'Not Our Kind of People'

A Southern accent immediately conjures thoughts of provincialism. Indeed, upon coming to Harvard the Southern student himself--in some early search for companionship--tends to seek affinity with students from his own region.

As a result, one of the first lessons a Southerner learns on arrival here is that he is not part of a great brotherhood inherently bound together in common aims and ideals. His education begins quickly. Classmates from the North however, are a little slower to catch onto the fact that Southerner means nothing more than a person from the South.

"When I first got here I had to stay up most of the first night convincing my roommate that I wasn't going to burn a cross in the living room or something like that. He wanted to move out," one sophomore from Georgia related. "He was from Connecticut."

Divergent Backgrounds

One major reason for the Southern students' failure to conform to a certain image lies in the fact that they actually represent a vast divergence of background. Historic sea ports like Charleston and New Orleans resemble Boston or a West Coast port; inland cities like Chattanooga or Atlanta are primarily industrial, farming, and rail centers.

There exists, however, among Southerners at Harvard a difference greater than that of separate kinds of origin. They do not, significantly, all fit the traditional pattern of white, Protestant, Bible-carrying segregationists. Their race and religion are as varied as that of any geographical group of comparable size.

Each year approximately 100 students from below the line of Mason and Dixon enter the Harvard freshman class. They arrive in Cambridge as eager and awed as any. Some, of course, arrive with a chip on their shoulder and with a few choice words concerning Little Rock. These few have ample--indeed, abundant--opportunity to express their defense of segregation, Faubus, and States Rights, for they will find roommates equally eager to argue.

"The Constitution says that all powers not expressly delegated to the Federal government remain in the power of the States! And the Constitution does not even mention education! States Rights!"

"But the fourteenth amendment says no inequality shall be based on race!"

"But the Negro schools are equal! Separate but equal!"

Southerners Grow Resigned

The first term arguments are interminable. Slowly then, as the weeks pass, these Southerners who were at first so ready to argue acquire a certain resignation. Not that they have capitulated, but rather that they have begun to see the impossibility of convincing their opponents; their opponents learn the same lesson, but perhaps a little slower.

Thus those Southerners who are convinced of the need for segregation in the South at last begin to keep their views to themselves, while in Harvard's liberal atmosphere.

"Man, I figure there's just no sense arguing with them. They've just got no idea how things are down there. They try to sit up North here and tell us how to get along. No sense arguing with them. Just ignore them."

So they often let pass without comment the idle jokes and comments on Southern life. They overlook the professor's aspersion on Faubus and the preacher's praise of Martin Luther King.

But just occasionally, among themselves, they tell their thoughts. "I know what they say about white, Protestant Southerners coming from the Bible belt, and all that, but I tell you, this is just not our kind of people up here," one confided.

Remember, however, that the number of Southern students who thus actively broadcast their discontents is relatively small. A far greater number, indeed the majority, attempt a quiet, less dogmatic approach to the integration problem. Perhaps it is because their manner is more relaxed and their conclusions less dogmatic that they form the generally unheard Southern voice.

This second group of Southern undergraduate opinion differs from the first chiefly in that it recognizes a problem in the present segregation practices of the South, yet generally disapproves of the current measures designed to abruptly end segregation.

At the opposite end of the poll the third group of Southern students at Harvard represent the fair-haired children of the Arkansas Gazette and the Northern press in general. These are the "enlightened" Southerners with opinions born in the South and crystallized upon exposure to Harvard's benign influence.

"I love the South now, understand that," one student from Georgia began, "but they're kidding themselves down there. The South has got to grow up."

Harvard May Not Change Minds

Quite possibly a Harvard education does not substantially affect the opinions and certainties of any of these three groups on the matter of segregation. An ardent supporter of school segregation will read Brown vs Board of Education in Government 1 and emerge more convinced than ever of the unsoundness of the decision.

"Where they refer to six sociologists there...why, three of them have been cited for Communist activity."

The Southern liberal reads the same brief and finds in it only new proof of his position.

As with all students, Harvard provides Southerners with the advantages of a superior Liberal Arts education, but this education sways the Southern view on segregation--pro and con-scarcely at all. The College can provide them no formula for arriving at a single unchallengable answer and so each goes still his private way.

Perhaps the greatest educational benefit of Southerners attending Harvard is bestowed on their Northern and Eastern classmates who learn that the Southerners' ideas and ideals, however divergent, are based on reasoning and sincere conviction and are not just the product of the Theodore Bilbos.