by I. F. Stone
Before the war and the witch hunt, when there were still organizations like the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, there would have been public meetings of protest under mixed auspices. It shames our country and it shames white Americans that the only meetings, in Harlem, Baltimore, Chicago and Detroit, have been Negro meetings. Those whites in the South and in the North who would normally have been moved to act have been hounded out of public life and into inactivity. To the outside world it must look as if the conscience of white America has been silenced, and the appearance is not too deceiving. Basically all of us whites, North and South, acquiesce in white supremacy, and benefit from the pool of cheap labor created by it.
Will the Negro take this latest outrage? Unless Negroes rouse themselves to make their indignation felt in some dramatic way, nothing will be done in Mississippi or in Congress. A. Philip Randolph last Sunday suggested a march on Washington like that which dramatized the FEPC fight before Pearl Harbor. Were thousands of Negroes to converge on the Department of Justice and demand action against the murders of Till, and of the other Negroes whose recent murders have gone unpunished in the South, such a demonstration would have an impact. The American Negro needs a Gandhi to lead him, and we need the American Negro to lead us. If he does not provide leadership against the sickness in the South, the time will come when we will all pay a terrible price for allowing a psychopathic racist brutality to flourish unchecked.
Eisenhower Goes Neutralist—On Civil Rights
The “neutralism” Stone refers to is that of the so-called nonaligned movement of nations that refused to choose sides in the Cold War struggle between East and West. Here he castigates the cowardice of mainstream American politicians like Eisenhower, eager to avoid alienating either northern liberals or southern racists, who refused to choose sides in the clear-cut moral struggle between Jim Crow and racial equality.
. . .
September 17, 1956
NEUTRALISM HAS BEEN MADe a dirty word in American politics. Both parties are against it. We are constantly being treated to homilies from the White House and the State Department on the wickedness of being morally neutralist. But apparently these high principles only apply to disputes between the United States (right) and the U.S.S.R. (wrong), in which Pandit Nehru (by refusing to take our side) demonstrates incorrigibility.
The President at press conference the other day delivered himself of an impromptu message on integration which was afterward filmed and is being shown in the movie houses. Mr. Eisenhower deplored the extremists “on both sides.” We weren’t hearing the people of good will in the South. “We hear the people who are adamant . . . they even resort to violence,” he said, “and the same way on the other side of the thing, the people who want to have the whole matter settled today.”
If we stop and translate this into realities, we will see that the President is adopting at home the moral neutralism he deplores abroad. Let us turn to Clay, Kentucky. There last week a mob of white miners and farmers massed near the Clay elementary school to prevent any Negroes from entering. These were the “adamant people” to whom the President referred. Several school days in a row they turned back a lone Negro woman who tried to enter her son of ten and her daughter of eight. Mrs. Louis Gordon finally gave up, and sent her children to an all-Negro school six miles away. “I just couldn’t continue to take them out there every day,” she told reporters. “They were in too much danger.” Mrs. Gordon is one of those people whom Mr. Eisenhower described as “on the other side of the thing, the people who want to have the whole matter settled today.”
We would like someone to ask the President how he can take that mob and that one brave Negro mother, and lump them together as “extremists.” The mob opposes enforcement of the law; the woman asks for her children the benefit of the Supreme Court’s decree. By any standard, isn’t the mob wrong and the woman right? Isn’t Mr. Eisenhower’s attitude “moral neutralism” of a real and obnoxious variety?
Is it fair to speak of Mrs. Gordon as wanting “the whole matter settled today”? Isn’t this an invidious way to describe what is happening? The Supreme Court decision is three years old. Unless her children are admitted “today,” i.e., at the beginning of this year’s school term, they must wait another year. And another year means, for them, as for many colored children in the South, another year of traveling a long extra way from home to school. “Six miles away” is twelve extra miles of travel daily, no small matter for children of eight and ten. Do they walk or ride? And if they ride, who pays their fare? These are bread and butter questions in most Negro homes.
Mr. Eisenhower says we aren’t hearing the people of good will in the South. Their voice is not heard because the same mob spirit which overwhelms the Negro also cows them into silence. If the President is afraid to speak clearly, what can they (themselves a minority) say with the mob outside? This is what Adlai Stevenson meant when he told the Liberal party in New York last week that it was the President’s duty to create “a climate of compliance.” This was what Adlai courageously was trying to create when he told a hostile, often booing, American Legion in Los Angeles the week before that we could not convince other nations that we believe in justice “when mobs prevent Negro children from lawfully attending school.”
We were sorry Adlai had to spoil his Liberal party speech by invoking that double talk from the Democratic platform about rejecting “all proposals for the use of force to interfere with the orderly determination of these matters by the courts.” There will be no orderly determination without some show of force. A false dichotomy has been set up about force and persuasion. Both are needed. Neither can succeed without the other. But mobs can never be merely persuaded. They will overwhelm the good people of the community unless dealt with firmly. What progress has been made in Kentucky and Tennessee was made because Governors Chandler and Clement to their credit called out the militia to show that they meant business. And both Governors were able to act because of the political realities in these border states, which differ sharply from the Deep South in two ways. The Negro votes in Kentucky and Tennessee. Both have a two-party system.
In the one-party Deep South, where the Negro if he votes at all has no real choice, integration has not made a dent. All those fancy compilations only hide the fact that outside of the western fringe of Texas, which is more western than southern, the only progress is in the border states. Everywhere from Virginia on, the South is preparing to nullify the law, to resist it, and there are too few places where Negroes have been able even to file suit. Unless some firm moves toward enforcing compliance are soon made from Washington, the lines may harden for a long, long fight in which the South, its destiny and its good people, will more and more come under the control of the worst elements and poison the political life of the whole country. Behind the school struggle is the shadow of a conflict as grave as slavery created. The South must become either truly democratic or the base of a new racist and Fascist movement which could threaten the whole country and its institutions. On this, more than any other issue, fresh leadership in the White House is urgent.
The Beginnings of a Revolution
In the fall of 1957, the focus of the nascent civil rights movement was on Little Rock, Arkansas, where the integration of all-white Central High School by nine black students was blocked on September 4 by National Guard forces called out by Governor Orval Faubus, ostensibly to avert violence provoked by “outside extremists.” In fact, the only violence was threatened by local white mobs determined to prevent blacks from attending their schools. By the end of the month, President Eisenhower was forced to send in 1,000 soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division and to federalize the Arkansas National Guard. Under military guard, the nine black students successfully enrolled in Central High, although the battle for integration wasn’t over: In 1958, the public high schools in Little Rock were actually shut for a year in a last-ditch attempt to prevent whites and blacks from studying together. Not until 1972 were all grades in Littl
e Rock public schools finally integrated.
. . .
September 16, 1957
WHAT WE ARE SEEING IN THE SOUTH is something which resembles a revolution. The government is trying to bring about a deeply unpopular change. The moderates have been counseling peaceful resistance, and undermining respect for the agencies of government. The moment has now come when leadership passes to the extremists, who advocate force and violence. The street mobs have begun to take control.
The mobs are only a handful, and those who would resort to violence are still a minority. But that minority has so much power because its aims are the wishes of the majority—to block integration. The power of the mob may be measured by the silence of the South’s normal leadership. Except for the Mayor of Little Rock, no public figure has spoken up for obedience to law. No senator from the South, no governor, no member of Congress, no leader of the bar, has dared publicly utter a restraining word. This dead silence may prove to be the inner “eye” of a hurricane.
It is whispered in Washington that unless something is done soon by the federal government the moderates will be destroyed politically. The southern senators only a few weeks ago looked like shrewd and skillful statesmen. Now they appear to be appeasers and quislings. How can they compete with a Governor who calls out the National Guard to prevent integration? The niceties of senatorial footwork would look ludicrous if explained to a southern audience which has just seen action.
The best the moderates offered was a long, slow, delaying action. To the extremists this was only a gradual form of surrender. They have taken the offensive in the border states of Arkansas and Tennessee where integration had already begun. They can claim to be pushing integration back, instead of retreating slowly before it. The extremists have outbid the moderates.
The moderates prepared their own downfall. In the state legislatures, the moderates enacted nullification. In Congress all last spring during the civil rights debate, the moderates helped to intensify in the South a pathological state of mind: suspicion of the Supreme Court, distrust of all federal judges, a feeling that alien and esoteric forces were plotting against the South and its “way of life.” The moderates, when a little integrity and courage might still have counted, pandered to the view that resistance to law was an almost sacred duty for white southerners, a pious obligation they owed their past. Faubus, the mobs and the dynamiters are only acting out what the moderates taught them.
The mob itself is what mobs usually are, unstable fringe elements, eager for any occasion to vent long pent-up hatreds, hatred of their own ugly selves they spew outward on whatever their social conditioning makes the target. The South has more than the normal quota of such sick souls, as it has more than the normal quota of poverty, ignorance and shiftlessness plus a frontier habit of violence. The average southern white is probably more afraid of the mob than the average southern Negro, since the former fears his own good instincts, which might betray him into “nigger loving” opposition. The latter may regard the mob as an almost normal recurrence of white bestiality which one may avoid without loss of self-respect.
These human scarecrows and juvenile delinquents in the news photos and on the television screens might become a majority overnight. If they can provoke a race riot, if they can make the issue seem starkly North versus South, the United States could find itself in the gravest crisis since Fort Sumter. Every day’s delay by the President, whose enormous personal prestige might be put to good use at this juncture, risks irreversible events.
Unfortunately we have a President who is nine-tenths figurehead. A figurehead must be manipulated. There seems to be no one around to tell him what to do, and so he turns up in the same picture pages, happily relaxing on the eighteenth green. “Mr. Brownell also informed the President,” the New York Times reported almost tongue in cheek, “that a Nashville school had been bombed. Mr. Hagerty said the President’s reaction to this had been ‘the same as anyone else’s would be—he thought it was a terrible thing.’” The gaping walls of the Hattie Cotton School are not as terrible as this gaping vacuum in the presidency.
If the situation were not so deadly serious, one would be tempted to satirize the contrast between the airlift swiftly unloading arms six thousand miles away in Jordan to meet an exaggerated crisis in Syria with the irresolution the government shows at home. The dangers of communism seem to arouse Washington much more quickly than those of racism, though the latter comes up in a form which is a fundamental challenge to law itself.
This is a time to see ourselves as others see us. The ugly hate-filled faces of the whites in Little Rock and Nashville, the bravery of the Negro children and their parents, the minister knocked down and beaten in Birmingham, the poor feeble-minded Negro emasculated by Klansmen just to prove their mettle, are giving the colored majority on this planet a picture of us it will be hard to eradicate. Whether here or in Algiers, the white race just doesn’t seem as civilized as it claims to be.
The Wall Between
Here is Stone’s review of The Wall Between, a memoir by Kentucky reporter and social activist Anne Braden, which focuses on the attacks she suffered after selling a house in an all-white Louisville neighborhood to a black family as a protest against segregation. In the decades that followed, Braden continued to work for racial peace and justice, founding Progress in Education and the Kentucky branch of the Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression to ease the stress of school desegregation in the 1970s. She died on March 6, 2006.
. . .
September 15, 1958
ANNE BRADEN GREW UP IN THE SOUTH on the right side of the tracks. She came, as they say in the South, of a good family. Very early she began to feel there was something wrong in the relations between the races. Her family was always kind to the Negro family who worked for them. “But something happened to me,” Mrs. Braden writes in her book, The Wall Between (Monthly Review Press), “each time I looked at the Negro girl who always inherited my clothes. . . . She would sit in a straight chair in our kitchen waiting for her mother. . . . She would sit there looking uncomfortable, my old faded dress binding her at the waist and throat. And some way I knew that this was not what Jesus meant when he said to clothe the naked.”
Anne became a newspaperwoman and married a fellow reporter, Carl, who came most decidedly from the other side of the tracks. His family was Catholic, the father an agnostic and Socialist who lost his job in the 1922 railway shopmen’s strike. The family had known poverty ever since. Carl, at the age of thirteen, went into a pro-seminary to prepare for the priesthood but at sixteen decided it was not for him. He became a newspaperman in Louisville, Kentucky. “A police reporter,” he once told his wife, “has to become one of three things—a drunk, a cynic, or a reformer.” Carl chose the third course, and it led him in 1954 to agree when a Negro veteran, Andrew Wade, asked the Bradens to buy a house for him in a new white neighborhood in Louisville. The house was dynamited, and the state authorities, instead of prosecuting the dynamiters, indicted the Bradens and five other residents of Louisville for sedition. Braden, first to be tried, was sent to jail for fifteen years, and saved only by the miracle of the Supreme Court’s Steve Nelson decision.
Anne Braden has told the whole story in her book, The Wall Between, and told it with the depth and objectivity of a first-rate novel. All that is happening elsewhere in the integration crisis is lit up for us by this story of what that attack on housing segregation did in and to liberal Louisville. Mrs. Braden writes with compassion for the prisons in which men seal themselves up. She sees the “paralyzed liberals” of Louisville, like its cross burners, as “trapped men.” She even tried, in one of the most memorable episodes of the book, to understand her fellow southerner, the prosecutor, Scott Hamilton, who was trying his best to send her and her husband to prison on trumped-up charges he himself had come to believe. “If circumstances,” she asked herself, “somewhere in the past of both our lives had been different, would I perhaps have been on his side of this battle or h
e on mine?” This was the same young woman who could firmly refuse to answer questions about the books she read and the organizations to which she belonged. “I think we have enough McCarthys in this country,” she said defiantly when taken before a judge, “without the grand jury turning into one.”
The Bradens walked through the valley of the shadow of the witch hunt. An FBI informer perjured herself to call Braden a Communist; he denied it under oath. The House Un-American Committee sent down agents to frighten Andrew Wade, the Negro they had risked so much to help, and got him to say things one only says about a man and a woman one does not trust. The transcript of what Wade said in a moment of weakness gave Anne Braden the most terrible moment of the whole experience, one in which she felt “that the things we had been working for—a world without segregation, a world of understanding and brotherhood—had turned to dust in my hand.” But the moment passed. Both Wade and the Bradens recovered from it. Her book is a worthy record of a great experience, the warming story of a heroic couple’s abiding faith.
When the Bourbon Flowed
As the Little Rock school integration crisis continues, Stone visits Arkansas and sketches a vivid portrait of two worlds, black and white—deeply intertwined yet mutually uncomprehending.
. . .
September 22, 1958
WE TOOK THE FIRST PLANE out of Washington for Little Rock after hearing Chief Justice Warren read a tense and crowded courtroom the order that integration proceed. The plane’s first stop was at Nashville, and passengers came aboard carrying its evening newspaper, the Banner. A black headline across page one indicated that we had reached the South. It said, with White Citizens Council objectivity, “Mix Now, Little Rock Told.” On the editorial page, under the caption “Education Be Hanged!” there was a cartoon which pictured the Chief Justice as a burly man leaning arrogantly on a huge gavel. Behind him was a blackboard on which he had triumphantly crossed out the word “deliberate” in the phrase, “all deliberate speed,” and written in the word “breakneck.” A page one Associated Press bulletin claimed that a “jubilant” Mrs. Daisy Bates, local leader of the NAACP, had “hinted” that she expected “more mixing” soon, though I was later to learn that Mrs. Bates in Little Rock was harder to reach than the Secretary of State on Duck Island and twice as cautious and that any such “hint” must have been deduced by the AP man from the way she said “no comment.” A staff correspondent in Little Rock quoted the Reverend Wesley Pruden, the segregationist leader, as saying, “The South will not accept this outrage, which a Communist-dominated government is trying to lay on us.” This was my introduction to a regional journalism which prints such statements matter-of-factly.