Voices in Our Blood (21 page)

If we lose this battle for freedom for 15 million Negroes we will lose it for 145 million whites and eventually we will lose it for the world. This is indeed a time for greatness.

The Cradle (of the Confederacy) Rocks

Go South to Sorrow,
1957

C
ARL
T. R
OWAN

When the Citizens Council leader finished outlining his proposals for economic coercion, he told his Mississippi audience boastfully: “I think the Negro will be humble.”

Yes, the Negro knows how to be humble. How long did he sing his spirituals under the burdens of animal labor, pray at the sight of new oppressions and say “yassuh” a little louder for the new white boss? Poor, powerless and humble, waiting for God to quicken the white man's sense of decency, waiting for the day when the Constitution would be big enough to serve as a hiding place. How long? So now—when the tension is high, and legislators are legislating, and the crosses burn again, and an eerie new cry of danger comes from the peanut patches and from beneath the weeping willows where the white men meet—who would expect the Negro to be anything but humble?

Yet I know that this is not the South I left in 1942. In the greasy apron behind the counter at that flyspecked honky-tonk there's a guy who talks about Salerno and Anzio and the gay madames of Paree; in the pool hall, shooting craps with two white guys, are three Negroes who have been to Guadalcanal, Okinawa and Heartbreak Ridge; preaching every Sunday at the Baptist church, trying to lure them out of the pool hall and the honky-tonk, is a man who went North to study the white folks' Bible and to bring back some of the religion of Plato, Rousseau and Paine.

So I wonder how humble this 1956 Negro will be . . . can be. I wonder . . . and once again it is 1953, six months before the Supreme Court was to utter those words that told the world that, for better or worse, the South would never be the same. Yes, 1953—and these are days of optimism about race relations in America. Only here and there a hint or a threat of bloodshed or violence over segregation. But I could not take these threats seriously. I was in the heart of South Carolina, and I had heard too many white men and women utter a quiet, “don't quote me” prayer for a court ruling against segregation, to believe that the majority of these people would ever sit timid and confused while those lawless elements of intimidation and coercion grasped the reins of government and the forces of society. I could see that the plain and simple Negroes of Clarendon County, the people behind the starched and polished briefs that lay before the Supreme Court, were not unduly afraid. After all, when I had walked down the street in Summerton, B. E. Hardy, a Negro farmer, stopped to tell me that he was “in the thick of the fight” to end segregation. I mentioned to Hardy that the mayor of Summerton had just been lecturing me about how the humble Negroes in the county preferred segregation. I told Hardy that a farmer at the mayor's office, waiting for a loan, was hasty to agree.

Hardy pushed his face close to mine and barked: “We got too damn many Negroes around here who ain't nothing but a white man's tool. They ought to've been dead before they were born; then they wouldn't be around to raise so many children to grow up ignorant because their parents are cowards enough to say they don't want their children to have their just dues.”

I talked with other Negroes in Summerton, and as I walked toward my car, ready to leave town, a hand tapped me on the arm. It was farmer Hardy, back to find out what I thought of the courage of Negroes in his county.

I told him that I had found them far more courageous than I had expected, but that the fighting words on both sides had aroused fear among some people that conflict and bloodshed might ensue.

“That's kinda strange to me,” the farmer said. “Here we been sending American boys across the seas to fight and die for principles that wasn't always easy to understand. But here we got a clear-cut American principle of democracy. Don't tell me they gonna let a little talk of riots and bloodshed make 'em weak-kneed and mealy-mouthed.

“You just let 'em know that we Negroes down here are like Gideon's army. A few went down like dogs and lapped the water. The rest were fit to fight.”

A few minutes later my colleague Bonham Cross, a Minneapolis
Tribune
photographer, and I were cruising slowly along the highway from Summerton to Columbia. I gazed across cotton fields and into the shacks that hundreds of Negroes called home. I thought of that one big word that hovered over Dixie:
Segregation.
A feeling of inadequacy crept over me. How could I explain the feelings inside farmer Hardy that made him compare militant Negroes with Gideon's army? How do you make a white man understand the stigma that is an inevitable concomitant of racial segregation? How do you make the white majority of Americans understand the Negroes' knowledge, based on experience, that segregation
is
a badge of inferiority pinned upon the segregated by the segregators? How do you explain racial segregation to the three poorly dressed lads we saw playing outside their shack on a chilly morning with drippings from their noses reaching into their mouths? What does segregation mean to the little Negro girl standing over the black washpot in front of the shanty where there is less than a dream of a bathtub or running water?

Photographer Bonham Cross and I got out of the car and walked toward the shanty, under which pigs wandered from the pens close by. I watched what appeared to be a million flies as they crawled along the wooden steps and on the arms and legs of the tots who came to the porch to see what these two strangers—one of them white and with a camera—were doing in their yard.

Yes, I thought, even the pigs and the flies were part of this issue of segregation. For in some measure they were a reflection on the education that South Carolina had given the parents of these youngsters, a measure of the extent to which second-class citizenship saps initiative, robs man of his
raison d'être.

And the dilapidated house, the backyard privy, the crude equipment in which the little girl washed clothes were reflections of a discriminatory economic system that Negroes insist is linked to segregation. I asked myself what I knew my readers would ask: Why don't they paint the shack, scrub the steps so the flies will go away, move the pigpens farther away and scrub the children and comb their hair? A big question—one that involves the incentive and self-respect that are lacking among the illiterate and the impoverished everywhere. But this apathy is difficult to understand when one has not lived where there is little education, little reason for incentive, little basis for self-respect.

Now, in 1956, I knew that the white man still did not understand, did not want to understand, this burden of the stigma of segregation. He laid his plans for coercion, passed oppressive law on top of oppressive law and even stacked the deck in his local courts, but he never ceased telling himself and the visiting press about how the Negro prefers segregation.

There was J. B. Easterly with his spurious story about the national “all-Negro” group being organized to maintain segregation; there were the editorials and the politicians asserting over and over again that “outside influences” were upsetting “the fine relationship between whites and Negroes in the South”; there were hundreds of whites parroting the same argument James F. Byrnes had given me in 1953 about how “only the Negro agitators and false leaders” desired integration.

It gave me a queasy, frightening feeling deep inside to listen to these arguments and realize that pills of self-deception were being dispensed and swallowed so generally across the South that a semi-literate cement-block builder in Louisiana in 1956 was using, almost verbatim, the rationalizations used almost three years earlier by a man who had held some of the highest positions this democracy can bestow upon an individual.

J. B. Easterly told us that the Negro preferred segregation because he is better off in the South than in the North. “One southern state—South Carolina—employs more Negro teachers than all your goddamn meddling northern states put together.”

Like Byrnes, Easterly neglected to mention the fact that teaching is practically the only professional state job a Negro can hold in the Deep South; or the fact that a strictly segregated system demands that South Carolina find 7,000 Negro teachers; or that these factors explain why so many Negroes are in the teaching profession in the Deep South. Easterly and others went on with the words of Byrnes, who told me in 1953 that there are about the same number of Negroes in New York City as in South Carolina and that, considering the relative poorness of South Carolina, Negroes in New York City are worse off.

(This is what the bureau of census reports for 1950:

In the New York metropolitan area, 579,410 Negroes over fourteen reported a median annual income of $1,707. In South Carolina, 506,436 Negroes over fourteen reported median annual incomes of $525.

In New York the median income for whites over fourteen was $2,517 compared with $1,684 for whites in South Carolina, indicating that New York is wealthier, even to the extent that a Negro in New York has a higher median income than a white person in South Carolina.

Allowing for this greater wealth, census figures show that the Negro still is better off in New York City. There his income is more than half that of the whites; in South Carolina it is less than one-third that of whites.)

So I listened to these white men—defiant today, wielding the big stick, predicting that the Negro will be humble; angelic tomorrow, disobeying the court only to do obedience to God, only to help the Negro who wants segregation, only fulfilling the white man's paternal duty to act as the Negro's best friend.

But even as I listened, sometimes disheartened and often confused, I could see that although there might be reasons to fear for my native South and my country, there should be no despair for the Negro. Swirling all about me and the white man was new evidence that the new Negro might not be humble.

In the early evening hours of December 1, 1955, a bright yellow bus passed through the court square in the heart of Montgomery, Alabama, and stopped in front of the Empire Theater. When a bespectacled, soft-voiced Negro seamstress refused to get up and yield her seat to white passengers, the white citizens of “the Cradle of the Confederacy” began to see the nation's most dramatic demonstration of the existence of this new Negro.

But let us tell that story in much of its detail, for in it is all the conflict, the pathos, the individual courage, the sacrifice, the spirit of Gandhi, the hope and the hopelessness that is the Southland of today.

On this Montgomery City Lines bus, with seating capacity of thirty-six, twenty-four Negroes and twelve white people sat in the traditional Jim Crow pattern: the Negroes to the rear, the whites to the front. Several passengers of both races were standing. Not only was this tradition, but the law, for the Montgomery city code required bus drivers to assign seats to passengers so as to separate whites from Negroes. The city code gave bus drivers police powers for the purpose of enforcing racial segregation.

At the Empire Theater stop, several white passengers boarded the bus, whereupon the driver asked four Negroes to stand so the whites might sit. Three Negroes complied, but Mrs. Rosa Parks, a forty-two-year-old seamstress at a department store and a well-known and highly respected citizen, refused. She said later that her action was spontaneous. Perhaps it was from tiredness, perhaps the resentment that is welling up high inside the new Negro was manifesting itself.

The bus driver called a policeman, who took Mrs. Parks off the bus to the police station, where she was charged with violating the city's segregation law. Trial was set for the following Monday, December 5, and Mrs. Parks was released on bond.

The news spread quickly through a Negro community where deep bitterness already existed over the bus situation. There had been many charges that bus drivers used abusive language toward Negro passengers. During 1955, two other Negro women had been taken off the bus, arrested and fined, although they contended that they were seated according to bus company policy. One Negro mother had stirred anger among the 60,000 Negroes in the metropolitan area when she told about a driver's alleged action when she put her two infants on the front seat while getting change from her purse. She said the driver ordered her to take the children from the seat, and without giving her a chance to place them elsewhere, lunged the bus forward, throwing the children onto the floor.

When word of Mrs. Parks' arrest reached the rougher element in the tavern district, they began to organize. “Goddamn it, we're gonna make it safe for our women,” said one tough guy. “These bus drivers either dog 'em or date 'em.”

But several Negro ministers were informed that these Negroes were oiling their pistols, sharpening their switch blades, and building up an arsenal of pipes, baseball bats and spiked sticks. The ministers got busy. On December 3, two days before the trial, the Negro community was flooded with mysterious circulars asking Negroes to stage a one-day protest by refusing to ride buses on the day of the trial. As yet, there has been no public admission as to who arranged for and distributed the circulars, but it is my belief that the job was done by the ministers, seeking to prevent the hoodlum element from carrying out its threat to “beat the hell out of a few bus drivers.” On Sunday, December 4, many Negro ministers included in their sermons a request that Negroes protest Mrs. Parks' arrest by staying off buses the following day.

On Monday, after the newspapers had given even wider circulation to the protest plans, probably eighty per cent of the Negro bus riders went to their jobs by bicycle, taxi, truck, wagon or on foot, covering distances up to ten miles. City officials were somewhat disturbed, but officials of Montgomery City Lines, a subsidiary of National City Lines of Chicago, were alarmed, for Montgomery's Negroes represented seventy per cent of the company's passengers.

On Monday, Mrs. Parks was found guilty of disobeying the bus driver and fined $10 and $4 cost. This angered Negroes even more. That night, 5,000 Negroes overflowed the Holt Street Baptist Church, where, according to press reports, some forty-seven Negro ministers and one white one, the Reverend Robert S. Graetz of the all-Negro Trinity Lutheran Church, led the crowd through hymn-singing and speech-making and produced a solid corps of citizens determined to produce changes in the transportation system of Montgomery. They extended the boycott—or “protest” as they called it—until such time as the bus company and city officials agreed to (1) more courteous treatment of Negroes; (2) seating on a first-come-first-served basis, agreeing that Negroes would continue to fill the bus from the rear and whites from the front; and (3) that Negro bus drivers be employed on predominantly Negro lines.