Dynamics of Desegregation; 8; A Glimpse at the Newest South

The Taffer Jim Crow, New South, Series 8, take 1. The Dynamics of De-Secregation. The Agricultural South is beaten its plowshares into spindles and its prudent forks into isotopes. Factory chimneys are replacing corn stalks.

Yesterday's cotton plantation is today's synthetic manufacturing plant. Economic indices have been rising faster in the South than in the nation in general, and in recent years the South adds on each working day an average of one multi-million dollar industry to its economy. From plowshares to spindles, these words of North Carolina newspaperman William Polk may sound like the old enthusiastic pitch of a chamber of commerce executive to you, but they are literally true. Along with the far west, the newest South over the past generation has been enjoying a rise in industrialization and prosperity, even greater than the rest of the country. Of course, the South has had further to go than other regions to catch up with the national economy, and it still is not fully caught up, but the giant strides it has made in this direction have crucial implications for American race relations.

Indeed, the South's booming economy is one of the major factors that is helping to write the epitaph for Jim Crow. The full force to the size newly gained prosperity cannot be appreciated unless we recognize what a torturous history industrial development has had in the region. Well after the rest of the nation, the South made its first tentative moves toward large-scale industrialization in the 1840s and 1850s, with textile meals opening in North Carolina and Georgia. But it was not until after the Civil War that the so-called new South movement to attract manufacturing began. After the devastation of the war from 1866 until the turn of the century, politicians such as Benjamin Hale and newspaper men such as Henry Grady pointing to the desperate plight of the South and urged a new way of life for Dixie.

In one of these many famous speeches in the 1880s, the eloquent Grady made his case by describing the life of a typical southern farmer this way. He gets up at the alarm of a Connecticut clock, puts his Chicago suspenders on a pair of Detroit overholes, washes his face with Cincinnati soap in a Philadelphia washpan, works all day on a farm fenced with Pittsburgh wire and covered by an Ohio mortgage. He comes home at night and reads a Bible printed in Chicago and says a prayer written in Jerusalem. And when he dies, they bury him in the midst of a marble quarry, cutting through solid marble to make his grave, and yet place in a little marble tombstone above him from Vermont. The burying him in the heart of a pine forest and yet the pine coffin is imported from Cincinnati. The burying him within touch of an iron mine and yet the nails in his coffin and the iron in the shovel that digs his grave are imported from Pittsburgh.

The South doesn't furnish a thing on earth for his funeral, but the corpse and a hole in the ground. If Brady's words mix bitterness with humiliation, they are indicative of much of the motivation behind the so-called New South movement. The South lost the Civil War in part because of its lack of manufacturing and it was deeply dependent economically on the North after the war because of its inability to compete industrially. It's not surprising then that such captains of the New South as Henry Grady kept the Civil War in mind and made frequent use of military illusions. They often referred to the new effort to industrialize as the South's fight, to the new tools as weapons, to the new workers as battalions. Blatantly, one rally newspaper editor wrote in 1880 that the South should make money, build up its waste places and thus force from the North the recognition of our worth and dignity of character. This in a weaving of resentment over military defeat with the beginnings of industrialization is not unique to the South.

WW Raustow, in his popular work The Stages of Economic Growth, notes that the initial or take-off stage of a nation's economic growth frequently follows a lost war or other humiliations. Examples of his humiliation principle include Germany after Napoleon or Russia after a century of military intrusions all the way from Napoleon through WW1. And of course the newly independent nations just emerging now from colonial status. Wright's Raustow, as a matter of historical fact, a reactive nationalism reacting against intrusion for more advanced nations, has been a most important and powerful motive force in the transition from traditional to modern societies, at least as important as the prophet motive. Men holding effective authority or influence have been willing to uproot traditional societies, not primarily to make more money, but because the traditional society failed or threatened to fail to protect them from humiliation by foreigners.

Raustow's analysis, as you can see, fits the science rather well. A reactive regionalism was certainly an important feature in the new South movement of the late 19th century. Henry Grady certainly feels the bell as an influential man willing to uproot a traditional rarian society because it had failed to protect the region from humiliation. But then can be usefully thought of as having long been an underdeveloped region, not unlike the proud but underdeveloped nations now coming into being throughout the world. As late as 1938, President Roosevelt could still accurately refer to the South as the nation's number one economic problem. But since 1938, the region has been industrializing at a rate that dwarfs the early gains of Henry Grady's new South movement.

In the last generation, the South's real takeoff in Raustow's terms, the initial boom phase, has been taking place and is still going strong, slowed only in particular localities by racial disturbances. Let's take a glimpse at this newest South. Spurred on at first by World War II spending, the South has continued to attract industry with a variety of inducements. First, its excellent climate. Second, a large available supply of labor, both black and white. Third, a sectional antipathy to labor organization. Fourth, transportation facilities that are at last reaching the standards of the rest of the nation. And finally, fifth, a wide variety of state and local government tax, land and building concessions, which to be frank at times have reached wild and reckless proportions. Now, the resulting changes make for some startling and impressive statistics. For instance, the South, together with the far west, has each year over recent decades been either first or second in gains in public construction and per capita outlays for privately owned public utilities and private non-residential construction.

Despite this growth and the steady stream of white and negro migrants who annually leave the South, there was still a surplus of labor. Thanks to both the Bolweevil and farm mechanization, massive numbers of southerners have left farming and many of the whites have secured employment in manufacturing. Thus, in the typical southern state, almost a half, 45% of the population lived on a farm in 1940. But only a seventh, 15% lived on a farm in 1960. One with typical southern state had only about 15% of its employed workers in manufacturing in 1940, it had almost a quarter, 25% of them in manufacturing by 1960. Today, the South leads the nation in a number of manufacturing areas such as paper making and a state-like South Carolina produces more textiles than even Massachusetts.

These advances in the newest South have naturally led to more education and higher income for the average southerner, though the gains have been much greater for whites than for negro's. In years of schooling, for example, the typical adult southerner in 1940 had little more than a grade school education, about seven years and all. Today, the typical adult southerner has had some high school education, about nine years and all, or consider family income. Thinking of the typical American family's income as 100%, the typical southern family in 1931 had an income of only 42% of the national figure. But today, it has an annual income roughly 80% of the national figure. A wide disparity still exists, however, between the income of white and negro families in the South, for the white figure is still over twice that of the Negro.

This disparity in white and negro income in the South raises some crucial questions. How are these sweeping changes affected race relations? Does a booming, prospering economy weaken, strengthen, or even touch the segregation system of Jim Crow? To answer these queries, let's first consider the effects of this way of life on white southerners. So we hear a lot these days from southern segregationist about the glories of the 19th century and the old southern way of life. The South has clearly chosen the 20th century and progress with a capital P. The old life had really meant in historian Van Woodwood's phrase, Jullips for the few and Pellegrif for the crew. But the new life promises and has already started to deliver prosperity. Perhaps most white southerners are unaware of the full implications of their choice.

But once you get accustomed to a higher standard of living, it is only human to want to maintain that standard and even better it further. We frequently look back, but in fact, of course, we sell them want to go back. But legal segregation is a legacy of this late 19th century, a barrier to a flexible, open economy. It cannot coexist with the modern industrial situation. Ultimately, a choice has to be made between prosperity and Jim Crow. And the South, you see, has already made its choice. Listen to this mayor of a deep south city. We've been watching these freedom rides and boycotts as they happened in other cities and we're beginning to get the picture. Well, we've been in contact with cities like Savannah, Atlanta, where they've had trouble in the past. But you might not believe this.

They've told us what it can mean to have the Negro's boycotten. But in Savannah, in Savannah, the sales in some stores were cut 50%. And bankers and small loan companies, insurance men, everybody felt the pitch. So here, right quick, we formed a committee of leading white and Negro citizens to work things out as soon as we had the first demonstration. Of course, that had to mean desegregating some things. Already, we've desegregated our public golf courses and the public library and the lunch counters in our stores. After all, even Robert E. Lee had to surrender finally, didn't he? Not all Southern mayors join Robert E. Lee so quickly. Particularly in Alabama and Mississippi cities, the significance of modern industrialization for race relations is not so rapidly sensed. Birmingham, the bustling steel center, is an excellent example of this point.

For it has so far resisted racial change with every means possible, including open violence. Obviously, then, we must qualify our appraisal of the newest South. It is clear that the long run effects of the region's rapid industrialization lead to Jim Crow's demise. Yet it is equally clear that these same sweeping changes make for short run disruptions and disorders. The South, like many other end of developed areas of the world today, is undergoing a vast social revolution at a considerably faster rate than the industrial revolutions of England or even New England. Here in the mid-20th century, the technology of rapid change is highly developed, but the adaptability of human beings is not so highly developed. Machines can accommodate to a new environment faster than their human operators. In concrete terms, this means that millions of white southerners today are having to adjust as best they can to new lives.

New lives in a punctual, complex, threatening, urban and industrial society. Many of them are afraid and unsure, and their fears often find an old traditional target, the Negro southerner, who ironically at the same time is undergoing the same changes and pressures. The mobs of Little Rock, the screaming women of New Orleans, the clansmen of Mobile and Chad Nuga, are usually people of rural origins who have been uprooted by the whirlwind across the region. If the long-range aspects for race relations of the newest South's industrial revolution seem certain in, so too of a short-range violence and resistance promised by the uprooted white migrants. But how does the Negro southerner fit into this picture? Well, in the first place, the Negro has never been allowed to enter the industrial complex directly.

The great majority of southern factories have, ever since Henry Grady's new South days, excluded and still exclude. The Negroes from all but the most menial jobs. And until recently, such a severe restriction of the labor supply has not deterred the expansion of southern manufacturing because of the generally large surplus of white workers. But as the rapid pace of industrialization continues, and potential workers of both races steadily migrate out of the region, this surplus dwindles. Again, we see that the long-range effects of this process are predictable. Jim Crow employment restrictions are doomed in the future of the newest South. In fact, we may expect Negro southerners to strive in the 1960s and 70s to secure better employment opportunities as determinedly as they have been working for the vote and the desegregation of public facilities. Despite their inability to participate directly in the size prosperity, however, the Negro has achieved important educational and economic advances.

Though often forced to scrape the crumbs, Negro southerners have not been totally unaffected by the size growth. Consider first the Negroes recent educational gains, partly because he has frequently moved to the cities, where schools are better, and partly because the newest South has been belatedly improving Negro education since World War II, many Negro southerners have obtained reasonably good educations. But after going to the expense of educating them, the region usually denies them a job at a level commensurate with their training. Frustrated by such a situation, many highly skilled Negroes leave their native section, while others stay and protest for racial change. It would be humorous word a less desperate situation, but actually the white South brought on the citizens and the freedom rise through its devotion to the Jim Crow principle of separate vehicle. The young Negro generation today is the best educated yet.

There are greater skills and sophistication, and there are rising expectations have led directly to their publicized protests. Further evidence you see that you cannot simultaneously educate a people and oppress them too. An important reason for the success of these student protests has been the resolute boycotts established by whole Negro urban communities, but an effective boycott requires the community with enough buying power to make itself felt and missed. Indeed, Negro income has been rising, slowly to be sure, but now reaching a point where it can no longer be ignored by white merchants, regardless of their racial attitudes. I recall before World War II and my hometown of Richmond, Virginia, that some major retail stores were not even allowed or Negro customer inside their premises. And yet today, these very same stores annually spend tens of thousands of dollars in advertising directed at the Negro community.

In the 1930s you see, white southerners could ignore the meager buying power of Negro Richmonders. But by the 1960s, the same Negro buying power achieved a wide-scale desegregation of lunch counters in Richmond by simply being withheld from segregated stores. The Negro's son and his protest also succeed because of industrial pressures of another type. Suppose a southern city witnesses citizens in their public libraries say in public parks, and faces Negro student demands that these facilities be desegregated. Unlike our mayor, who emulates Robert E. Lee, some civic leaders in the south would impulsively close down the facilities. They'd close the library in the parks rather than have them desegregated. But such race action conflicts with the future manufacturing growth of a city. Little Rock offers the sharpest illustration.

Though successfully attracting industry up until the mob rioting and the later closing of its public schools, Little Rock found it could not persuade a single firm to build a plant for four long, lean years. I remember serving as a consultant for a news film crew in Little Rock in the midst of these lean years. And I took them out to the tractor land called the Little Rock Industrial District. A large expanse just south of the city that had been a set aside for attracting new industry. It had a rail, siding, roads, and electric and water connections, and eager anticipation of new plants. But the industrial district had the misfortune of opening just before the 1957 school crisis in the community. In so for years, it remained barren lion, a stark symbol of a city in deep trouble. I took the news crew out to film this telling site, and they skillfully captured the weeds growing up over the rail siding and over the roads. And for the sound track, they dubbed in the voice of Governor Forbes of Arkansas, assuring everyone in one of his many speeches,

that Little Rock had not suffered industrially whatsoever during the crisis. No further comment you see was necessary. Now this portion of the Little Rock tragedies common knowledge among most southern business leaders. And it is an important reason why they ease quietly out of their segregationist positions of so-called moderation to support successful desegregation, as they have done in Atlanta, in Memphis, in Dallas, in other major cities in the south. But there are southern communities that are still learning Little Rock's lesson the hard way. For example, civic leaders in one textile city in the middle south a few years ago made the mistake of closing down their public library to prevent desegregation at precisely the time they were completing a deal with a large New York state firm for a new plant. Desperately needing to diversify their one product economy, the city officials have been overjoyed at obtaining a famous non textile company's new plant

that would hire well-paid highly skilled workers, but the library closing ended the whole deal. The New York firm's leaders felt that any city that could take its extreme action was capable of other extreme actions that would hurt their plant and make it difficult to attract good executives and skilled operatives. In this way, one by one, each southern community that does not take the cue from Little Rock's plight is finding out for itself that you cannot successfully mix 20th century progress with 19th century racism or to paraphrase the Negro leader at the turn of this century, Booker T. Washington, the white south cannot keep the Negro southerner Washington said in the gutter without getting in the gutter itself. Obviously, the white south has chosen not to pay such a price. These long-range inevitable effects of the status industrial revolution cause the desegregation process to have a surprisingly predictable pattern.

Research that I have conducted together with a number of other social scientists has shown clearly that public school desegregation is progressing in the south directly along the lines we have just been discussing. That is, cities tend to desegregate first, especially prosperous cities, which are industrializing and have moderate or low percentages of Negroes in their populations. These districts come the wealthier rural counties, which have small numbers of Negroes, and last come the poorer rural counties with high Negro percentages. Usually, these resistant counties are part of the South's old black belt, named for its rich black soil and stretching from Virginia all the way to Texas. In this rustic area, racial traditions stemming directly from slavery and old plantation life are slow to die, and industry and racial change are slow to come. Consider such border states as Missouri and Kentucky, which have their school desegregation programs well underway.

After the cities of these two states desegregated, rural counties began to follow suit, but the order in which the rural counties entered the process was closely related to their economic conditions. The counties that went first, when compared with the slow and resisting counties, tended to have more of everything. They had more manufacturing, more valuable farms, higher family incomes, and more refrigerators and central heating even in their homes. In a phrase, the counties that desegregated early in the border states were more intimately a part of the newest South. Note, too, that recent desegregation of public schools and other facilities in the middle and deep South is tending to occur in the larger cities. Indeed, the process is predictable enough for social scientists to apply statistical formula to predict roughly the desegregation pattern from county to county. Such formula used census measures of economic prosperity and the percentages of niggros and the percentages of people living in the cities, and they predict results far better than chance guessing.

These measures of the newest South then provide us with some of the best clues that we have as to what the future holds for the desegregation process. The economics are surely not the only factors in the situation. It is certain that as these changes continue, desegregation becomes inevitable. Harry Ashmore, the former editor of the Arkansas Gazette, has written that white southern news will work all day to bring industry to their community and then spend half the night of the segregationist meeting of the White Citizens Council plotting how to keep the niggro down that these people are schizophrenic. They are working against themselves at different times in the day. Our glimpse at the newest South reveals the truth of Ashmore's words. Let's not forget, however, there were real values and aspects of the 19th century rural South that hopefully can be retained, friendliness and hospitality, a more gentle pace of life. Now we see the South rocketing into the fast-paced urban industrial life of the 20th century.

Rapidly it is becoming less Confederate and more American. And this trend is clearly one of the important factors in the present writing of the Epitaph Fujim Crow. The actor was Bill Kempness. Epitaph Fujim Crow is a presentation of the Commission on Extension Courses, Harvard University, 75 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge 38, Massachusetts. The actor was Bill Kempness. Epitaph Fujim Crow is a presentation of the Commission on Extension Courses, Harvard University, 75 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge 38, Massachusetts.

Association with the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council, WGBHTV Boston. Studio production costs were provided in part with the assistance of grants from the Anti-Defamation League of Beneb Brits, the Commonwealth School Boston and the Claudia B. and Maurice L. Stone Foundation. This is NET, National Educational Television.