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The Civil Rights Movement first touched my life about fifty years ago, though I scarcely knew it at the time. We were visiting my father’s sisters at the old home place in South Carolina, and were heading home from a lakeside picnic. I was old enough to read and ask questions, but too young to follow current events. As we slowly wheeled out of the parking lot, station wagon crowded with parents, kids, and aunts, I scrutinized the retreating entrance sign from my perch on the back seat. Its big bold letters read “Greenwood County White Park.” The park didn’t look white to me. Except for the ducks, all I saw were the usual green trees, brown water, and red dirt. This had to be explained. above: The Civil Rights Movement won huge victories, and made enormous differences, but the gains are fragile and progress is incomplete. Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King, 1964, photographed by Herman Hiller, courtesy of the New York World Telegram & Sun Collection at the Library of Congress.
“Why do they call it ‘White Park?’” I demanded. “Why? ” Flush with modern theories of childrearing, my parents normally indulged my curiosity, but not this time. Dense silence suddenly enveloped the front seat. Maybe they hadn’t heard me. “Was it named for Mr. White?” I offered helpfully. “Is that why they call it ‘White Park’?” More silence. Tense silence. Without knowing it, I had stumbled onto a sore subject, something my parents did not want to discuss with children, especially around sensitive kinfolk. You never knew what people might think. Finally my mother stammered something about explaining it to me later, but she never did. I got a similar reaction when I grew a little older and asked for definitions of some funny words that kept coming over the airwaves: “segregation,” “integration,” and even “race.” These concepts were too hot for her to handle, and I would have to figure them out on my own. Even sex was easier to explain. For a southern child in the 1950s, segregation was everywhere, but Jim Crow alone had not created the awkward silence that was unforgettable even before I understood it. Earlier generations of white parents had explained racial boundaries as a matter of course, and I was already aware, without being able to articulate it, that the black people in my life had entirely different roles from the white people. But by the time I encountered the mystery of “White Park,” old racial assumptions were becoming untenable for “moderates” like my parents, far too absurd to explain to a child but still too powerful to criticize in company. Unable to defend segregation but afraid to renounce it, my parents were truly speechless. It is clear to me now that it was the infant Civil Rights Movement that had disturbed our family outing that uneasy afternoon. Gathering strength in the twentieth century’s first half, the Movement had already scored impressive victories in the streets and the courts. With years of bloody struggle still ahead, black marchers and protestors had already touched my parents’ consciences, undermining Jim Crow’s moral defenses and leaving my mother and father tongue-tied. In the years ahead, new waves of marchers would keep pushing forward, ultimately overturning decades of brutal discrimination and forging a social revolution. As they did so, millions of white southerners, including my parents, would surprise themselves by learning to live by a new racial code. The Movement’s greatest victories were the monumental changes it brought to the lives of black Americans, but some of its achievements were less tangible than equal housing or the right to vote. For some of us, at least, as the physical barriers of segregation slowly fell, the mental barriers that had created Greenwood’s “White Park” in the first place slowly receded as well, first giving way to stammered excuses and eventually to palpable relief that the duty to defend the indefensible had finally lifted. This issue of Southern Cultures focuses on the Civil Rights Movement, and its timing is apt. Here at the Center for the Study of the American South, the Southern sout hern cultures, Fall 2008 : Harry L. Watson
Oral History Program is now in the midst of a lengthy study of “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” stretching from the 1940s to nearly the present. The aim is to find stories that capture the Movement’s origins and its broadest ramifications, as protestors first struggled to find a voice, then struggled more to implement new mandates, and finally carried their principles into new fields like economic life, gender relations, and the environment. This issue would not be complete without a progress report on that multi-year endeavor, told here by the SOHP’s Sarah Thuesen. We also proudly present the SOHP’s dvd on the Movement. Some of the other essays in this issue celebrate the Movement itself—the lawyers, the marchers, the victors, the prophets who have still not fully overcome. But others deal with southerners who struggled to catch up with history, either by embracing a Movement someone else had started, or by resisting it, or by consenting to tactical retreats, or by struggling to accept it when the tide had turned. We read about commemoration, accommodation, resistance, and reconciliation. We hear successful leaders, and remember the battles not yet won. Fundamentally, we start to see how the white South’s “Never” slowly became “Okay, maybe a little bit.” White retreat has been the inevitable flip side of black progress. Its story is not heroic but pervasive, since for all its flaws, we live today in a South that the Citizens Councils fought bitterly to prevent. It is common now to say, in the words of a Birmingham activist whom Thuesen quotes, that “everything has changed, but ain’t nothing changed.” It is hard—though still important—to keep both halves of that sentence in focus simultaneously, avoiding the twin extremes of smugness and despair. Full equality is a distant goal, and coded racial messages still clot our political debates, but there once was a time when the white South brooked no debate. If unquestioned devotion to discrimination was a central theme of white southern history before the Movement, the tortured, partial suspension of it has been central ever since. The late Alex Haley was surely one of the most important cultural figures in the struggle to transform the South and the nation. A masterful interviewer and journalist, Haley first brought us The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a twentieth-century masterpiece that emboldened black militancy and jolted white complacency. But Haley also brought us Roots—on the page and on the screen—a family saga that enlightened whites and inspired blacks by rendering the black struggle for freedom and dignity as a familiar and reassuring variant of the American Dream. If Malcolm’s fiery rhetoric gave whites a frightening glimpse of the anger that smoldered behind black masks, Roots offered a vision of family history and liberation that blacks and whites could both embrace. Our issue begins with a wide-ranging interview Haley gave to William Ferris in 1989, three years before Haley’s death, in which he shared his family stories of black struggle and achievement and reflected on the changes brought by the Movement. A second interview, collected by Elizabeth Gritter of the Southern Oral HisFront Porch
tory Program, gives us the voice of Judge H. T. Lockard, the Memphis lawyer and activist who led his city’s NAACP chapter and later became the first African American to serve in Tennessee’s cabinet. Lockard gives us a peppery account of the courtroom side of the 1950s Movement, with its multiple lawsuits aimed at prying open closed doors inch by inch. Along the way, he shares some of the Movement’s inner conflicts, as lawyers from the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund sparred with ministers from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, including Martin Luther King, and some black community leaders clung to the status quo. As Lockard’s life struggles began to pay off, his career began to leave his former white opponents behind. “Well,” he tells them, savoring the irony, “you were just on the wrong side of the track.” Other essays explore white reactions to the Civil Rights Movement, and efforts to build reconciliation through museums and public memorials. Stephen J. Whitfield leads off with a recollection of Harry Golden, the author and publisher who attacked segregation with gentle ridicule from his insider/outsider position. Whitfield shows us how a Jewish New Yorker brought his own critique to regional mores, while Charlotte gave him a reasonably safe perch from which to fire his salvos. As an adroit immigrant satirist, Golden succeeded by inviting old stock white southerners to live up to the American democratic traditions which they professed, and he loved more than they. Ironically, Golden’s celebration of family togetherness, equal opportunity, and upward mobility for both races eventually exposed him to the penalties of success, when mainstream culture came under attack in the late 1960s, and his once-prophetic message was dismissed as too conventional. Southern conventions now make room for institutions of reconciliation, from Martin Luther King Day, to Civil Rights museums, to efforts at confronting past violence. Robert Hamburger’s essay interprets four very different Civil Rights museums in Memphis, Birmingham, Selma, and Albany, Georgia. Here black and white visitors struggle with the Movement’s memories, replete with pain and homage and dawning insights which some whites still refuse to accept. Hamburger finds that the museums’ most powerful effect is to recreate a connection to the past, to make visitors feel part of the events they recall. The reason is surely that these old conflicts are not too far behind us, or beneath the surface calm of the contemporary South. So long as the Movement’s relics can still do this, they will be anything but museum pieces. David Cunningham approaches reconciliation through various efforts to address the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. Resolution is not easy, he tells us, for criminal trials of aging terrorists tend to isolate the perpetrators and absolve the complicity of those who convict them, while efforts to understand and alleviate the real plight of impoverished white racists can evade the hard questions of moral accountability. Cunningham has more hope for the path taken by a Truth and sout hern cultures, Fall 2008 : Harry L. Watson
Reconciliation Commission that assembled in Greensboro, North Carolina, when criminal trials failed to resolve the bitterness and unanswered questions left by the 1979 murder of five radical demonstrators. While making genuine progress, the commission faced stubborn resistance from civic boosters who could not admit that the city itself shared some responsibility for what had happened. The road to broader reconciliation will surely feature even higher obstacles. Derek H. Alderman tells a similar story of progress mixed with resistance in his stark photographs of southern streets now named for Martin Luther King, and his penetrating discussion of their place in the modern South. Some of King’s streets are broad symbolic unifiers that link disparate parts of still-divided cities, and some are black-only lanes in segregated neighborhoods. Some are sincere gestures of recognition; some are minor sops to marginal constituencies. The tension that still runs through Civil Rights museums and reconciliation efforts reappears in these varied images, as communities still struggle over King’s place in their common landscapes. In our “South Polls,” Southern Cultures editor Larry Griffin and fellow sociologist Peggy G. Hargis attempt to assess the effects of the Civil Rights Movement by gauging just how much the white South has really changed. Their tools are a series of public opinion polls taken as far back as 1972 to as recently as 2006. They find that white Americans in general have improved dramatically over time in their professed willingness to accept blacks as schoolmates, neighbors, and even family members. Southern whites’ racial attitudes have improved as well, and at almost the same rates. But despite this progress, regional differences in racial attitudes have not disappeared. White southerners are still far more likely than other white Americans to blame blacks for their own difficulties, to oppose intermarriage, and to resist government efforts to redress inequality. White southerners now express far more racial tolerance than white northerners did in 1972, but can we trust their answers to the polltakers? Is the glass half empty or half full? The data give hints but no firm answers. The numbers leave us with the same uncertain conclusions as our essayists. The Civil Rights Movement won huge victories, and made enormous differences, but the gains are fragile and progress is incomplete. The “White Park” signs have come down, and de jure segregation is something that children must now learn about on museum field trips instead of family outings. Parents must arm themselves to answer different queries from their offspring, and struggle with different uncertainties. But the forces that inspired my pesky questions are not gone. In one form or another, I know I will face them with my grandchildren. Harry Wat son, Editor
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