Two Years of Integration--Rancor and Progress

Two years have passed since the Supreme Court abolished segregated schools, a bewildering two years which have found the South covered like a battleground; murderers of Negroes acquitted; Negroes severed from their jobs, liberal whites threatened with ostracism, and violence sometimes just around the corner. Despite the forth-coming election of Herman Talmadge in Georgia and the loudly proclaimed growth of the Citizens Councils, however, the process of integration in public schools is, and will continue to be, one of progress, conditioned only be experience and circumstance.

These first two years have proven that Southerners who said it could not be done are wrong. There are the examples of Kentucky, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Delaware, Maryland, and increased stirring in other states. Far more significant, too, there is the wail of Jim Eastland to his Deep South colleagues that, unless integration in the border states is stopped, it will inevitably spread to his center of Anglo-Saxon purity. But this period, with its trials, disappointments, and its bitterness, has also served to remind people of what Southern liberals have often said--in a sometimes weak and strained voice: that the issue must be handled with a delicacy almost new to American social and political progress.

There are no easy solutions to the South's problems. Indeed, the greatest danger for the forces of progress is the easy generalization, the lumping of the good with the bad, the single approach to the many pressures and difficulties. There is no single voice of the South.

A Pragmatic Approach

For this reason, the only effective approach to the integration problem seems to be a pragmatic one. Neither a flabby gradualism nor the use of federal troops can achieve a humane and realistic answer to this emotion-charged issue. Instead, the NAACP should move as fast as it can--as fast as particular local conditions will allow. Gradualism, which has become the off-the-hook byword in a presidential campaign, must not assume that because resistance is strong in some areas and the process will be slow, the integration everywhere in the South should not be rushed.

The South today, however, is a highly diversified area. Local situations are conditioned by many things: population trends, size of the community, Negro population, the degree of industrialism, tradition of suffrage or lack of suffrage, and strength of local Negro and white leaders. The same type of voluntary arrangement which will produce integration in Louisville, Kentucky, will produce nothing in Louisville, Mississippi.

In the past, the NAACP has often moved in areas where maximum resistance could be expected: in the Mississippi delta area, for instance, where the Negro sometimes outnumbers the white and where feudal relationships are strongest. In the future, however, the NAACP should confine actual integration cases either to major Southern cities--such as Atlanta, Birmingham, and Jackson--where indications are that natural development has brought the races to a point where integration is possible, or to areas where the Negro population is negligible--such as the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Southern Leaders--Planning

While the NAACP goes forward as quickly as it can, responsible Southern leaders must be enlisted on their side, without the false maintenance of disclaimers of radicalism that are really the well-springs of inaction. It is, admittedly, not easy to make definite progress in some areas at present; neither, is it sound to criticize Citizens Councils and leave things at that. Southern leaders must stop equating the Councils with the NAACP, for they are really unequal groups. It is time to stop talking about integration in progressive terms while attending a convention up North and then keeping silent back home. It is time to begin planning for the community's future; whether it be the formation of a joint committee, the enfranchisement of the local Negroes, or the first unsteady, unsure steps of integration.

The Southern leader must grasp the significance of the polls and conversations that show the average man opposed to integration, but nevertheless certain that it is coming. It is time to impress upon the people of the South both the significance, and more important, the inherent dangers of this split.

Montgomery--Coming of Age

For if the Montgomery bus strike proves anything, it shows that no longer are the local whites going to "tell" the passive Negro what to do; in more and more instances they will discuss it mutually. Montgomery, in its quiet, spontaneous way, demonstrates that the Negro is attaining his political and economic potential.

If the South's leaders continue to disregard these aspirations of the Negro for dignity and recognition, then they are not only denying the Negro the benevolences of a court order, they are also trying to refute what is becoming fact. The Negro is coming of age: unless he is accepted, his energies will become diverted against the community.

It is foolish to admit integration is coming and then delay for the sake of delay. The time to start working towards it is now; the day has arrived when Southerners must study both the problem it represents and the even greater problems it will bring. "This is not a question of what we want to do, this is a fact," a superintendent of schools in a deep South city recently told his teachers, "this is a fact, and we must start now to divest ourselves of any predjudice against the Negro race and to teach each child regardless of who he is."

In the final analysis, as he realized, the Court, the NAACP, and Thurgood Marshall all can do only so much; the future of integration and, more important, the future of the Southern community in the next fifty years depends on the mutual co-operation of whites and Negroes. If any decent way of life can be achieved, a meeting of friends and hearts will be its instrument.