LETTER FROM THE SOUTH
79
that he had never in his life owned anything, not his wife, not his
house, not his child, which could not, at any instant, be taken from
him
by the power of white people. This is what paternalism means.
And for the rest of the time that I was
in
the South I watched the
eyes of old black men.
Atlanta's well-to-do Negroes never take busses, for they all have
cars. The section in which they live is quite far away from the poor
Negro section. They own, or at least are paying for, their own homes.
They drive to work and back, and have cocktails and dinner with
each other. They see very little of the white world; but
th~
are cut
off from the black world, too.
Now, of course, this last statement is not literally true. The teachers
teach Negroes, the lawyers defend them. The ministers preach to them
and bury them, and others insure their lives, pull their teeth, and
cure their ailments. Some of the lawyers work with the NAACP and
help push test cases through the courts.
(If
anything, by the way,
disproves the charge of "extremism" which has so often been made
against this organization, it is the fantastic care and patience such
legal efforts demand.) Many of the teachers work very hard to bolster
the morale of their students, and prepare them for their new re–
sponsibilities; nor did those I met fool themselves about the hideous
system under which they work. So when I say that they are cut off
from the black world, I am not sneering, which, indeed, I scarcely
have any right to do. I am talking about their position as a class–
if
they are a class-and their role in a very complex and shaky social
structure.
The wealthier Negroes are, at the moment, very useful for the
administration of the city of Atlanta, for they represent there the
potential, at least, of interracial communication. That this phrase is
a euphemism,
in
Atlanta as elsewhere, becomes clear when one con–
siders how astonishingly little has been communicated in all these
generations. What the phrase almost always has reference to is the
fact that, in a given time and place, the Negro vote is of sufficient
value to force politicians to bargain for it. What interracial communica–
tion also refers to is that Atlanta is really growing and thriving, and
because it wants to make even more money, it would like to prevent
incidents that disturb the peace, discourage investments, and permit
test cases, which the city of Atlanta would certainly lose, to come to
the courts. Once this happens, as it certainly will one day, the state
of Georgia will be up in arms and the present administration of the
