◆ SpookStack

MARCH 8, 1948 aad such a width (a strap known to prisoners and ex-prisoners all over the State ‘as “Black Annie”). In most Southern states packs of well trained bloodhounds are still maintained, and every few weeks or so the dogs are _ sniffing and. barking along the trail of some suspect or criminal, or inno- cent victim. -.Such scenes as ‘this illuminated and horrified the readers of Uncle. Tom's Cabin and Whitman’s slavery poems before the Civil War. As a matter of fact, one of the most universal experi- ences of Southern lifé, the spectacle of a neatly dressed individual auto- matically hanging back ‘at the rear of a crowd, or standing hat in hand wait- “ing ‘to be noticed, or going through a special door marked for the lower caste, is an astonishing anachronism. _ Last winter a very old woman was buried in a Mississippi churchyard not fat from where I live. She was 96 years old, perhaps the last person alive who remembered in a clearheaded way the details and the abundant harsh tealities of plantation life before the Civil War. I was fortunate enough to exchange letters with her in’ the last years of her life, and to read her frag- mentary memories dictated to a rela- tive. She could have been termed a “progressive,” certainly more progres- sive than politicians half her age who repine for past glories which she ac- tually remembered with considerable irony. But the most dramatic aspect of her life—an aspect of which she was ‘well awate—-was the fact that it had spanned the most incredible techno- logical age of history. In her lifetime the science of mictos- copy had developed and the germ theory had given mankind its first idea of the nature and causes of illness. Chemistry, physics and astronomy had stripped aside the veil upon the mys- tery of matter; physics had passed from Newton to wave mechanics, and finally to Einstein and Hiroshima. This old lady had actually seen the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and in her lifetime warfare had developed ° from the muzzle-loading cannon to the fourth-dimensional horrors that fill the press today. But over her 96 years, dominant Southern political leadership changed not at all. On the day she died, the fundamental principles of. “white supremacy’ politics were the same as on the day she was born. A gap in fime. This great abyss which has opened between the world of antiquated theories and the world as: it is, is still the Devil’s ‘Cauldron where the old-time leadership is stew- ing up the old-time formula of race hate, militarism and _ states’ rights. This brew has served to poison human sympathies and drug intelligence suffi- ciently in the past to set the Southern people, the majority of whom are almost as poor as the Negroes, against the very. political and economic devel- opments which would help them. The dominant aspect of life in the South today is the blasting volume of propaganda which has been turned loose through newspapers, radio, poli- ticians, “‘service’ clubs, chambers of commerce, the person-to-person con- tacts of the barbershop and _ street corner. Its objective is to prevent eco- nomic and racial democracy from sweeping into the South, and to erect ' new psychological levees behind the legal ones that are crumbling. I believe that if by some miracle the averape white Southerner could be free to form his views of race relations out of the experiences of his own life, the race problem would quickly fade away. But the enforced servility of the Negro people—automatically holding at least as many poor whites in a degraded role—has been the brick and mortar from which the whole economy was Bae eR ART ee 1 A Bin ap ee OS built. Therefore in the South no white ‘man has the sight not to fear the Negro. He is ‘made to understand, from beyond the memories of child- hood, that any suggestion of Negro humanity and worth is a threat against something called race purity. By the time he grows old enough to see that it is rather a threat to factory invest- ments, to cotton profits, to cheap serv- ant labor, he has lost the capacity to Other fundamental complications have also been at work, For twenty yeats or so he has been looking at the results of Negro poverty. When he teaches maturity, he can no longer dis- tinguish the results of poverty from the causes. By this time life has made him an official and conforming “‘South- erner.” He adheres to the religion of race purity in a deeper psychological process than he adheres to his actual religion, or to his belief in democracy. _ He, too, has made himself into a kind of mortar to keep old economic and political institutions stuck together, If he is the average Southerner—I do not mean the average middle-class Southerner—he does not benefit from this economy. His income is low in comparison with that of other regions. His schools, his hospitals, his living standards are poorer. It could be dem- onstrated to him that an open political