10
PARTISAN REVIEW
city will be out of power. I did not meet a soul
in
Atlanta (I naturally
did not meet any members of the White Citizen's Council, not, anyway,
to talk to) who did not pray that the present Mayor would be re–
elected. Not that they loved him particularly, but it is his administration
which holds off the holocaust.
Now this places Atlanta's wealthy Negroes
in
a really quite sinister
position. Though both they and the Mayor are devoted to keeping the
peace, their aims and his are not, and cannot be, the same. Many of
those lawyers are working day and night on test cases which the Mayor is
doing his best to keep out of court. The teachers spend their working
day attempting to destroy in their students-and it is not too much to
say, in themselves-those habits of inferiority which form one of the
principal cornerstones of segregation as it is practiced in the South.
Many of the parents listen to speeches by people like Senator Russell
and find themselves unable to sleep at night. They are
in
the ex–
traordinary position of being compelled to work for the destruction
of all they have bought so dearly-their homes, their comfort, the
safety of their children. But the safety of their children is merely
comparative; it is all that their comparative strength as a class has
bought them so far; and they are not safe, really, as long as the bulk
of Atlanta's Negroes live in such darkness. On any night,
in
that other
part of town, a policeman may beat up one Negro too many, or some
Negro or some white man may simply go berserk. This is all it takes
to drive so delicately balanced a city mad. And the island on which
these Negroes have built their handsome houses will simply disappear.
This is not at all in the interests of Atlanta, and almost everyone
there knows it. Left to itself, the city might grudgingly work out com–
promises designed to reduce the tension and raise the level of Negro
life. But it is not left to itself; it belongs to the state of Georgia. The
Negro vote has no power in the state, and the Governor of Georgia–
that "third-rate man," Atlantans call him-makes great political capital
out of keeping the Negroes in their place. When six Negro ministers at–
.tempted to create a test case by ignoring the segregation ordinance on
the busses, the Governor was ready to declare martial law and hold
the ministers incommunicado. It was the Mayor who prevented this,
who somehow squashed all publicity, treated the ministers with every
outward sign of respect, and it is his office which is preventing the
case from coming into court. And remember that it was the Governor
of Arkansas, in an insane bid for political power, who created the
present crisis in Little Rock-against the will of most of its citizens and
agairut the will of the Mayor.
