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SRC 32 Conference
(Day 1, Tape 2)
Brian Ward: And miraculously, you will notice that a University of Florida exhibit has
appeared, and an exhibitor. Meredith Marisbab is over there, she will
whore her wares around amongst you-I'm sure there's another turn a
phrase that I could have used, but you know exactly what I mean.
Seriously, peruse the books, do not steal; very, very bad form, very, very
bad form. I'm sure there is a generous conference discount available, am I
right? The exhibits manager says thirty percent. We can probably haggle it
up to thirty-five [percent] if we do well. Alright, I'm pleased to announce
that we have the second session about to get underway, and our very own
Jack Davis from the University of Florida is going to be chairing it, so
thank you Jack.
Jack Davis:
Thank you, and welcome to Gainesville. I hope you do get a chance to
see the Gainesville area and also the more beautiful parts of the UF
campus because it is a really nice place. It'd be a shame if we all had to
stay inside for the next few days since the weather is promising to be so
great, so try to get out to other places besides bars. [laughing] We have
two speakers, David Chappell, who teaches history at the University of
Arkansas, and he is the author of the book Inside Agitators, published by
Johns Hopkins Press in 1994, and the forthcoming book, A Story of Hope:
Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, which is due out in
December and will be published by UNC Press. Many of his articles have
appeared in the Journal of American Studies, The African American
John Kirk:
Brian Ward:
Review, World Policy Review, and others. David will actually be our
second speaker. Our first speaker this morning will be John Kirk, who
teaches US History at Royal Holloway University of London. He is the
author of Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock,
Arkansas, 1940-1970, and also the author of numerous articles and
essays on the Civil Rights Movement. His latest book on the public
leadership career of Martin Luther King, Jr. will be published by Longman
Pearson Press next year. Again, we'll start with John Kirk.
Thank you. For better or for worse, and I suspect I'm just about to find out,
I took Brian at face value when he instructed us to talk to the published
papers rather than actually deliver a written paper itself.
Which is fifty pages.
John Kirk: Which is fifty pages, yeah, and they're all posted on the internet there on
the conference website. Of course, as a former graduate student of
Brian's, I should know by now that taking Brian's advice at face value can
only lead to trouble in one way or another, but I figure he's gotten by so
far, so why turn back now. The paper that's published on the internet is on
the Arkansas Council on Human Relations in the Civil Rights Movement in
Arkansas from 1954-1964, the first decade of operations of the human
relations council that actually went on for another decade from 1964-1974,
before finally merging with the local branch of the Urban League in Little
Rock. I think conceptually the paper breaks down to three sections, which
makes it easier to manage and hopefully easier to fathom. The first
section looks at the Arkansas Council on Human Relations as it facilitates
school desegregation from 1954, handed down by the Brown v. Board
decision, up to the outbreak of the Little Rock School Crisis in 1957. The
second section looks at the crisis years in Little Rock and how the
Arkansas Council on Human Relations relates to that, and from 1957 up to
the reopening of the schools up to closed them in August
1959. The third section looks at how the Arkansas Council relates to the
desegregation of the downtown facilities in the aftermath of the Little Rock
Crisis from 1960-1964. So that's the basic rubric of the paper. By way of
some sort of background introduction, historians of the past twenty years
or so have been trying to remap the history of the Civil Rights Movement,
moving away from national biased Montgomery to Memphis, Martin Luther
King centered national narrative, and they've been looking back to
developments amongst other places at a local level. Starting with Willy
Mays Chase book in 1980 on Civilities and Civil Rights about the
sittings in Greensboro in North Carolina and looking at those in a local
context. A number of studies have looked at the local and state
dimensions of the Civil Rights Movement, including Professor Narell's
excellent work on Tuskegee, Alabama, down to my own on Little Rock,
Arkansas, for this part of the University of Florida which is
available at a reasonable discounted price in the back-Meredith's here
and she forced me to say that-which came out last year. I think that's
collectively taught us a number of things, one of the things that they've
taught us is that the Civil Rights Movement has complex origins that go
back beyond the 1950s into the 1940s and 1930s and in some places
even beyond that. Another thing I think that the local studies have done is
allow us to look at national and regional based organizations at a local
level to look at what their affiliates are doing. For example, in Little Rock,
Arkansas, I explored the relationship between local branches of the
NAACP and the national based NAACP. I found a very sort of rancorous
relationship between the two; the two in constant bickering over aims and
tactics and goals and the way that the organization should operate. The
Arkansas Council on Human Relations office [was] a very different sort of
set, I think. The Arkansas Council I think quite accurately mirrors what's
going on at the Southern Regional Council level, and hopefully the point of
the paper is not just to offer some local flavor or some quaint sort of
adjuncts to the Southern Regional Council itself, but to hopefully offer a
tool for instructive analysis of the way that Southern Regional Council
operates as a whole in terms of its ethos, in terms of tactics, in terms of
the way it operates. Really what I want to do is look at that in a
if you like at a local level as to what's happening in
Arkansas. The Arkansas Council on Human Relations was founded in the
mid 1950s as a state organization, connected to the Southern Regional
Council across the south during that period, to try and help refocus efforts,
I think, to prepare communities for what was going to happen after the
1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision, to sort of pave the way
to educate, to provide hopefully a tolerant climate for the implementation
of Brown v. Board of Education. The two leading founders or the two
leading movers of the Arkansas Council on Human Relations were Halley
Actuar, who was editor of the Arkansas Gazette, on the one hand, and on
the other Fred Caderer, who was a local multi-millionaire businessman
and philanthropist. Together between them they instigated the reformation
of the Southern Regional Council branch in Arkansas to launch the
Arkansas Council on Human Relations. Interestingly, both were former
Gl's and both cited their experience in WV\II as forming the basis for
wanting to be involved in the Arkansas Council on Human Relations. The
first thing that they had to do was find an executive director and associate
director. The Arkansas Council on Human Relations was fairly limited
operationally-its numbers never really reached beyond 300 members in
the state-but even more focused than that, the executive director and
associate director were the two main parts, and they were the two people
who really drove the organization. They decided to appoint a man called
Matt Griswald to the executive director position, a white Methodist
minister. He was a native Arkansan who had been recreations director of
the Japanese-American relocation camps in Arkansas during WWII. He
moved around the country as a Methodist minister, and at the time he was
appointed to the Arkansas Council as executive director, he had been
working for the AFIC in Texas. So he took on the job of executive director,
and Christopher Mercer, one of the first African-American graduates of
the University of Arkansas Law School, took on the job of associate
director. That mapped out that the two poles would be divvied up for the
rest of the time that the organization [existed], that always executive
director and the associate director, one would be black and one would be
white, as a self-conscious attempt to be a truly interracial organization.
There was a great deal of optimism when Brown versus Board of
Education came down in Arkansas; many people saw Arkansas as a state
that might possibly lead-as a progressive state-they might possibly lead
the rest of the South in compliance with the Brown decision. Karias
Actuar, one of the two leading figures of the Southern Regional Council,
just the day after Brown versus Board of Education was handed down, he
wrote, 'Looking at the this morning, I'm right proud of the
South. on schedule, but virtually every other Southern
politician is standing on the high ground. If I had to define the prevailing
feeling here, and I believe this is generally true all over the South except
for the really hot spots, I would say it is one of relief that the other shoe
has finally dropped. I think I can see the beginning of the time I've always
dreamed of, where you can conduct a conversation in the South without it
degenerating into an argument over where a man should sit in a streetcar.'
Of course eighteen minutes later the Montgomery bus boy court begins,
which is almost directly that you can't have talk race
relations without an argument over where, in this case, a woman sits in
the streetcar. No less, I don't think Actuar is necessarily wrong, but I think
the court sort of reveals that didn't really anticipate the sort
of resistance the school would set up. It's the beginning of the resistance
to school desegregation that would eventually develop. In that first period
of its operations, the Arkansas Council on Human Relations in trying to
smooth the for school desegration from 1954-1957, I think it can be faster
understood by looking at developments in two different places and
comparing and contrasting those. One of them is in Little Rock, the state
capital of Arkansas, which many people thought was a beacon of
Southern progressivism. The place had been very successful in luring an
Army base during WWII, and the emergence of a progressive business
elite of managers and professionals had given the hope and optimism that
Little Rock would be a gleaming new size city. They had been particularly
successful in luring all the money and luring all the investment in the years
after WWII; hand in hand with that, they had significant changes within the
context of the times, the natural segregation. In 1948, Little Rock
desegregated its public library quite quietly but quite effectively. A number
of white and colored signs had been taken down from water fountains
downtown. The medical school in Little Rock desegregated, or at least I
mentioned its first black student in 1949; the year before, the University of
Arkansas fight mill had admitted its first black student into the law school,
the first black student to attend a Southern university since the twentieth
century. So there was the hope that Arkansas would be a leading beacon,
that Little Rock as the state capital would be that progressivism city, the
kind of city that the Supreme Court thought that school desegregation
might make progress in. The other place to contrast that with is a very
small settlement called Hocksey, Arkansas, just sitting right above the
Mississippi Arkansas Delta, just north of Memphis, a very small,
boondocks, backwoods kind of town. Now if you have to bet, if you're a
betting man, then you'd put your money of course on Little Rock being a
success for school desegregation, and Hocksey being exactly the kind of
place where you wouldn't make any progress at all. In fact, exactly the
opposite happens; Hocksey becomes a model for progress in how you
successfully desegregate schools, and Little Rock becomes a place that
shows exactly how not to go about desegregating schools. Understanding
why that happens and the differences between the two is very important in
terms of understanding the work of the Arkansas Council on Human
Relations because it's intrinsically involved in both those episodes. In
Hocksey, soon after the school desegregation decision is handed down,
the superintendent of schools, Kay Vance, announces that Hocksey
intends to desegregate. He gives three reasons for this; the first reason he
gives is that it's called right in the sight of God, a quite unusual sort of
model justification leading for desegregation, which I won't tell you know,
but which David could probably tell you more about and probably has
written more about already. The second reason was that it was the law;
the Supreme Court said that we had to desegregate schools, so we're
going to have to desegregate. Third of all, perhaps more to the point, it
was cheaper. Hocksey, although it was just above the delta area, had
only a very small black population, and it was a real burden for the school
board to maintain a separate black school, such as it was. At one point
even the white school board described the black school as a bat hole, but
even then they had to maintain it and pay money and pay taxes just to
maintain a separate school. They figured if we desegregate schools, it'd
be a lot easier and a lot cheaper, so they desegregated in 1955. On the
first day of classes they integrated twenty-five black students into the high
school of 1050 people, and concerned white citizens turned up on the first
day of school, but interestingly the reporters who interviewed them, and all
seemed to get the same story, they say, well we don't want to
desegregate, it's not what we would have wanted, but what else can we
do? The Supreme Court has spoken, the school board is going to
desegregate, we have to desegregate. The classes start and by lunch
time it seems as if everything is going fine; black kids are attending school
with white kids and it's like segregation never existed. It goes on like that
for three weeks, and the school board reports there are no incidents, no
discipline problems in the school, and everything is going on as normal.
Then the turning point comes when Life magazine, which was there to
cover desegregation, prints a big photo spread of what's happening, and it
has lots of photos of black children playing with white children. It says,
look how successful desegregation can be, which is like a red flag to a bull
for the segregationists in Mississippi just across the border. They said, we
can't have a successful desegregation taking place just like that so close
to us, so the Mississippi Citizens Councils urged the
Arkansas Citizen Councils, which were kind of newly forming, to stop
integration from taking place at Hocksey. A number of loosely bound
organizations in Arkansas, Citizens
Council in Little Rock, which hadn't really gotten a great amount of
support, all sort of converged on this town of Hocksey and tried to stop
the school desegregation there. Under immense pressure the school
board actually holed up, and part of the reason that the school board holds
up is because of the Arkansas Council on Human Relations. Matt
Griswald, the executive director, writes to the school board of Hocksey
and says, you're doing the right thing, you're absolutely right, this is the
right thing to do, the stand you're taking is the most sensible one. He
sends them copies of the SRC publication and says, here's back up for
you, this is exactly what you should be doing. Equally what the Arkansas
Council on Human Relations does is to provide practical support for the
Hocksey School Board. They have a contact up there by Jonesboro
called Bill Phoenix, a lawyer who represents the school board, and the
attorneys at Hocksey are successful in getting a court ruling which gives
them an injunction against interference from the Citizens Councils. The
Citizens Council were really forced to go away with their tail between their
legs because the court said, stop interfering, the school board holds firm;
the Arkansas Council on Human Relations backs them up very quietly
while the white Citizens Councils are getting all the headlines. The
Arkansas Council is, as it does throughout its time, operating quietly in the
background to ease progress, and Hocksey remains integrated and the
Citizens Councils were just forced to back down and go away in the face
of standing firm. It was a very different story in Little Rock, a slightly
different story. Initially the superintendent of schools there, Virgil T.
Blossom, says, we'll comply with the law, and they draw up the plans to
desegregate the schools. But Blossom has more of a insidious intent;
he's not really serious about desegregating the schools, his idea is that
there will be a more controlled integration of schools. Blossom's idea is
that what we'll do in Little Rock is have a sophisticated plan for a
sophisticated city, and what we'll do is we'll minimize the impact of school
desegregation as much as we possibly can. We'll allow a token number of
black students in, so we won't look as if we're defying the law, but at the
same time that will only mean that we can use a legal loophole to have as
little desegregation as possible. The real difference between Hocksey and
Little Rock is the role that the Arkansas Council on Human Relations
plays, one important difference between the two. In Little Rock, Blossom
absolutely refuses to listen to the Arkansas Council on Human Relations
or accept any of their expertise or advice; Blossom says, I'm in charge,
I've made up this plan, and I don't want to listen to whatever you have to
say. As Matt Griswald says of Blossom, he says, he [Blossom] did not
confer the sends; he pleasantly explained and defended a
position, his. In response to any thoughtful contrary position, usually he
said something like this, you have a right to your view, but this is our plan.
Griswald went on to say that Blossom thought he found the admissions
device by which the requirements of the court could be met, and at the
same time, by which only a few Negro students would be enrolled in the
white schools. The intent of the plan was to guarantee the extended life of
the dual school system. He was the author of one of the earliest plans for
school desegregation in the South; he was at the same time guarding it
with built in submerged pictures which provided a way for schools in the
South to avoid the dreaded consequences of integration. The difference
was that in Hocksey people were prepared, as the Arkansas Council on
Human Relations tried to do, to be educated and to listen; in Little Rock
the school board wasn't prepared to listen and wasn't prepared to be
educated and they said, stay away, we're managing this on our own
terms, this is what we can do best. Of course, it doesn't turn out that way
at all, and what happens is that the Blossom plan, someone folds, in
subisolation with Blossom in its center, and by the time, in late 1957
when the Blossom plan is back to being implemented, when they're about
to send nine African-American students into Central High School, the
pressure from the White Citizen's Council has built. The White Citizen's
Council was not very powerful in Arkansas, but the concentrated focus on
one school in the city sort of gives an impetus to them. Without an
infrastructure or support paving the way for school desegregation in Little
Rock, as soon as the White Citizen's Councils put school desegregation to
pressure, Blossom begins to fold, and as Blossom begins to fold,
steps into the breach, sees the political currency being
built up by the head of steam of the White Citizen's Council, intervenes,
stops school desegregation rather than to implement it. So 1957, as you
all know, the Little Rock School Crisis explodes in Little Rock and leads to
federal troops being sent in by President Eisenhower to enforce school
desegregation. The troops stay for the year; at the end of the year
Governor Forbes closes all the schools to prevent
desegregation continuing. Finally in 1959, December 1959, the white
business community mobilizes to win positions on the school board and to
carry on with a token integration of Central High School. In August 1957,
under white business community control, the school board desegregates
Central High School, although notably with black students than the
Blossom plan had intended to in 1954, at two students admitted to Central
High and two admitted to another city school, Hall High School. The
Arkansas Council on Human Relations has problems during the Little
Rock School Crisis, of course, because if nobody wants to listen and to be
educated before the Brown decision, before this Little Rock School Crisis,
certainly nobody wants to listen during the Little Rock Crisis as both sides
polarize and black and white communities move further apart. One of the
important things that the Arkansas Council on Human Relations does do is
to actually exist and come out on the other side of the Arkansas School
Crisis, and the NAACP doesn't really manage that. Because of the
NAACP's actions, it's sort of chased out of town by the white community,
and the branch is decimated. The Oven League is chucked out of the
community chest and doesn't go on from there. The Arkansas Council on
Human Relations exists and continues and comes out on the other side.
The importance of that is that the Arkansas Council on Human Relations
is there as a moderator and voice in the community after
the school crisis, and is there to lay the blueprint for desegregation in that
1960-1964 period. What the Arkansas Council on Human Relations does
is exactly the same thing it was doing before the school crisis, it tries to
work on the white business community, it tries to get them to desegregate,
but they still won't listen. So again they face the problem, what happens if
we have people who won't listen to what we have to say, who don't want
to be educated? Ultimately the Arkansas Council on Human Relations
resolves that by calling in SNICK, and it's the Arkansas Council on Human
Relations who invites SNICK into Little Rock, because you need an
invitation to come in. [SNICK] organized black students to initiate sits-ins
in Little Rock. Through the sit-ins, through this kind of pressure of direct
action, eventually the white business community is forced to listen to the
voice of moderation, the Arkansas Council on Human Relations, and it's
forced into negotiations to follow the actual blueprint that the Arkansas
Council on Human Relations follows. So what does this story mean? I
hope that it gives a model for how the Arkansas Council on Human
Relations and perhaps the Southern Regional Council operates in that the
emphasis is on education, on informing people, and yet the problem is
what happens if people don't want to be educated and if people don't want
to be informed. The lesson for the Arkansas Council on Human Relations
is that we need to engage in direct action, and ultimately the Arkansas
Council on Human Relations was successful when SNICK was in town to
actually force the white business community to listen. Therefore the sort of
learning curve of the Arkansas Council on Human Relations is that, as
Griswald sums up in 1964, at the end of this decade, in an article in the
Arkansas Gazette: 'It would be good to have the heart converted, but if
that doesn't work, we try something else.' So through battle hardened
experience, what the Arkansas Council on Human Relations evolves to is
a sort of education, informative organization, but moves to that option
through battle hardened experience. They realized, we have to work within
the context of what's happening in the community; we have to find some
way of actually making people listen to what we have to say, and
ultimately can only do that by employing direct action. One of the
sub-questions that that sort of addresses is why
historians finally stumbled upon the Southern Regional Council, why has it
taken them so long to get there when we see the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference analysis of the NAACP, of SNICK, and all those
organizations. Partly I think it's because those direct action organizations
are the ones that capture the headlines, they're the ones out in the
forefront, and therefore they're the ones that are first seen. The Southern
Regional Council and the Arkansas Council on Human Relations as its
surrogate sort of is there throughout offering support, but it's more of a
sort of infrastructural organization. It provides the context, it creates the
environment, it provides the blueprints for what's going to happen, [and] it
creates the context of the direct action. Really historians are only now
beginning to move beyond those headlines and to see those kinds of
infrastructural headlines like the Arkansas Council on Human Relations,
like the Southern Regional Council, like, for example, the American
Friends Service Committee Fellowship of Reconciliation. There's a whole
trench of organizations that I think the investigation beyond those
headlines leads us into, which this conference is sort of part of in charting
that new territory. That seems to be the place I need to stop, so thank you.
[clapping]
I'm David Chappell from the University of Arkansas. I want to thank Brian,
Jenny, and Jack, and others at the University of Florida, for welcoming us
here. I just want to thank the Southern Regional Council for inspiring and
provoking our research on what's so far a very fruitful discussion. My topic
is the Fourteenth Amendment, constitutional, equality; the Fourteenth
Amendment, of course, being the only place in the constitution where the
concept of equality of persons shows up, and the role of the Southern
Regional Council in Southern moderates struggling with the efforts to
realize the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment. Historians of the Civil
Rights Movement, including me, have tended to give Southern moderates
short shrift, echoing Martin Luther King's pronouncement from his great
pulpit in the Birmingham Jail, I have been greatly disappointed with the
Chappell:
white moderate; "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that hte
Negroes' greatest stumbling block is not the White Citizens' Council or the
Ku Klux Klan, but the white moderate, who was more devoted to order
than to justice, who paternalisticially believes that he can set the timetable
for another man's freedom, who lives by a mythical concept of time and
who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a more convenient season.
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than
absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will." I would like to begin by
suggesting, however, that SRC types were justified in their special brand
of moderation without making more general claims in about moderation in
the abstract. Though King's rebuke of the white moderate was a stinging
one, it is often forgotten that he quickly added a list of exceptions, white
brothers in the South, he said, who have grasped the meaning of the
social revolution and committed themselves to it. Ralph McGill, somewhat
startlingly, was first on the list, followed by William Smith, Harry Golden,
James Dabbs, Ann Braden, and Sarah Boyle. McGill, Smith, Golden,
Dabbs, and Boyle, at least, had all been associated with the Southern
Regional Council. While Ann Braden may not relish being mentioned in
the same breath as McGill and vice versa, it is important that King was
even here holding up hope in the moderates, or at least declining to burn
his bridges to them. The SRC's moderation was not that or
absolute, it was a selective reluctance to act radically on Fourteenth
Amendment questions as opposed to Fifteenth Amendment voting rights
on which I think the accusations of overweening gradualism cannot stick.
The Southern Regional Council's moderation can best be seen, I think, as
a strategic sense of priorities, and a strategy, if you will, of covert
operations, an effort to stay below the radar screen of their enemies to
keep radical changes out of the headlines where demagogues would
exploit them. By strategic priorities I mean the SRC's moderation meant,
not reluctance per se, but the reluctance to press Fourteenth as opposed
to Fifteenth Amendment questions before the Fifteenth Amendment voting
changes had been achieved, before economic development had taken
firmer route, and before a degree of acceptance appeared among the
general white Southern population. Meanwhile, there was much they could
try, especially out of the range of the media, and much they could and did
accomplish, and much of that has historical significance that we need to
recognize. After its famous turn in favor of desegregation in 1951, the
SRC remained reluctant until the 1954 Brown decision to force Fourteenth
Amendment questions of equality upon the public schools. One of the
things I wish to suggest is that we may have an exaggerated sense of the
public schools importance-elementary and secondary schools as opposed
to higher education in other institutions. The SRC's hesitation is not
evident at all in its approach to desegregation of other arenas, at least
after 1951, for example, public transportation, which I think is particularly
important, where again, I think, the SRC cannot be accused of
temporizing. Our understanding of transportation desegregation may be
occluded by the Brown decision, which seemed to turn so much of the civil
rights struggle into a litmus test of where people stood on the schools.
There's something artificial about viewing the whole struggle through the
lens somewhat arbitrarily intruded by the Supreme Court in 1954.
Transportation from the perspective of 1945 or 1952 might have been a
strategically sounder starting place to begin a serious campaign to restore
Fourteenth Amendment rights. One of the early members of SRC,
Virginia Dabney, who figured as a sort of godfather of modern Southern
liberalism in the 1930s, certainly had greater faith in transportation than
school desegregation in the pre-Brown era. In 1943, while he was
participating in plans to launch the SRC, Dabney tried an experiment now
notorious in the annals of Southern liberalism. In a few editorials he
proposed desegregation of streetcars in Virginia cities, thinking that the
white citizenry would accept his conservative-that's his word-argument
that the law had already become a dead letter. The great wartime growth
in black and white employment, Dabney explained, repealed bus
segregation through simple overcrowding. In the new conditions, strict
adherence to the law of segregation perversely led to greater interracial
contact. To get to the black section, black passengers had to push all the
way to the back of the bus or streetcar, jostling more white passengers on
their way than they would if they just stood or sat wherever there was
room. Dabney conceded that streetcar laws were among the more
gratuitous of the humiliations of Jim Crow. But within two months Dabney
recoiled from his conservative desegregation proposal. Sensible pragmatic
gestures like his were futile, he explained to a friend, when the mass of
whites is hostile to any change, and that was the characteristic stance of
the Southern liberal and often of the genteel Southern conservative. [He
said], I favor change, but out there in bubba land there's a combustible
mixture of hatred and fear growing which just won't allow reasonable
people like me to take any obvious or significant steps; we can be liberals,
but only closet liberals. As historian John Nebaun showed, however,
Dabney invented the mass reaction to his proposal almost entirely out of
cold cloth. His editorials did not bring on a flood of angry letters from
uneducated white folk. He told a friend that in fact he got no reaction at all
from those types of white Southerners, and Nebaun observed that for
decades Dabney and other Southern liberals, "brandished this
boogeyman, the cruelly Negro-phobic poor white, to drive away impetuous
reformers." In the end Nebaun says, this terrifying class of white
Southerners also paralyzed Southern liberalism. The opposition to
Dabney's proposal, if his own papers are any guide, actually came from
upperclass educated leaders like himself. Even at that, the letters he
published in his newspaper from white readers were overwhelmingly in
favor of his proposal of roughly three to one, but newspaper editors and
political leaders, including Governor Arden, elsewhere in the
state, cold-shouldered Dabney on this question and Dabney concluded
that he could not fight those leaders. So of course he joined them by
opposing further experimentation along even the conservative lines that
he had tentatively sketched out. Although Dabney soon joined the SRC,
he fought efforts within the organization to question Jim Crow, then after
he lost that fight in 1951, he quit the SRC and became one of the most
effective segregationists in the South. My interest in bringing up the story
is not to bring scorn on Dabney as a spineless wishy-washy
paternalist-dishwater interpretation that Doug Smith so ably
described-rather I wish to call attention to Dabney's discovery about
white Southern society, or Nebaun's discovery of Dabney's discovery,
which is: the masses of urban Virginia apparently would not react violently
to desegregation of public desegregation. A lead reformers fear of the
masses on that issue was ill-founded, and this is important because even
before the great turning point in 1951, most of the SRC leaders were
moving in the opposite way from Dabney on the question of segregation.
At least, I don't think we can say absolutely what the numbers are, but it
seems to me they are moving that way more decisively on every question
except schools than they are moving on the schools, and I think the school
question is lagging. There is something special about school
desegregation. Its emergence as the defining issue in civil rights was to
some degree a fluke, perhaps a tragic one, of the haphazard ad-hoc path
of legal development. The Supreme Court did finally bring on for a few
years following May 1954, the surge of mass anger and hysteria that
Dabney had feared, or to be more precise, had raised a human cry
among opportunistic politicians and rabble-rousers who, for a remarkably
long run, succeeded spectacularly in mobilizing angry white voters. But
before Brown, the NAACP defense fund had been following other
avenues, and until 1946, the most promising of those was probably public
transportation. The original judicial loophole justifying segregation under
the Fourteenth Amendment, after all, came in the transportation case, the
Plessy case. The most logical place to attack the Plessy doctrine was in
other transportation cases. As historian Mark Tushnet explains, however,
the LDF's campaign against transportation segregation petered out after
the apparent victory in 1946, Morgan v. Virginia. In the Morgan case,
1946, the court decided seven to one that a state could not impose
segregation on an interstate bus because doing so unreasonably
interfered with interstate commerce. The lone dissenter from the case,
Harold Burton, normally a supporter of civil rights, pointed out however
that the court was evading the central question, which was whether state
imposed segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment. In the Morgan
majority's controlling precedent, an 1878 case, Hall v. Dequer, the court
had used the exact same logic of interstate commerce to strike down an
anti-segregation law. Thurgood Marshall feared, in 1946, that
resuscitation of that precedent could be turned around to invalidate the
existing laws at that point of eighteen northern states that banned
segregation on interstate carriers that crossed over their borders.
Considering these and other quirks of interstate commerce, Thurgood
Marshall said at that point that he was unwilling to test transportation
further. The Legal Defense Fund needed to push the court to find
segregation in conflict somewhere with the Fourteenth Amendment's
equal protection clause in the event, of course, it ended up using schools,
but there were signs in the late 1940s that going that way, down what
appeared the most promising litigated avenue, was heading away from
crucial bases of political support. The year after the Morgan decision,
President Harry Truman's special commission on civil rights showed
weakness and division on only one question in its famous report of 1947
to secure these rights. After forthrightly recommending a permanent
FEPC, an anti-lynching law, and "elimination of segregation from all
aspects of American life," the committee divided on the means to eliminate
segregation from the public schools. A minority of the commission went on
record that it did not think schools should be desegregated immediately or
forcefully by the federal government. The commission minority thought
that school desegregation might be a desirable end, but that it should be
achieved voluntarily, gradually, and by local initiative with due regard to
the peculiarities of local conditions. There was no such hedging in the
report on other issues, some of them quite radical. In fact, I wonder
whether this show of division over the means to school desegregation did
as much to provoke the reaction from Strom Thurmand's Dixiecrats as
the report's radicalism. Much as the commission's radicalism allowed
Southern politicians to accuse Truman of betrayal of the loyal
South, the division over federal force on schools made the commission
and the whole civil rights lobby, Republican as well as Democrat, look
vulnerable. When Brown finally came in 1954, the Southern Regional
Council stuck its neck out by pushing for compliance with the inevitable,
now that the desegregation was suddenly the law of the land. How did that
work out? The first major test of public school desegregation in real life, in
Little Rock in 1957, provides an instructive juxtaposition. The very year
before the school crisis that put that city into the headlines, Little Rock's
public transportation system was perfectly desegregated without fanfare or
incident, also the suburban system immediately to the north of Little Rock.
Even in Montgomery that same year, 1956, opposition to reducing
discrimination on the buses seemed to come more from the bus company
and city officials than from the general lay population, and that is
especially significant since the bus riding, part of the white population, was
skewed toward that allegedly more combustible end of the income
distribution. When, after a year of struggle the bus system finally was
desegregated in Montgomery, it happened with no significant violence.
Also in 1956, Tallahassee desegregated its bus system much more
quickly than Montgomery. Maybe the stiff resistance and international
publicity that the Montgomery boycott got was the exception, not the rule.
At any rate, Mills Thornton persuasively argued that it was only the
intranscedents of a few local officials that made a local dispute in
Montgomery literally into a federal case. Desegregation of transportation
might well have proceeded had it not been for all that fanfare. In 1956, the
segregationist editor Tom Waring of the Charleston News and Currier
wrote to Virginia Dabney that even his own paper, which he rightly called
diehard, had been "advocating some, perhaps most, of the SRC's agenda
when the Supreme Court came along and made it all but impossible to
pursue that line." It was desegregation of schools, or rather what was
perceived as their sudden forced desegregation by a distant alien
authority that provoked and seemed to justify violence and mass
resistance. Some of the local dynamics are important here as well. Many
white parents in Little Rock perceived the desegregation of Central High
as an imposition by upper crust do-gooders like Virgil Blossom, who's
own children would continue to attend segregated schools. Massive
resistance was not just about home rule as it was about who should rule
and how. Jennifer Hothschild, among others, makes it clear that the
same view that liberal activists and federal judges whisked their own
children off to private or suburban schools where there was no black
presence, played a key role in many, if not most other cases of resistance
to school desegregation in the North as well as the South. The year after
Little Rock, the SRC was delivering a pamphlet, South Carolinians Speak:
A Moderate Approach to Race Relations; this is in 1958. Though the
Southern Regional Council had committed itself to school desegregation,
this pamphlet suggested that local affiliates, the State Councils on Human
Relations, still depended on members who agreed with the Southern
Regional Council on every point but schools. I would echo and amplify
what John Kirk said that we really won't get to th marrow of the story of
Southern liberalism and moderation in these years until we look at that
relationship of the local councils on human relations. The example of what
people have done on the black side of the struggle, if you will, looking at
the local NAACP branches and finding how often ...
[end side A 1]
Chappell:
... in South Carolina, it was a compendium of statements by prominent
community leaders all identifying themselves as moderates. Most of them
advocated an end to segregation in transportation. One of these
moderates stated, there is no good reason why segregation on public
conveyances should be continued. I think it was on the way out when the
school issue arose, and in a comparatively short time it would have
disappeared. But all the contributors to this pamphlet who expressed
themselves with any clarity on the issue went down the line opposing the
imposition of public school desegregation. Many of them said it was a
desirable goal, but they didn't want to achieve it by forced impost from
outside. It is of some interest that the moderate position here echoed the
segregationist position of Tom Waring quoted earlier. It was indeed
common for other segregationist leaders, including James Kilpatrick and
the Reverend James Dees, to make such concessions. Short of federal
public school desegregation, they could acknowledge and accept and
even embrace desegregation of medical schools and professional schools,
seminaries, divinity schools, desegregation of professional associations
and so on. My point in making that connection is not that the SRC's local
rank and file were really closet reactionaries with secret affinities to people
like Tom Waring and James Kilpatrick, but rather that the middle
ground, the white Southerners who favored segregation, wanted to hang
onto it but didn't want to fight over it or make careers over it, might well
have expanded if locally initiated desegregation of transportation rather
than court-ordered school desegregation had been the defining issue. Had
the Southern Regional Council proceeded without Brown, then history may
have taken a very different path; resistance may not have been as
explosive and surprising as it was. Moderates could at least have called
the bluff of people like Kilpatrick and Dees and Waring perhaps in the
hope that a little desegregation would ward off demands for systematic
desegregation, which I would argue is all that happened in so many of the
school desegregation cases anyway. People like Dees and Waring could
justify acquiescence in token gradual desegregation. Had the court not
drawn the line with schools, moderates could have driven the absolute
diehard sets to the margins instead of driving themselves to the margins,
which is what they did. Not only white liberal opinion but black opinion
seems deeply divided on the question of desegregation, and this seems to
me a conspicuous fact that historians have not begun to face up to. I'm not
saying that I've done more than begin to face up to this, but in 1955, a
gallop poll found out that only fifty-three percent of black Southerners
supported the Brown decision. I was very struck by Patricia Stevens,
whose reading of the letter from her father saying that eighty-five percent
of the black community were opposed. Who knows, maybe that's
exaggerated, but it's an interesting statement in itself. Daisy Bates, the
leader of the Little Rock Nine said in a 1976 interview that she had never
felt much confidence about her relationship with the black population of
Little Rock, that she was walking on egg shells. Many black folk there
considered her an outsider, she said, who was stirring up trouble and
causing people to lose their jobs. Not only her white friends, but also her
black friends stopped visiting her house, and not simply out of fear. If one
of the Little Rock Nine had gotten killed in those days, she said, the whites
would not have needed to persecute me anymore; the black community
would have chased me out of town, I knew that. School desegregation,
especially the token variety, which was often the only kind available at
least for the first fourteen years or so after the Brown decision was, after
all, very often not a strategy for the black masses, rather for the
foreseeable future it appeared that it would benefit at best a small number
of extraordinary children, or children with extraordinary parents. The black
newspapers of the period have a rich and diverse range of opinion in their
editorial, op-ed, and letters columns. George Skylar [and] Zora Neale
Hurston were not isolated freaks, but had significant numbers of black
readers and letter writers who supported their positions, and their
positions were quite different; Skylar opposing the means to
desegregation, and ultimately assimilation, which he favored, and Hurston
opposing the end of desegregation. Those are just two [opinions]. There is
a whole range, a whole variety, of different positions that is not for public
school desegregation or against. Why not continue such proposals as the
equalization plans in South Carolina, Mississippi, and elsewhere? The fact
that segregationists were pushing those plans as a way to avoid or evade
desegregation might, in a sense, make those plans more politically viable,
more likely to succeed in the real world, and accomplish more in the long
run if they were admittedly less palatable to moral purists. Historians who
see the struggle as literally black and white I think are a long way from
understanding the diversity of opinion within the Southern black population
on such questions as differences of tactics, but also I think differences of
ultimate ends and goals. The main reason, though, that I wish to
reexamine the Southern Regional Councils initial hesitation to lead the
South into federally forced school desegregation, and to put that court
before a lot of other ready horses, is that a major trend of recent years,
especially the 1990s, has been the resegregation of public schools, the
ongoing of what was achieved at such costs in the 1960s and 1970s.
Resegregation, whatever or whomever we choose to blame it on,
suggests that the schools were not in the long run the great
accomplishment of the Civil Rights Movement. This is not to question the
value or the desirability of desegregation, just for the record I supported
desegregation, including public school desegregation, participated in it as
a third grader. I supported it and continue to support it both as a practical
means to greater equality and as a civic and cultural end in itself, but it
has not been the most durable initiative and I think it's unraveling, or at
least its significant unraveling in many parts of the country should, in
addition to inspiring new strategies for achieving equality now, should lead
us to take another look at the relative values and priorities that we tend to
take for granted in our efforts to learn from the past. Thank you very much.
[clapping]
Jack Davis:
I read a longer version of David's paper and I was reminded that
apparently I commented on one of your paper's before at another
conference, and David's ideas I always find very stimulating and
interesting and also fascinating. Also sometimes I don't understand them,
so I apologize ahead of time as I present my comments if I'm a little off
base here. He asks us to think in terms of the counter-factual, which I
think is useful in analytical methodology. In other words, if civil rights
organizations and federal policy makers had obtained a better
understanding of the so-called white masses and the pluralistic views of
the so-called black community and taken the SRC's moderate position on
school desegregation, something about the course of history would have
been different. However, I'm not clear from reading his paper on what
would have been different and perhaps he will offer some clarity. Is he
suggesting that if desegregation forces had followed the front to eliminate
discrimination in public facilities such as transportation, successful and
enduring desegregation of schools would have followed without or with
just limited volatility? Would the SRC's "more general strategy" in public
accommodation of desegregation have worked for schools? It is clear from
the paper and presentation, I think, that David is himself trying to sort out
the puzzle of school desegregation and resegregation, yet it seems at this
point in his venture he wants to have his beer but drink somebody else's,
as he has been known to do. [laughing] I confess that I, as a
co-conspirator, it seems from reading his paper-it was not in the talk
because of the restriction of time-he wants integrative schools and yet he
wants to respect the sanctity of local control. He questions though whether
this is possible. Of course, after the expenditure of thousands of dollars
and countless calories of physical and intellectual energy to address the
continuing problem of race in schools, the experts have shown us one
thing, and that's that noone has a solution. Now we've been talking a lot
this morning about Southern liberals, but it seems to me that before
historians can begin evaluating alternative strategies of the Civil Rights
Movement, they and racial liberals, whoever and whatever they may be,
should first fully understand what segregation meant to white
segregationists. [They should get] to know the reason rather than just the
fact. Why are schools today, next to churches, the most segregated public
and semi-public venues in the country? What exactly was it that whites
feared in desegregation? Too many activists and policy makers failed to
listen, for instance, when Walker Percy, during the heady days of Brown
and Little Rock and Ole Miss, clarified the private nature of public
schools? When the justice department compelled the enrollment of James
Meredith at the University of Mississippi in 1962, Percy wrote, "It was if
the black man had been quartered in the living room of Southern whites.
The familial boundary of this society came to coincide with the actual
public space which it inhabited." It seemed odd and contradictory, if not
traitorous, to many white liberals when in early days of resegregation in
the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, it seemed contradictory when throngs
of black parents expressed their opposition to integration at the expense
of neighborhood schools and local control. As David pointed out, plenty of
blacks took this very position in the early days of the civil rights struggle,
but no one on the side of civil rights seemed to listen because, I think in
part, because conservative whites were making the very same arguments.
Again, we cannot know what social reformers were up against until we get
at the heart of white racial attitudes, the basis of which I have argued
elsewhere, was more complex than social fears and economic
competition; that racial amalgamation meant not just physical
amalgamation to white segregationists. Only after we scholars give
credence to the reality of white segregationists, rabid races, semi-civil
conservatives, and white supporters all, and refrain from imposing our own
value laden reality on our subjects, can we answer question about failed
strategies of the Civil Rights Movement. I mean, how many of us scholars
in here have actually interviewed a citizens council member, a Klansman,
a race murderer? There's not very many, only two or three of us. If we too
secondguess the motives, beliefs, ideals, and values of Southern whites-if
we treat them as objects rather than subjects-our own strategies as
scholars will fail.
John Kirk is part of the British invasion in the study of civil rights, and he
brings what I call the across the pond perspective of U.S. History. Kirk
encourages us to consider civil rights activity beyond traditional civil rights
organizations such as SNICK, SELC, and NAACP, and
other historians such as Linda Reed and John Ederton and Pat Suldon
have given us a glimpse into the civil rights contributions of public interest
organizations whose agendas were not necessarily civil rights specific. In
many such organizations old and new, [they] continue to carry the torch or
picked up the church of civil rights after some of the traditional civil rights
organizations lost their luster or just sort of faded into obscurity. The
non-traditional organizations were national, regional, and they were
community based, and Kirk takes us down to the all important state and
local level to introduce us to the historical impact of the Arkansas Council
on Human Relations. He consequently reminds of just how decentralized
the Civil Rights Movement actually was. While it did reveal some
centralized aspects such as campaigns like the lunch counter sit-ins and
the freedom rides that mushroomed into region wide campaigns, and of
course the reinforcements that were sent in from the national
headquarters or the regional headquarters, the real work of change was
done in separate, individualized, local campaigns. The initiatives in Little
Rock were part of a larger collective that shared a common spirit and
goals, but depended on strategies that were tailor made at the local level
to meet specific challenges. As some of us have shown, even local
NAACP branches acted independently of national headquarters in New
York; the two groups weren't even connected at times. Local branches
adopted agendas that clashed with national policy, frustrating the leaders
of the national organization as would a wayward child a parent or a
soldier his superiors. I want to wrap up my comments by
beginning with a question for John that perhaps we can use as a
springboard into questions from the floor. You opened your paper by
saying that the ACHR "grew out of the reorganization of the Board of
Arkansas Division of the Southern Regional Council." I wonder if you can
tell us more about those origins and why, for instance, did Harry
Ashmore choose the SRC? What was the appeal about the SRC?
The SRC branch itself reflects the Council on International Cooperation,
which had been in Little Rock before that, and it was part of a long
succession, I think, of liberal moderate white entities in the community. I
John Kirk:
M. Lassitter:
think one of things that happened in the mid 1950s is that organization,
what we would call it today, regrounds itself as the Council on Human
Relations. Harry Ashmore, as a returning GI, goes to Little Rock just
about the time, or just a few years before, that regrounding takes places. I
think there's a new impetus, a new direction, that the Southern Regional
Council has taken by that regrounding exercise which attracts those
people who think, this is something new, this is a new context we can
operate within.
This is a question for David. My name is Matt Lassitter from the University
of Mississippi. This is for David, but maybe you can speak to this to. I can't
decide whether I'm troubled or a little confused about the implications of
taking schools out of the civil rights narrative because a lot of historians
are starting to use a consumer model to understand civil rights, and Liz
Cohen has a new book on New Jersey in which she does this. Back then
schools had a much more fundamental challenge to raise
class privilege like with street cars, for example, in other consumers'
faces. Like Jack said, schools are semi-private; understand that a lot of
white middle class and suburban lines, and they are increasingly private
residents. If you think about it this way, you can argue that the real
successes of the Civil Rights Movements are in consumer spaces,
shopping malls are probably the most integrative places in the country
today, whereas neighborhoods and schools are not. If you think about this
in terms of moderates and massive resistance, moderates do get control
of the process in the South in every major city by the late 1950s and early
1960s. Increasingly what they do is they stop using a language of
segregation and they start using a language of neighborhoods, and a
class privilege as well as racial privilege. I wondered if you wanted to
speak a little more to the implications of what does this mean? They're
really moving toward a northern model, I think, which is a consumer
model based on this idea that there's a distinction between public spaces
and neighborhoods and schools. What does it mean in a larger context to
try to rethink the role of schools in civil rights?
D. Chappell:
There's a lot there. The consumer stuff, I think that's a very, very
promising development in historiography. I hadn't thought of that
connection; it's an astute and provocative one to make. It bothers me a
little. I think there's a lot going on in the 1950s. Generally what I see as the
Civil Rights Movement, what makes it distinctive, what makes it
interesting, is that it's a counterpoint to those consumer trends. These are
human beings who have lives and jobs and they are getting and spending
like the rest of America, and they often partake of that
consumerism-everybody does. The reason we're interested in them, the
reason they stand out from my point of view, is that they resist so much of
that consumerist ideology or solution to the old problems of freedom and
democracy. That's obviously a personal answer. The private or
semi-private nature, Jane brought up I thought that the
distinction that she made was not between public and private there, but
she had sort of a three-steer model of human society, and she did not say
that schools are private. Her basis for thinking that school desegregation
was the wrong move to make in those essays was that there's this fear
somewhere between the private and the public. She wasn't saying that it's
as private as families are-it was a distinct sphere from us-but neither was
it an entirely private realm. On liberal egalitarian grounds, she argued that
we still need to have spheres like public schools, neighborhood schools,
that can be insulated from the claims of the state, the claims that we
rightly make on strictly public space like voting booths and jury boxes and
streetcars and public accommodations like hotels and so on; those would
be public. I'm not saying that I want to narrate all those implications, and
of course one of the things Jane didn't mention that was that Orinth
quickly recanted all of that for tactical reasons. She wanted to push this
repeal of massessination laws, and that wasn't what the civil rights
leaders most wanted to push or even envisioned as a goal. It's sort of that
question of the semi-private quality of schools, [which is] sort of a moral
and philosophical question, and that's the way our ends approached it. My
approach, I think, is somewhat different. I mean Jack was right to say that
some of my argument wants to favor desegregation and yet recognize I
think what he referred to as the sanctity of local control. That's not the way
that it came to me. I think what I want to respect is other people who
respect the sanctity of local control, black and white, liberal and
conservative, in those years and in other periods-in the 1950s but also in
the 1980s and 1990s. In the immediate context of the 1950s, it's not
respecting people for the moral sake of respecting them, but respecting
them because you're fighting them in a battle; there's a war, a sort of
social-cultural-political war going on for desegregation and other strategies
to achieve greater equality. What you want to do, I think, and what the
Civil Rights Movement often did at the grass roots level, the local level,
was go after the weak points. [They'd] pick the pressure points where
segregationists opinion was most vulnerable to division, most likely to
come apart. I think strategic choices that the Supreme Court made, or if
you will, imposed, or sort of fobbed off on the Grass Roots Movement in
1954, aren't necessarily the ones that the shrewdest field commanders in
that battle might have chosen. Whatever their ultimate goals, and I think it
was more respecting people's notions of local control, it's more a matter of
respecting the enemy's power and ability to unify and develop solidarity on
the school issue, which they couldn't do. The diehard segments] were
more isolated, more marginalized, or more vulnerable to marginalization
on other issues. It's a strategic analysis that I approach this through. I
think I learned something about the philosophical issues, but that's the
way I get at it. Les you had your hand up earlier.
I'm Leslie Dunbar of the University of [laughing] I have an
organizational privilege, but before I get to that. I got to the SRC a few
months after the South Carolina I would like to say that at
L. Dunbar:
least one of the organizers of that path with became one of
the more outspoken, forceful leaders of progressivism in the South, and as
a matter of fact, Law Street Church in South Carolina pretty much was
thrown in that path. What I really wanted to say was Barry and I and Paul
Gaston's warning about getting lost in words, and I don't want to do that,
the word is moderation. That is one of the most hateful words in my own
personal life. To me, More crucially, that decision for
the Southern Regional Council is far more incredibly
important than the NAACP. I cannot really think of any important issue
between the I cannot think really of any important issue on
which the Southern Regional Council took a position different from that of
I'm Connie Currie. I just wanted to make a comment on the issue about
the schools. I think it would be important that if you leave the issue of the
black parents sending their children to white schools out of the
of the movement, because certainly after 1964, the women
that I have interviewed and the father's who made that choice to send their
children to the white schools, it was part of the Civil Rights Movement. If
you interview people, you know they say, yeah, we know that-this was in
Mississippi-we knew that if we were caught educated we
would be killed. So it was not just a schools issue, it was a flowing part of
the movement. It's very interesting because I was talking to some people
at the NAACP Regional Defense Fund, and at one of their last meetings
C. Currie:
Doug Smith:
John Kirk:
they were considering trying to get the right to a public education into the
Constitution. A lot of people don't realize that it's not a Constitutional right
to be able to go to a public school and to get a public education in this
country. Now what happened at that meeting a few weeks ago,
amendment on public education.
I'm Doug Smith. I have two questions, one for each of you. John, I was
fascinated by your comment that the ACHR actually invited SNICK into
Little Rock. I just wondered if there are examples of that happening
elsewhere. If you could talk about that for just a second. Then David, my
question for you is just sort of following up with what was just happening
here. I think it's certainly understandable to look at the amount of
resegregation of schools and say, well what went wrong, and maybe
different choices should have been made, but I'm a little bit uncomfortable
with the notion that it was the Supreme Court that sort of imposed its
agenda on the South when, in fact, the NAACP for twenty years had been
building up to ground, and people like Oliver Hill in the 1930s are running
all over the state of Virginia trying to get people riled, students. Oliver Hill
says that World War II was not the best thing that happened but the worst
thing that happened because it stopped the momentum that he and others
had actually made in filing these equalization suits. I wonder if you might
comment on that.
On the point of the Arkansas Council of Human Relations inviting SNICK
in, I think it is interesting in the light that I was talking about different types
D. Chappell:
of organizations in the Civil Rights Movement. Those kind of Big Five
organizations, if you like, felt in competition with one another. What's
interesting is that those organizations don't seem to feel in competition
with the Southern Regional Council or the Arkansas Council on Human
Relations. There's a deception that they're doing two different things at
two different sorts of rivals, and therefore the Arkansas Council on Human
Relations doesn't really think it's a threat to invite SNICK in to operate
within those organizations, whereas SNICK and the NAACP do come to
blows-not literally, but metaphorically-because of their operations. I think
there's a twin track structure; if different organizations work with one
another, it is more broadly effective too.
The key word in those suits in Virginia is equalization; those are not
desegregation suits, they're equalization suits. That, of course, is a
strategy that is embraced by Jimmy Burns and other diehard
segregationists. Maybe, and I'm just saying, we ought to consider the
ultimate fate, the tokenistic quality that so much of school desegregation in
fact had for so long despite the calories that were expended in achieving
it, there's a lot that can be done and a lot that may be really radical. I think
one of the things we do, to throw this back to you guys, we see the school
issue as so radical because that's what finally got the segregationists to
come together and make a stand. That doesn't necessarily mean that as a
long term strategy it leads to the most radical achievement. I'm just saying
let's pick that apart and look at it. I'm not saying that I've got a new answer
M. Lassitter:
D. Chappell:
and a new interpretation, I think actually Connie Currie's point that there is
a kind of continuum for all of these issues certainly by the mid 1960s, I
think that's indisputable. But I also think that if you look in the opinion and
letters columns of the black newspapers, people break the issues down;
two people may agree on one issue and disagree sharply on another.
Resegregation is happening to all the local people because of
neighborhood schools, because of the supervision of
school districts like Charlotte and
Okay, but I think that is just begging the question of why did local control
become such a value for many black parents, as well as white? Why did
judicial control sort of-I think the turning point is this 1974 in the Miliken
decision-why did the Supreme Court justices just sort of throw up their
hands. They're cowards, they're closet reactionaries-we can say all of
these things about them, or that the climate of opinion is changing, or it's
just the irreducible racism of American society. I think there's something to
all of those theories, but I also think that the Supreme Court was saying,
we can only force, to use term, social engineering so far;
not as a moral choice of the ideal world we want to create, but the
practical choice of what we can actually achieve in our limited lifetimes in
the real world. If I could briefly respond to Les' point, and maybe I didn't
make myself clear, but my point was to suggest that the people working in
the SRC even before the advent of your leadership, the term moderation
is really not a good one. What they were doing, if you look at it carefully
and break down the issues, was often quite radical, quite historically
significant, and we shouldn't sort of dismiss it as moderation.
Steve Suits:
I'm Steve Suits from When the last gentlemen's
question of schools, it seems to me that an important line of inquiry
is you always kind of measure whether equalization would
have gotten anywhere, whether Jimmy Burns would have taken it up at
all had it not been an effort. Equalization was an effort since
Reconstruction ; that historical continuum. Folks were
ready to assume that equalization was not going to come about
That's a separate point, but I think you have to measure,
how far did it get along in 130 years to measure or not whether it would be
an option for strategy in of good schools. The second point
about this of the ground, I was intrigued by your difficulty in
refuting the polling of the blacks after Brown and the split. It reminds me a
little of the folks who slight Eddie Williams the day
in studies. In over one year has shown that most
African-American parents support vouchers at a higher rate than do white
parents. Those who believe in vouchers have tried to make good use of
that in an appropriate way, but if you look at both those polls in the point of
view of a parent, you say, what does my child need? My child needs a
better education? Either that or he needs better choices. I'm not
supporting a voucher, but I'm supporting a choice for a better school. In
Jack Davis:
Steve Suits:
D. Chappell:
1954, what parent of a black child would say, is that decision, in my child's
life, get them a better education? Every child that went to a white school
knew what kind of hell they'd have to deal with, and Eddie Bates and
others had to make sure that those children were taken care of. To
assume that a parent in a poll makes a global choice about what is good
rather than an understanding that that poll is raising to them a question
about their own children I think's a consideration. I'm interested in the
terms by which these interpretations come about; as analytic frameworks
whether they are grounded and respective of people who are living those
lives. Harry Ashmore and his day after editorial-now we all have a
memory that can serve us better than the past sometimes right-more than
once in the Poppem Seminar Harry Ashmore remembered editorial. He
clearly, from his memory, wasn't trying to project what was, he was trying
to project what he hoped would encourage the South to do and who
necessarily thought by writing that editorial he was not trying to persuade
the South, but instead reflecting. It's something I think you're assuming
that Harry as an editorial writer was liberally always honest-he wasn't. He
would like to have had the South respond that way; he was trying to
encourage the South to respond that way.
We're out of time and I think we need to have David respond.
As I would conclude, I'd like you to consider that point.
Actually, I don't want to say how wrong you are. On the poll, I lean toward
your interpretation exactly; the only thing that confuses me is how you
Jack Davis:
Brian Ward:
seem to think we disagree on that. I think we don't know what the deepest
inner motives of the people who answered the polls are, but I think what
you suggest is very plausible. I would sort of go with that as the most likely
general explanation to the extent that there is a general explanation. It just
brings it back to the question for me of whatever people might have
believed about ultimate ends and goals, we need to keep those goals in
mind, but also keep in mind what people think is worth making a sacrifice
for, worth working full time, and actually likely to be achieved in our
lifetimes or in the school age range of our children. That is as much a
framework that determines the course of Southern history through the Civil
Rights Movement as the ultimate goals, that I'm not saying we should ever
forget, but I want to keep those things in balance and look at their
relationship in a different way after we have the experience of
resegregation, among other things.
Thank you. Very good presentation, thank you.
I thank you to everyone who has presented and shared this morning.
[Lunch instructions]
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