LETTER FROM THE SOUTH
75
Before arriving in Atlanta I had spent several days in Charlotte,
North Carolina. This
is
a bourgeois town, Presbyterian, pretty-if you
like towns-and socially so hermetic that it contains scarcely a single
decent restaurant. I was told that Negroes there are not even licensed
to become electricians or plumbers. I was also told, several times, by
white people, that "race relations" there were excellent. I failed to
find a single Negro who agreed with this, which is the usual story of
"race relations" in this country. Charlotte, a town of 165,000, was
in a ferment when I was there because, of its 50,000 Negroes, four
had been assigned to previously all-white schools, one to each school.
In
fact, by the time I got there, there were only three. Dorothy Counts,
the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, after several days of being
stoned and spat on by the moh--"spit," a woman told me, "was
hanging from the hem of Dorothy's dress"-had withdrawn from
Harding High. Several white students, I was told, had called-not
called
on-Miss
Counts, to beg her to stick it out. Harry Golden,
editor of
The Carolina Israelite,
suggested that the "hoodlum element"
might not so hav,e shamed the town and the nation if several of the
town's leading businessmen had personally escorted Miss Counts to
school.
I saw the Negro schools in Charlotte, saw, on street corners, several
of their alumnae, and read about others who had been sentenced to
the chain gang. This solved the mystery of just what made Negro parents
send their children out to face mobs. White people do not understand
this because they do not know, and do not want to know, that the
alternative to this ordeal is nothing less than a lifelong ordeal. Those
Negro parents who spend their days trembling for their children and
the rest of their time praying that their children have not been too
badly damaged inside, are not doing this out of "ideals" or "con–
victions" or because they are in the grip of a perverse desire to send
their children where "they are not wanted." They are doing it because
they want the child to receive the education which will allow him to
defeat, possibly escape, and not impossibly help one day abolish the
stifling environment in which they see, daily, so many children perish.
This is certainly not the purpose, still less the effect, of most Negro
schools. It is hard enough, God knows, under the best of circumstances,
to get an education in this country. White children are graduated
yearly who can neither read, write, nor think, and who are in a state
of the most abysmal ignorance concerning the world around them.
But at least they are white. They are under the illusion-which, since
they are so badly educated, sometimes has a fatal tenacity-that they
