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Fs eenge me ee \ - MARCH 8, 1948 ” destructiveness of this wartime devel- opment. Peace brought a general mod- _ eration of the hysterical element. Stories of the mythical “Eleanor Clubs,” of apocalyptic, warnings reportedly mut- tered by Negroes on buses and in de- partment stores, passed almost com- pletely from the conversation of the middle class. Cold, dark war. If war had been followed by 2 clean and general settle- ment, I believe that inevitable and long delayed civil-tights concessions to Negroes would have gone forward in the South rather quickly. But, instead, we have passed into the cold war with Russia. The psychological results of this conflict are already overwhelm- ingly evident in Southern life. There ™ ‘can be little doubt that these expedient results of militarism—the increased fa- cility for steam-tolling and shouting down honest American and Democratic and constitutional developments—are not accidental by-products of a foreign ' policy-but, so far as Southern politi- -cians are concerned, a part of foreign Frightful images of “Russia,” “Com- munism,” “The Atom Bomb,” are blasted at the Southern mind from every quarter. Every public utterance and every second editorial comes up with fresh warnings about. the on- slaught being prépared in the great, ominous world. beyond the Mason- Dixon line against “‘white civiliza- tion.”. The threat seems to issue from Washington and the Democratic Party as much as it does from Moscow. Here and there a-lone voice speaks up in’ protest; a weekly newspaper pub- lishes a rational editorial; a preacher or a rabbi talks good sense. On the whole, people in the street remain indifferent for a long time to the white-hot crusades of Governors, Senators and other embattled cham- pions. But any issue, no matter how unrelated to the tranquil and humble realities of town life, eventually gives the citizen’s mind its coloring when it is all his mind has to feed upon. And so this agitation has succeeded, in the case.of great numbers of Southerners, in making a cruel amalgam of the \ Russian question and the race question, and has convinced many that the cure for “Democracy” and for keeping Ne- groes in their place, for high prices, for scarce housing, is a wart with Rus- sia, which is somehow causing all these difficulties. _ In a barber shop not long ago I heard the radio news commentator say that ‘Russia is spending seven percent of her income on education while the United States is spending only one and a half percent for this purpose.” The men in the barber shop were welders, farmers, fishermen, clerks— men who ordinarily have a great re- spect for education, wanting it for their children, sensitive to their own lack. But even these. innocuous statis- “tics were received with ‘agitation, as though the item discussed was poison gas or the atom bomb instead of edu- cation. — Hope in the South. The quest of civil liberties in the South—ike every other. question, and perhaps the very existence of a habitable planet—lies ‘ under the shadow of the atom bomb and the future. If it were unrelated to this stupendous element, its develop- ment might be fairly predictable. 1 have seen Negroes standing in line to vote in Mississippi and not a man in the crowd seeried upset by the fact or even overly conscious of it. Some troublemaker might have set off upon a harangue and changed the mood. But in the face of increasingly forthright Supreme Court decisions and Depatt- ment of Justice commitments to en- force them, harangues at the polls are becoming rarer. , The whole civil-rights program hangs upon the right to vote. Once that. right is established, politicians will adjust to it, as they are adjusting in places where it has been won. And by adjustment I mean the cessation of malignant and irrelevant agitation of an emotional question which is utterly remote from the economic and politi- cal needs of Southern people. In the old days many of the “aristocrats” in Congress adjusted for a time to the Populist program. But they did not stay adjusted. This time, by the grace . ene so aie oc tS x = ee Fa cee eh Sp EAN, ESL ae si BRE EEE tant mE RES ae Ka of Supreme Court rulings which stick, they will eventually adjust or return to private life. = There is a final point that must be touched on in any discussion of civil rights, though theoretically it is irrele- vant. And that is the question of so- cial equality and “race purity.” The » more oné sifts day-to-day realities from ~~ the jungle of legends and suppositions, the more it is apparent that a funda- mental extension of civil rights could ~ take place without loss to the white Southerners of one scintilla of the “race purity” they now have. There can never be intimate social relation- ships or intermartiage between two, groups when one is profoundly and emotionally determined that it shall . not take place. But keeping the other group from any exercise of the citizen- ship which organic law guarantees - them, or -barring them from educa- tional opportunities which their tax dollars help provide, are not remotely necessary to keep the races separate in their social choices. Wealthy white Southerners do not as a rule marry poor ones; perhaps not one Southern member of the Junior League has evet married a practising sharecropper, though they are the same Anglo-Saxon offshoot of the same Caucasian race. I know of one woman, in fact, who restrained her son from martying outside the “North Missis- sippi Baptist Convention.” That seems to me to come very close to saying the last word on intermarriage; but not on civil liberties and American democracy.