VARI ElY
FAULKNER
AND DESEGREGATION
Any real change implies the
breakup of the world as one has
always known it, the loss of all
that gave one an identity, the
end of safety. And at such a mo–
ment, unable to see and not daring
to imagine what the future will
now bring forth, one clings to
what one knew, or thought one
knew; to what one possessed or
dreamed that one possessed. Yet,
it is only when a man is able,
without bitterness or self-pity, to
surrender a dream he has long
cherished or a privilege he has
long possessed that he is set free
-he has set himself free-for
higher dreams, for greater priv–
ileges. All men have gone through
this, go through it, each accord–
ing to his degree, throughout their
lives. It is one of the irreducible
facts of life. And remembering this,
especially since I am a Negro, af–
fords me almost my only means
of understanding what is happen–
ing in the minds and hearts of
white Southerners today.
For the arguments with which
the bulk of relatively articulate
white Southerners of good-will
have met the necessity of desegre–
gation have no value whatever as
arguments, being almost entirely
and helplessly dishonest, when not,
indeed, insane. After more than
two hundred years in slavery and
ninety years of quasi-freedom, it
is hard to think very highly
of William Faulkner's advice to
"go slow." "They don't mean go
slow," Thurgood Marshall is re–
ported to have said, "they mean
don't go." Nor is the squire of
Oxford very persuasive when he
suggests that white Southerners,
left to their own devices, will real–
ize that their own social structure
looks silly to the rest of the world
and correct it of their own accord.
It has looked silly, to use Faulk–
ner's rather strange adjective, for a
long time; so far from trying to
correct it, Southerners, who seem
to be characterized by a species
of defiance most perverse when it
is most despairing, have clung to
it, at incalculable cost to them–
selves, as the only conceivable and
as an absolutely sacrosanct way of
life. They have never seriously con–
ceded that their social structure
was mad. They have insisted, on
the contrary, that everyone who
criticized it was mad.
Faulkner goes further. He con–
cedes the madness and moral
wrongness of the South but at the
same time he raises it to the level
of a mystique which makes it
somehow unjust to discuss South–
ern society in the same terms in
which one would discuss any other
society. "Our position is wrong and
untenable," says Faulkner, "but it
is not wise to keep an emotional
