LETTER FROM THE SOUTH
61
This war between the Southern cities and states is of the utmost
importance, not only for the South, but for the nation. The Southern
states are still very largely governed by people whose political lives,
insofar, at least, as they are able to conceive of life or politics, are
dependent on the people in the rural regions. It might, indeed, be
more honorable to try to guide these people out of their pain and
ignorance instead of locking them within it, and battening on it; but
it is, admittedly, a difficult task to try to tell people the truth and
it is clear that most Southern politicians have no intention of attempting
it. The attitude of these people can only have the effect of stiffening the
already implacable Negro resistance, and this attitude is absolutely
certain, sooner or later, to create great trouble in the cities. When a
race riot occurs in Atlanta, it ,¥ill not spread merely to Birmingham,
for example. (Birmingham is a doomed city.) The trouble will spread
to every metropolitan center in the nation which has a significant Negro
population. And this is not only because the ties between Northern and
Southern Negroes are still very close. It is because the nation, the entire
nation, has spent a hundred years avoiding the question of the place
of the black man in it.
That this has done terrible things to black men is not even a
question. "Integration," said a very light Negro to me in Alabama,
"has always worked very well in the South, after the sun goes down."
"It's not miscegenation," said another Negro to me, "unless a black
man's involved." Now, I talked to many Southern liberals who were
doing their best to bring integration about in the South, but met
scarcely a single Southerner who did not weep for the passing of the
old order. They were perfectly sincere, too, and, within their limits,
they were right. They pointed out how Negroes and whites in the South
had loved each other, they recounted to me tales of devotion and
heroism which the old order had produced, and which, now, would
never come again. But the old black men I looked at down there–
those same black men that the Southern liberal had loved, for whom,
until now, the Southern liberal and not only the liberal, has been willing
to undergo great inconvenience and danger-they were not weeping.
Men do not like to be protected, it emasculates them. This is what
black men know, it is the reality they have lived with; it is what white
men do not want to know. It is not a pretty thing to be a father and
be ultimately dependent on the power and kindness of some other man
for the well-being of your house.
But what this evasion of the Negro's humanity has done to the
nation is not so well known. The really striking thing, for me, in the
