ARGUMENTS
413
I am thinking, in this connection, of a young man, tall, quite thin,
with straplike muscles and a supple body. His mother approached me
one day over a year ago with a confidence. She was a poor woman from
a sharecropper farm in South Carolina, and her son had recently led
his race into a white high school of the deep South. The situation was
still a little incredible to her: the ugly, incessant telephone calls that
went on for three months before the start of desegregation, the police
visits and the police escort for her son when the opening day arrived,
the press, the television, and her son's stories, over the following weeks,
of harsh words and quiet, puzzled faces from silent white adolescents
who didn't know what to think or say or do. Like him, they were con–
fused, because what they had learned when they were younger was in
conflict with what they were experiencing. Yet most of them were de–
termined to study, just as he was determined to stay with them and
study. It was this common, very simple determination, rather than any
ideological enlightenment that carried them together through the year.
The youth was in a school where he met much less scorn than others
had met in his city or in other cities. Now well past his initiation, her
son had gone to a football game between two Negro high schools, one
of them formerly his, and had seen a razor pulled, a fight develop, a
person hurt. "Mother, they're animals," he said, "they're animals, and
you know it when you go to a white school and see how civilized people
behave." She was a heavy woman who never could resist starches, and
she finished the last of a doughnut and told me:
"If
that's integration,
for my boy to talk like that, I want to go back to our farm."
I had seen worse than this. In a Southern college recently desegre–
gated, social and economic distinctions and snobberies that apparently
exist as much within as between races, appeared among the three Ne–
groes pioneering desegregation. In the midst of the agony of public out–
cry, of heckling and jeering shared by all three, one poor Negro was
"cut" by the others, finding himself slighted by his two Negro classmates.
I recall all the mixed motives, all the ambivalence of the white and
Negro parents alike in New Orleam, and all the usual range of hesita–
tion and suspicion, trust and kindness I saw among the Negro students
in Atlanta and elsewhere. Do these people need to be sanctified by con–
verting them into aristocrats? Under stress, I have not heard too many
claims from them to special worth or insight. On the contrary, they are
anxious to be quite realistic about themselves, even willing to say as
one did to me, "I get a kick out of the people who make a big thing
out of what we do.... I know it's important, but I'm getting a lot out
of it too, and I'm not so pure as some of those speeches say...." (He
