yeah. And what? What happened?"
          I said, "Well, one of the papers was that you can't arrest
anybody unless you've got a warrant. But Mrs. Andrews has a warrant
for you."
          Well, there we were. I haven't ever been inspired maybe but once or
twice in my life. But that was one of the times. And, incidentally, he
never did ask me any further about running for Georgia.
          Then I went back to the study of rural Georgia. I went with the
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Argicultural Economics, to
Greene County in the fall of 1940. And I was busy as six bees, keeping
myself propped up on every leaning side down there so I didn't get
thrown out.
          In the meantime I was running all over the South, checking on
things, and going to committees and conferences, and accepting
invitations here, yonder, and there, to help write a report and the
like. I had an advantage. I had a travel account. And all these
organizations that are looking for a speaker-well, they're frequently
looking for somebody that don't cost them anything. So, from that
point of view, I was very attractive, just from the logistical point
of view. But they also was willing and even eager, seemingly, to have
somebody get up there and talk about the plantation system, and have
somebody get up there and talk about the unevenness of education
between whites and blacks, between the educational expenses in Atlanta
and in the rural counties, of the soil washing away and filling up the
rivers and rendering people very, very poor.
          I was amazed and frankly very pleased at the invitations that I had
to speak. I remember to the Kiwanis, I guess, in Atlanta, the name of
my speech was "It Could Happen Only Once." And I took the
forests and the soil then the installment buying and this and that and
the other. I had the thing worked out on about ten points. And I look
back at it every now and then and I think it was quite insightful. But
they took it. They listened to it. I saw those folks later and they
would talk. I'd meet them in other meetings, you know.
          Then came the New Deal, and it did have an NWA program, and it did
have a WPA program, and it did have something for the schoolteachers,
and it did have some notions about some clinics and the like. And Gay
Shepperson presided over a sort of resurrection of hopes and spirits
of the people of Georgia. I had ready access to her office on any kind
of public information that she had, and I worked out for every county
in Georgia how much money was going for CWA, Civil Works
Administration, for the whites, and how much for the blacks, and how
much per capita, if it was on a basis of people employed; if not, on a
basis of the population. And we had that whole thing for all of those,
all of those agencies. And we had, with the Rosenwald Fund, worked up
some figures on what the disparity of costs were for education for
whites and blacks in Georgia by counties, then when this New Deal
program came in for education and they were going to give something to
the teachers, how much of it went to these that were getting so little
and how much went to these others, how much went to Atlanta to the
whites and how much went to Atlanta to the blacks.
          Wherever the general standard of education was the highest, the
differential between the whites and the blacks was the least, and
where the general education expenditures were the lowest the
differentials were the greatest. And that was something that we'd
documented to the hilt. So we were interested to see where these New
Deal funds went. And they were usually on the side of the angels. If
they didn't get the whole way to heaven, why, they at least were sort
of in that direction.
          WELL, MR. TALMADGE thought this was all pretty bad. And in his Statesman, you know, the weekly paper that he had, he
railed about this, these programs every week. But they just went right
on. He was railing, and a lot of people were asking him to snap his
red galluses. But a lot of other people were glad to have some money
coming down to the county. And somehow or other they had said "We
like Talmadge. We like old Gene. But we also want the WPA money to
come down here. We want the money to come. Whatever money is to come
down here, we want it to come." And I think they wanted that to
happen more than they wanted to praise Talmadge.
          I don't know how much of the renaissance in the South came out of
the New Deal, but I think--I expect if you analyze this back--and this
would be a good thing for a historian to do--analyze that back, you
will find more coming out of the New Deal than almost any one thing
that's happened in the South in the last 100 years. I would be pretty
sure of that. Especially changing attitudes of people toward
themselves is the greatest change it made. The NYA helped some kids
get an education. The CCC helped some kids plant some trees and get
their stomachs full of good 

food and get their faces clean and their
feet clean. But the main thing it did is it gave these people maybe a
first chance they had had to believe they could ever be anything
except a sharecropper's son or a sharecropper's daughter. More poor
kids got to school under the NYA than anything else that's happened in
the South-the National Youth Administration. This is what they went
out there to do, and this is what they did. And they-they just saw a
different world from what they had up until then been able to even
envision.
          See, when I was working in Greene County, working on this Tenants of the Almighty that we published, MacMillan,
1943-I had working in my office five NYA youngsters, and those kids-no
one of them would have ever been associated with a project like
interviewing farmers and asking them what they would have expected to
get from the Unified Farm Program, and what difference has it made
when they had canned fruit, or what difference had it made when they
had a fenced garden, or what difference had it made when they were
able to get a production loan at a low rate of interest, what
difference did it make when they had a clinic, and this and that and
the other. Well, those kids just simply saw a new world when they were
working with that material. And then the pictures that Jack Delano
made there in Greene County-and we had them up on the wall, and we
were talking about--"This is what they're doing for the land
erosion back over here, and here's what they're doing in this area to
get a forestry going. And fire towers--be sure if the fires break out
that they get them put out before they burn the whole business
up." And the whole way through, those five kids there were just an
illustration of the process that was going on.
          And another thing that happened here was this tenant purchase
contract that they had with the Farm Security Administration. I can
tell you a story about that. Alexander had been saying, and he wrote
in Preface to Peasantry, that what we had to do
was get the ownership of the land into the hands of these producers,
that that was the only way we could have an adequate civilization
here. He had worked on that. We had talked about it. He had promoted
it in every way he could. And so he called me into his office one day--
this was before he left Atlanta--says, "I think we got it. I think
we got it. I think we got it."
          I said, "What?"
          He said, "I think we got this tenant purchase thing. I think we
got it. John Bankhead thinks he thought it up."
          Well, Alexander was the kind of guy who had very practical sense,
and if he saw that it was the way to get John Bankhead to promote that
legislation, why, he would devise every scheme in the world he could
to help get John Bankhead reconfirmed every morning that he had
thought that up.
          Well, these tenant purchase contract folks-there was, back here,
this dream of 40 acres and a mule, and that had been dashed. Then here
comes along an agency that says, "You can have this land. It's
yours. You can pay off your indebtedness with a low rate of
interest." And there was practically no hanky-panky in that
program. It was done by local committees, and the elite, again, made
up most of the local committees. But the elite didn't get the
farms. The rung down, not the bottom of the tenant but the top of the
tenant group got those farms. And out from those farms went children
who have done anything that has been done in America.
          We know one family in Greene County. They lived right next door to
us. And we said to the Hopkinses, "Now, look. Why don't you apply
for one of these tenant purchase contracts?" They were right
beside of us and were working on the land there on that old plantation
we were living on when we were in Greene County.
          And they said, "No, we won't do it."
          Why? Well, I talked with the man about it, Mr. Hopkins, Frank
Hopkins, and Martha talked with Mary Hopkins, his wife, that, well,
this would be a good idea to do.
          "No, there's a joker in it. We'll get squeezed again." He
said, "My father tried twice to move from sharecropper into
ownership, and each time bad years came. he had to give up everything
he had and go back into sharecropping. I'm just going to
sharecrop."
          Well, we kept saying, "No, you don't need to do that now." I
think they saw we were sincere, and then they saw some of these other
people moving onto these farms. And 

they did move onto their own
farm. They paid for it in five years. Well, there it is. I'm glad that
it happened. I'm glad that I was associated with something that is
that vital.
          Of course, I didn't anticipate, then, frankly, agribusiness and
what that has done in terms of this tremendous emphasis on bigger
units to finance and pay for bigger machines and to pay bigger
fertilizer bills and pay for bigger insecticide bills. I didn't
anticipate that then.
          There was, when I left, in, say, the middle of '39-there was still
the assumption on the part of most, I think, of the Interracial
Commission members that segregation-we would make it as best we
could. We wouldn't openly challenge it. I had openly challenged it,
but I just did it personally. And I think I didn't earn any points
with Odom and Alexander when I did it. I went to the Southern
Conference on Human Welfare in '38 [the first SCHW meeting was held in
Birmingham in 1938] and took a very active part and was a sponsor to
the one they had in '40. Alexander and Odum both had the feeling that
this Southern Conference on Human Welfare was sort of a flash in the
pan, as indeed it was. But the people that I knew in the South were
nearly all there, and I wanted to be there with them, and I was.
          And in some ways they were right. But in other ways I think the
South in race relations is very much farther along by having had the
southern Conference on Human Welfare, even if it did later on peter
out, and for good and sufficient reasons. But it did something. The
people got together and they talked and they looked at each other. It
was a plus, I think, and I'd do it again. If I had been ten years
older, I think, I don't know whether I would have done it or not. I
was still under forty. But if I had been fifty, I don't know whether I
would or not. Maybe I would have been with Alexander and Odum. The
Interracial Commission had its backgrounds and it had its committees
and it had its-never did write down what it believed in. Alexander
said, "We won't do that. We'll decide as we go along." He was
right in doing it, because couldn't anybody pick it up and say,
"This is what the Interracial Commission believes in." The
whites and blacks at the Interracial Commission had always chosen
their place of meeting. It had always-it had never been secret, but
neither had it been advertised in public. It was purposely kept sort
of quiet because it didn't want to be annihilated. "We can
grow," we thought, "if we don't kill ourselves."
          Well, then, the police and some of the folks in Birmingham looked
around a little bit: "Hmmmm, we better go over and check on this
thing." So they came over and decided they had to segregate us,
and when they did it made us mad. We were here and we had this meeting
set up, and this was the way we were going to go, and now you won't
let us go. "We'll have a meeting only after this where we can have
it unsegregated." That came out of that meeting in 1938. "We
will not have another Southwide meeting where we have to be
segregated." That came out of that meeting. That was a part of the
findings of the meeting. It was put in the newspaper.
          Okay. So that-and, as I say, I didn't gain any points by having
been identified with something that was pushing up on the mores, as
that was. And that was exactly what it was doing.
          Every member of the Interracial Commission was an ultimate
integrationist. He had nowhere to go except towards integration or
else deny his affiliation with the whole effort. Now that's the
dynamism of that earlier work that was done with the Interracial
Commission when it was being careful, when Alexander wouldn't put
down, "This we verily believe."
          I think what happened was that the people who were in this process
knew in themselves that, insofar as this better thing to be done, why,
everybody was going to feel better. You feel better when you have been
considerate of this other fellow who is treated inconsiderately by so
many people. You feel better. You see he feels better, or she feels
better. You sleep better. The doors on your house don't have to be
locked quite so securely. The laws don't have to be quite so demanding
in terms of restrictures here and here and here in life.
          I think the people who were the farthest along with it were happy
that they saw other people every now and then coming towards their
side. They thought they were with the future. This is the future,
therefore I can abide it somewhat. It hurts, but let's keep going.
          I don't think your ultimate integrationist ever thought integration
was going to solve the whole thing. I think some of the other people
who had been against it and then flipflopped over to it made demands
on it that some of us who had worked through the process never
expected. We didn't think it was going to make a tremendous, immediate
difference. But it was a process which had to be entered into and
carried on through. And the sooner and saner you can get started, why,
the better off you are.
          When you look at the Southern situation, the racial situation, so
far as the mechanics of the thing is concerned, it has made more
advances than many of us in 1940 could have expected. But these
advances that have been made haven't gotten the heart of the
thing. The heart of the thing lies deep in the culture of the white
man and in the culture of the black man.
          So that's where the real problem is-the integration, we had to come
through that phase. But we ain't there yet. We ain't there yet, and
we're not anywhere close to that. But we've gotten up the mountain far
enough that we car be over it and see what some of the other peaks are
and how high they are. The latter and more troublesome half of the
journey is still there. 
          
            Historian Cliff Kuhn was a co-producer of the "Living Atlanta" series and the producer
of the "A Southern Profile" series.
          
        