Chapter III: Part I: The Evidence (2)

The _Brown_ decision operated with galvanic force upon the South; but as this is written, eight years after _Brown_, it is apparent that the electric shock has lost at least some of its impact. The South, in many respects, is still one; but the prodigious energies that were set in motion after World War II are beginning to reassert themselves widely. If one reads the recent Messages and Inaugural Addresses of Southern Governors, he will find segregation barely mentioned. Everywhere, the emphasis is on industrial promotion, tourist promotion, expansion of higher education. The problems that increasingly absorb Southern legislatures are problems common to such bodies across the Republic--taxation, highways, mental health, the control of air and water pollution.

In brief, I doubt that “the Negro question,” by which is meant the fear of integration and of a revolutionary Negro ascendancy, will provide a sufficient force, in itself, to keep the South welded together. The fears of 1954 are subsiding, as it becomes apparent that there will be no significant integration (not in the definitive sense in which I use the word, as a condition quite distinct from “desegregation”); and we observe that the revolution so many Northerners jubilantly anticipated in _Brown_ is not to be a two-day _coup d’état_, but a thirty-year Peloponnesian War. Beyond the borders of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, interest wanes. In Virginia, the assignment of a Negro child to a formerly white school now rates a two-inch item on _The News Leader’s_ page 48.

What of the other common themes that tie the South together and make the region distinct? What of Southern conservatism? What of the Southern manner? These traits will endure, I believe, though a wry acknowledgment may be made of persuasive evidence to the contrary. It is perfectly true that the Conservative’s traditional animosity to centralization has a way of disappearing in the South when bills are called up in the Congress to support cotton, and peanuts, and tobacco. The Conservative opposes socialism and all its works; it is his favorite devil; but the steam plants of the TVA seem to be marvelously exempt from his anathema. It was a Georgian whose name was longest and most lustrously identified with foreign aid, and an Alabaman whose plan of Federal subsidies for hospitals bears his name, and an Oklahoman who has led the Liberal forces in behalf of a Federal program of medical care. The case for “Southern conservatism” totters before the voting records of Kefauver, Gore, Fulbright, Sparkman.

The defense would respond to this indictment by saying that all things are relative, and in an increasingly Liberal society, it is only the political center that has moved. The old Conservative instincts remain, and if they have been much corrupted, they still manifest themselves in a hundred ways not necessarily susceptible to roll-call vote. A wise and enlightened conservatism does not resist all change; it resists what it views as impulsive change, or change simply for the sake of change, and this tendency, I believe, remains more apparent in the South than in other regions. We still resist abrupt innovation, in art, music, literature, architecture, religion, public morals. Other regions, in our view, should be the first to lay the old aside. Instead of casting away all our old prejudices, as Burke once remarked cheerfully of English Conservatives, “we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed the more we cherish them.” This process of cultural husbandry, this laying by, has been too long ingrained in the South. I cannot imagine its abandonment any time soon.

The South’s identification with “conservatism” will survive, among other reasons, because it fits so perfectly into the real or imagined Southern manner. These days, liberalism is identified with the masses, and not merely identified with them but equated with them. The race issue to one side, this equation simply is not a process that comes easily to the Southern temperament. Implicit in the conservative faith is a high respect for individual variations, for class, and order, and rank; and all these are implicit in the Cavalier ideal as well. Aristocracy is wasted in a shower room; and to the extent that public institutions are reduced to the level of a public bath, the Southerner is bound to object. The graces, the little elegancies, the privileges of birth and office and position--these too are long ingrained; they persevere.

To be sure, a good deal of cynical evidence may be amassed to suggest that this Southern manner, this Southern romanticism, is as unreal as the myths on which it is based. When a gang of foul-mouthed Mississippi white men lynch a fifteen-year-old colored boy, the Southern manner seems a long way away. And when a rabble of black-jacketed young punks assemble to jeer at law-abiding Negro students, notions of _noblesse oblige_ may seem just that: notions.

But if Southern conservatism may yield now and then to the temptation of the pork barrel, and Southern romanticism be attenuated by the impatience of an impatient age, the last of my four threads may prove stronger than ever: Southern realism, and with it, the tradition of Southern defeat. For decades to come, despite the phenomenal population shifts (and in many instances because of these population shifts), the South will have to live realistically with the interracial realities it alone, among all the regions of the country, has known well. “It is a condition which confronts us,” said Cleveland of the tariff, “and not a theory.” Just so with race relations in the South. The gentlest concepts of brotherhood, the broadest reaches of the law, the finest theories of integration, go through a sea change in crossing the Potomac. These comfortable Liberal attitudes emerge from the gauzy mists of illusion and encounter the blazing sun of fact: _These_ rural schools, _these_ country people, _these_ children, white and black, in _these_ particular towns and villages. The Negro is not moving in any substantial numbers to the remote rural counties of the North; he is moving predominantly to the cities, where everything works in his favor during a period of transition: job opportunities, the melting-pot tradition, the impersonal anonymity that protects him in a larval time. Yet millions of Negroes remain back home in the South, salt-and-peppered across the rural countryside, and they and their problems and aspirations are daily, personal realities to the Southerner. He knows he must cope with them somehow.

And the Southerner knows more than this. He knows, in the marrow of his bones, that new defeats are entirely probable. He takes this much profit from the lessons of the past, that he learns something for the future. Desegregation, as a legal principle, is accepted inwardly by many of the Southerners who cry out most vehemently against it. Something of the spirit has been surrendered. One more defeat has been experienced, and we know it. In the first few years after _Brown_, we perceived in this judicial Gettysburg nothing finally decisive. The talk then was of sending Governors to jail, or of challenging the Justice Department to arrest whole legislatures. Let them call out the troops! Well, Mr. Eisenhower did call out the troops; and our Governors had second thoughts about going to jail, and not even the Louisiana legislature could devise a way to get itself arrested. Little by little, the hopeless conviction has begun to seep in that it has happened again, that the courts really _mean_ this, that so far as laws and litigation are concerned, nothing remains but the long road to Appomattox. Proud Virginia gazed upon the voluntary desegregation of her schools with bitter distaste, but in the end we were like Byron’s heroine who “vowing she would ne’er consent, consented.” Defeat.

And yet; and yet. The fabric of the South is snagged with a beggar’s lice of contradictions. The jesting exhortation that the South will rise again has a hard kernel of truth at the bottom. It is precisely because the South has experienced defeat, again and again, in Nullification, in the Missouri compromise, in the War, in Reconstruction, in the postwar generations, time and again, in contradiction to the success of our neighboring regions, that defeat has become an old friend. We meet it, and survive; we rise again. And paradoxically, the prospect of defeat in lunch counters, waiting rooms, public schools, places of assembly, is no harbinger of ultimate despair; the prospect is an old friend, the face of defeat, and in the South it is a symbol not of disintegration but of unity. Misery loves company. It does, indeed; oh, it does indeed! And we are our own best company.

I speak with a mild cynicism, and do not mean to: It floats to the surface. The mystical entity that is the South is held together, in a lovely, helpless, hapless bond, by its consciousness of the Negro, by its abiding conservatism, by its dedication to romanticism, and by its inexorable sense of realities, and whenever one of these threads wears thin, another is redoubled and twice twined together to knit the fabric whole. The defeated South is never wholly defeated; the romantic South cannot be wholly disillusioned; the conservative South can flirt with liberalism and remain as chastely conservative as before; and to the twin inevitabilities of death and taxes we philosophically add a third: the Negro, _in saecula saeculorum_, world without end. Amen.

V

Let me move on, may it please the court, with fewer digressions and random interpolations, to the South’s case against “integration.” The quotation marks are intended to suggest that the noun has a distinctive meaning. This is as good a place as any for a definition of terms.

Increasingly, in the Southern lexicon, words that are used interchangeably elsewhere in the country have come to take on a special and well-understood meaning. By “segregation,” for example, we now mean the body of practices enforced by State or local law. Prior to _Brown_, our schools were legally segregated. As this is written (though probably not for long), places of assembly, athletic contests, certain public records, also are segregated by law in several States. As these laws and institutions one by one are bowled over by court decree, a process of _desegregation_ sets in. It is an abominable word, by any philological standpoint, as madly illogical as “irregardless” or “inflammable,” but a new spirit of lexicography is abroad in the land: Whatever is, is right. Our schools, save in Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, are entering upon desegregation.

By racial _separation_, we mean something much less precise. In almost every aspect of Southern life, the races are separate, though not necessarily (or even very often) are they segregated. Day in and day out, white and Negro inevitably are thrown closely together in the South--shopping in stores, working in factories, riding in elevators and buses, standing in queues at banks or liquor stores or post offices--but this is the normal condition of existence. I have termed it an intimate remoteness. It is a condition that goes beyond the ordinary impersonal encapsulation of strangers; it is a subconscious recognition that ours are separate races, separate worlds. This does not imply that there is no communication. On the contrary, the Southern white and the Southern Negro are gregarious animals; thrown temporarily together, they will make agreeable conversation: “Think this rain will ever stop?” “It suttinly is po’in, it is that.” This is the relationship that conditions all human intercourse in the South. A murder has been committed; the police reporter’s first question, before he thinks of who or where or why or when, is simply “white or colored?” A candidate qualifies for public office: Is he white or colored? News values start from this point. (Even as I write this paragraph, the telephone rings, and it is an informant at the State penitentiary calling to tell me that clemency has been granted a prisoner in death row. I am not familiar with the case. “White boy or colored boy?” I ask. Doubtless it makes no difference; they are equally fallen sparrows, but the question is automatic, instinctive, inescapable. It is a consequence of racial separation, and this is a part of the world we live in.)

Finally, by way of definition, _integration_ has come to mean a willing suspension, or abolition, of the state of mind I attempt to convey by _separation_. So defined, integration is almost nonexistent in the South. The term embraces the complete and unrestrained intermingling of races, on terms of social equality, without constraint of any sort; it is color-blindness, voluntarily accepted; it is more than mere joint membership on civic committees or school boards. And it is not something that can be achieved by writ of mandamus. A court can impose a legal condition of desegregation, and thus put an end to segregation; but a court cannot enjoin separation and thus achieve integration. The arm of the law, long as it is, cannot reach into certain areas of the human spirit.

It would be pointless, at this late stage, to prepare even a hypothetical brief directed wholly against “desegregation.” The desegregation of public institutions is a _fait accompli_. True, the process is far from complete; in the Deep South, in this late spring of 1962, the process has not even begun--and I would not hazard a guess when it will begin, or be complete. No time soon. But my thesis here is primarily the South’s abhorrence of integration, and especially the South’s continuing stubborn resistance to a widespread desegregation of the public schools that fearfully would result in integration of the races. Why is the South resisting race-mixture in its public schools?

I am going to suggest three primary reasons. Other writers about the South might put them down as five or ten or fifteen reasons, but in the end perhaps we would cover the same points. Mine are, first, the arguments of anthropology; second, the arguments of practicality; and third, the arguments for gradualism.

VI

On the first point: The South earnestly submits that over a period of thousands of years, the Negro race, as a race, has failed to contribute significantly to the higher and nobler achievements of civilization as the West defines that term. This may be a consequence of innate psychic factors. Again, it may not be, but because contemporary evidence suggests little racial improvement, the South prefers to cling to the characteristics of the white race, as best it can, and to protect those characteristics, as best it can, from what is sincerely regarded as the potentially degrading influence of Negro characteristics.

Now, that is a “racist” thesis, and if one would listen to no more than the horrified gasps of the Liberal left, the very statement is a dreadful example of racism at its worst. Hitlerism! Fascism! Kluxism! White supremacy! To the doctrinaire theologians of a Liberal socio-anthropology, the thesis is blasphemy, and it is mortal sin even to consider it. A Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, in May 1957, denounced such heresy in unequivocal terms: “The _fact_ is, _of course_, that the Negro possesses the same capacities and potentialities as does the white.”

But if this is a _fact_, how did it get to be a fact? How “of course”? Is the question of innate aptitudes and characteristics no more arguable than the sum of two plus two? Is the flat statement that “the Negro possesses the same capacities and potentialities as the white” to be regarded on a level with “Washington was the first President,” or “the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the square of its other two sides”? If this “fact” has in truth been so positively established, discussion of the subject is wholly pointless; nothing remains to be said, and those readers whose minds are closed to reconsideration will flee from these pages and soothe their wounded sensibilities with the balm of Ashley Montagu’s hairless prose.

But those who are agreeable to pursuing truth, _wherever the quest may lead them_, will stick around; they will keep their minds open; they will acknowledge at least an outside possibility that the disciples of Boas and Klineberg could be in error; they will formulate questions, and they will insist upon honest and straightforward answers to them. And if intellectually satisfying answers to their questions cannot be adduced, they will honestly acknowledge at the end: _The question is still open._

Now, that is all the defense can ask. Few Southerners have made any serious attempt to read up on anthropology or to acquaint themselves with the results of intelligence tests. Their judgments and attitudes--or if you please, their prejudices--are based largely upon personal observation, instinct, upbringing, the cumulative experiences of a lifetime, stored up day by day and hour by hour. An advocate for the South does not wish to be dogmatic. He does not insist that the South has all the right answers. He does not say, “the _fact_ is, _of course_.” But the South does suggest that it raises some of the right questions.

Even to raise the right questions has become an almost impossible undertaking in today’s emotionally charged atmosphere. For the past twenty years at least (I write in 1962), a systematic and well-financed campaign has been under way to obliterate the entire concept of race. This calculated perversion of honest scholarship has drawn a rebuke from Dr. Carleton S. Coon, one of the world’s foremost anthropologists, who himself believes that classification by race “is a nuisance.” In _The Story of Man_, Coon departs from his masterly narrative long enough to register a serious protest against the activities “of the academic debunkers and soft-pedalers who operate inside anthropology itself.”

“Basing their ideas on the concept of the brotherhood of man,” Coon comments sharply, “certain writers, who are mostly social anthropologists, consider it immoral to study race, and produce book after book deploring it as a ‘myth.’ Their argument is that because the study of race once gave ammunition to racial fascists, who misused it, we should pretend that races do not exist. Their prudery about race is equaled only by their horror of Victorian prudery about sex. These writers are not physical anthropologists, but the public does not know the difference.”

Typical of the doctrinaire Liberals who shrink from the very notion of race are the scientists who make up the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry. In their disdainful view, race is no more than a “myth.” In particular, the Group denounces the “myths which have grown up about the Negro.” These “myths,” it is said, serve merely to rationalize and to justify the white man’s disparaging attitudes, because he cannot clearly recognize or understand the real source of his prejudice. We should realize, says the Group, that such “myth formation” psychologically seeks to protect individual and group security; and if we realize that, we can better understand why the “myths of prejudice” are so resistive to logic: The powerful need for safety, which “the myth” is created to insure, explains why it is clung to despite facts and logic to the contrary. Moreover, the damaging consequences of “racial myths” are misconstrued as evidence to support them.

Ashley Montagu has suggested, in _Human Heredity_, that the very word _race_ be struck from the English language. There is, he says, “sound sense in the argument that the long-standing abuse of the meaning of a word constitutes the best reason for its total exclusion from common usage.” Unsound words make for unsound ideas, and the unsound ideas tend to result in unsound action: “The word ‘race’ is a horrid example.” To Dr. Montagu, race is a notion, a myth, a fallacy, an error. In the sense that the term suggests distinguishing characteristics on the part of a particular people, “the word is beyond rescue and it had better be dropped altogether.” He suggests that the term “ethnic group” be employed instead, and the most he will concede is that “slight differences may exist between some ethnic groups in the frequencies of certain genes underlying mental capacity.” This is possible, says Dr. Montagu, “but in spite of all attempts, no one has, in fact, ever demonstrated that they do.”

Otto Klineberg, who cannot bring himself to write the words _race_ or _racial_ without putting them in quotation marks, says the same thing: “In all probability, inherent intellectual differences between Negroes and whites do not exist.” Other writers--Kenneth Clark and Ruth Benedict, for example--are impatient with such academic impedimenta as “probabilities.” More in anger than in sorrow, they denounce the bigoted Southerner, who dares to suggest that in terms of his capacity to adjust fully to Western values, the Negro may be innately inferior. The very idea! And any recourse by the Southerner to history, as Miss Benedict puts it, is mere “special pleading.” All good historians know of the greatness of Negro achievements. To doubt this truth is to substitute for historical processes “an unashamed racial megalomania.” This is a “travesty of fact.”

In 1960, a group of distinguished anthropologists, psychologists, and social scientists, rebelling against the obstinate attitudes of the Benedict-Montagu school, launched a small publication in Edinburgh, _The Mankind Quarterly_. They ventured to suggest that some of these questions of “race” are not altogether closed; they commented that it was a pity to see responsible scientists so influenced by emotion and political bias that they had closed their minds to objective inquiry; and the editors proposed to publish occasional monographs exploring aspects of these issues that were banned from exploration elsewhere. _Mankind Quarterly_ scarcely had raised its mild voice before shrill cries from the Liberal left united in a ritual chorus of denunciation. Late in 1961, the chief editor, Dr. R. Gayre of Gayre, replied to his assailants in an editorial that sums up so much of the Southern view on these matters that I should like to quote from it at some length. He began by expressing regret that persons who do not slavishly subscribe to egalitarian dogmas should be denounced automatically as “racialists” and their teachings condemned as “racism.” He continued:

The fear of being so abused has for the last one or two decades
been sufficient to silence many, if not most, scholars and prevent
them from writing what they believed and thought to be the facts in
connection with anthropological subjects. They have, in the main,
confined themselves to negative action, such as protesting when the
notorious UNESCO pamphlet on race was produced, and being happy
to gain, as a result, some modification of the more extreme and
nonsensical assertions of the a-racist egalitarians.

That there has been such a clearly marked reactionary influence,
if not domination, over our studies, is so patently obvious that
it hardly needs to be stressed. Even those who have not subscribed
to any form of political doctrine have felt it safer to make
interpretations of the facts of race and heredity in such terms
that they can bear a clearly egalitarian interpretation.... The
anxiety which is shown to suppress publications and expositions
which do not support egalitarianism is entirely consistent with
this political direction of, and domination over, science....

[W]e wish to state categorically what are the views of the
editors on the matter of racial equality. While rejecting racial
egalitarianism as having no warranty in honest scientific
expositions and investigations, we do not, on the other hand,
subscribe to doctrines of racial _superiority_ or _inferiority_.
We believe that just as all individuals within a particular stock
are different, so is one racial group in relation to another.
In respect of some characters, various stocks will be superior
to others; and in other cases inferior; but in many cases no
perceptible differences may be apparent. While environment, both
physical and social, may influence these characters, we believe
that heredity is by far the most important single factor, and
the current fashion to eschew the significance of heredity is
a definite disservice to the understanding of what makes for
differences in the various characters which distinguish one group
from another.

Furthermore, we do not presume to judge what is desirably superior
or not. We think that within the ambit of the type of civilizations
erected by the White-Brown stocks or the Yellow races, the
Black, which has shown no natural predilection to that form of
organization, will be at a disadvantage in any competition--and
is _in that sense_ inferior. After all, a _priori_ considerations
alone would lead to this conclusion, and if modern science thinks
this is not the case, it has yet to show why and how the Melanoids
have remained technologically backward compared to both the
Mongoloids and the Caucasoids. For the Egyptian civilization,
which was basically Caucasoid (Mediterranean, Atlantic, Nordic,
and Armenoid strains being the basis of that nationality), abutted
on the Negroid world of Africa, and its ideas were there to be
accepted and copied, so that urban technological civilizations
could have been erected in Africa, if that way of life had appealed
to the inherent Negroid genius and temperament. It is only within
this last millennium that certain ideas generated in Egypt four
millennia ago began to reach West Africa--long after the Nile
Valley civilization had decayed and disappeared.

H. L. Mencken once remarked that the most costly of all follies, which he viewed as the chief occupation of mankind, is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. The aphorism applies with special force to the Negrophile social anthropologists who are so passionately determined to propound that which is palpably not true, or at least palpably not demonstrable, that in their zeal of advocacy they lose all sense of proportion. Thus, in their raptures, the most primitive mud-hut cultures of the Congo must be praised for their “sophistication” and “complexity.” Crude works of art tend to be equated with the sculpture of Periclean Athens. In the rhythmic thump of an African tom-tom, they find black Beethovens at work. Miss Benedict, in _Race: Science and Politics_, is fairly transported. Her technicolor illusions of African history produce “great kingdoms of wealth and splendor ... great political leaders ... men of wealth ... the spread of higher culture.” In seventeenth-century Nigeria, she sees “prized cultural achievements,” and of these African tribes she girlishly cries that “their elaborate and ceremonious political organization, the pomp of their courts, the activity of their far-flung economic life, with its great market centers and tribute collected over great areas, their legal systems with formal trial of the accused, with witnesses and with prosecutors--all these excite the admiration of any student.”

Well, one is reminded of Mark Twain’s comment that there is something fascinating about science: “One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” Let it be granted that there is much of archeological and anthropological interest to be found in the obscure and sketchy “histories” of various African kingdoms and empires. One might wish, abstractly, to know more of the Ghana Empire, the Almoravid Empire, the Mali Empire, the Songhai Empire; the teachers and the curriculum and the libraries of the Universities of Timbuktu and Sakoré might usefully be contrasted with those of the Universities of Paris and Bologna; we should like standard reference works that offered full and scholarly expositions of the kingdom Miss Benedict terms the “culmination” of African civilization, the “great empire of Bornu.” It is an empire not even mentioned by Herskovits in _The Myth of the Negro Past_ and barely touched upon by J. D. DeGraft Johnson and W. E. B. DuBois in their works on African civilization. (DuBois does say that Bornu, a Northern Nigerian kingdom, had in the tenth century a civilization that “would appear to compare favorably with that of European monarchs of that day.” It is an assessment that leaves very little to the Carolingians, and it is the sort of tossed-off grandiloquence of the Negrophile propagandist that leaves the ordinary student more mystified than informed.)

In terms of enduring values--the kind of values respected wherever scholars gather, in the East no less than in the West--in terms of values that last, and mean something, and excite universal admiration and respect, what has man gained from the history of the Negro race? The answer, alas, “virtually nothing.” From the dawn of civilization to the middle of the twentieth century, the Negro race, as a race, has contributed no more than a few grains of sand to the enduring monuments of mankind.

One finds no pleasure in rendering such a judgment; one finds no more than the cold comfort of truth, and even that chilly companion is made the less attractive by the disdain in which this unappealing truth is held. Yet the serious students of the South’s position, like the serious pathologist examining an especially distasteful object, ought not to be deterred. If the South is wrong in this appraisal of the contributions of the Negro race (or “culture,” or “ethnic group”), then evidence of this wrongness should be readily attainable in standard works of reference; such evidence should be convincingly documented, objective in its nature, susceptible of proof by accepted tests of scholarship.

Well, then, where is this contrary evidence? What library houses the works of a Nubian Thucydides? Who was the Senegalese Cicero? One plows in vain through the works of a score of apologists. In the volumes of the most sympathetic Negrophile writers, one finds little but conjecture, surmise, vague assertions that thus and so “must have been true.” What are the contributions of the Negro culture to enduring art, or music, or literature, or architecture? To law, jurisprudence, government? To science, invention, mathematics, philosophy? Here was a race, if the horrid word may be used (or a culture or subculture or ethnic group), that lived for thousands of years in effective possession of one of the richest continents on earth. Here were a people who lived by the sea, and never conceived the sail; who dwelled in the midst of fantastic mineral deposits, and contrived no more than the crudest smelting of iron and copper. The Negro developed no written language, not even the poorest hieroglyphics; no poetry; no numerals; not even a calendar that has survived. Even so skilled a defender as Toynbee has to conclude, after a desperate flurry of coughs and sighs, that the Black Race is the only one of the primary races “which has not made a creative contribution to any one of our twenty-one civilizations.” Breasted, who wrote in a more objective time, before fashions of social ideology tended to warp critical judgment, says bluntly that “the Negro peoples of Africa were without any influence on the development of early civilization.”

Franz Boas, the father of “modern” social anthropology, posed the South’s question in this fashion in _The Mind of Primitive Man_: “Have not most races had the same chances for development? Why, then, did the white race alone develop a civilization which is sweeping the whole world, and compared with which all other civilizations appear as feeble beginnings cut short in early childhood, or arrested and petrified at an early stage of development? Is it not, to say the least, probable that the race which attained the highest stage of civilization was the most gifted one, and that those races which have remained at the bottom of the scale were not capable of rising to higher levels?”

Boas’ answer to his own rhetorical question, needless to say, is that most races have not had the same chances for development, that “the claim that achievement and aptitude go hand in hand is not convincing,” and that “the earlier rise of civilization in the old world ... is satisfactorily explained as due to chance.” He finds nothing to persuade him that “one race is more highly gifted than another,” and besides, he insists, Western critics ought not to judge other races by their own standards. For example, an “impression” exists that primitive men, and the less educated of our own race, have in common a lack of control of emotions; it is thought that they give way more readily to an impulse than civilized man and the highly educated. This impression, says Boas, is entirely unjustified. Too often the traveler or student measures fickleness by the importance he himself attributes to the actions or purposes in which primitive men do not persevere, and he weighs the impulse for outbursts of passion by his own standard. The white traveler, to whom time is valuable, is impatient and irritated at Negro porters, to whom time means nothing. The proper way to appraise the Negro, Boas tells us, is to consider his behavior in undertakings which he considers important from his own standpoint. So considered, the differences in attitude of civilized man and of primitive man tend to disappear.

This line of defense has a certain plausibility and merit; divorced from reality, it provides a fine topic for a sophomore’s term paper. But the American South is an inheritor of Western civilization; the South’s values are the values of the West, and it understandably must be concerned with the capacity of the Negro people for contributing to these values. The Ubangi’s mud huts may be the most artistic mud huts ever set out in the sun to bake; by tribal esthetics of the African bush, the Ashanti may be vastly more cultured than the Yorubas, and the Balubi superior to the Mogwandi. Or vice versa. These critical judgments are interesting. They are irrelevant, too.

The question that never seems to be convincingly answered is _why_ the Negro race, in Toynbee’s phrase, is the only race that has failed to make a creative contribution to civilization. What can account for the singular failure of the Negro people, alone among the major divisions of man, to enter the mainstream of political, cultural, and economic history?

The first rationalization that is given is that the physical conditions of sub-Saharan Africa imposed such fearful disadvantages that the development of a “civilization” was patently impossible. The argument simply will not hold up. As many geographers and anthropologists have observed (in a day before such observations were reviewed as blasphemy), parts of Africa were perhaps “uninhabitable,” but other parts were not. In any event, the jungles of the Congo imposed no obstacles to Negroid peoples greater than those faced by the Mayans in the jungles of Chiapas.

And consider the Mayans: They carved out of the rain forests of Yucatán--out of an area Van Hagen has termed “the least likely place one would choose for developing a culture”--a civilization that can be identified, and studied, and photographed to this day. They raised great temple cities: Tikal, Uaxactun, Calakmul. They built roads and reservoirs. They developed complex ideographic writing, a twenty-day lunar calendar, a code of laws for crime and punishment, a flourishing industry in dyeing and weaving. To compare the crude phallic fetishism of Negroid tribes with the highly developed art of the Mayan and the Incan civilizations is to engage in a travesty upon critical judgment.

It is complained of the early Negroes that they were “isolated,” that no maritime access was possible to the African interior, hence that they had no opportunity for contact with the cultures of Europe and the Mediterranean. This is a specious argument, too. Every standard history of Africa makes plain, implicitly or explicitly, that early Negroes did indeed have contact with the outer world. Phoenicians, Arabs, Libyans, Hamites all found their way across Africa. Romans came, and Persians, Chinese, Turks, Berbers, Indians, Portuguese. Nothing aroused the Negro from his primitive sleep. He did not adapt. He did not copy. He did not profit.

In 1525, when Pizarro invaded Peru, he found a magnificent Incan civilization flourishing in the almost impenetrable fastness of the Andes. Here, indeed, was isolation from the currents of European thought! No maritime access here! Yet the Incas had built temples and labyrinths and massive palaces of stone. The palace at Cuzco offered fountains, heated pools, intricate goldwork, and polished stones. There were public granaries, a three-hundred-mile road, a decimal system, an advanced astronomy. European explorers who sought trade in Africa found nothing there to compare with this. As Nathaniel Weyl has written, the decisive fact is that centuries of intermittent contact with the growing culture and technology of the West “did not serve to stir the Negroes from their millennial torpor, to quicken their minds and prod their curiosity, to induce them at least to borrow if not to invent.”

Franz Boas has sought earnestly to explain all this away. So has Basil Davidson in _Lost Cities of Africa_. So has W. E. B. DuBois in _The World and Africa_. So has Johnson in _African Glory_. But when it comes down to evidence acceptable to rational appraisal, their romantic conjectures fall pitifully short of the minimum requirements of objective scholarship. It is possible to accept Boas’ judgment that some African wood carvers and potters have produced work “original in form, and executed with great care.” Coon’s slightly more enthusiastic appraisal is that Africa’s Negro tribes “developed social systems of considerable complexity and a high art, the quality of which the white world is just beginning to appreciate.” There is merit in a thoughtful appraisal by the Oxford anthropologist, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, of the complex system of witchcraft, oracles, and magic that he found among the Azande tribe of Central Africa. _Granted certain postulates_, he says, inferences and actions based upon a system of witchcraft are sound. But is Western civilization really prepared to “grant the certain postulates” of witchcraft in order to find a rationale for praising African culture? No. Let it be conceded that certain African arts and crafts reached a tolerably interesting stage of development. Modern dance and contemporary jazz doubtless owe much to the instinctive rhythms of ancient tribal rites. But south of the Sahara there was no literate civilization, no intellects at work to comprehend and solve the abstract problems; and Western Europe was not built by basket-weaving.

Let us move along. The story is told of a conversation between Boswell and Dr. Johnson, in which Boswell mentioned Bishop Berkeley’s theory of the nonexistence of matter. Boswell said he was satisfied the theory was not true, but he confessed he was unable to refute it. Whereupon Dr. Johnson kicked a large stone until his foot rebounded from it. “I refute it _thus_,” he said. There comes a time when the common, uncomplicated observation of ordinary men makes better sense than the partisan inventions of social anthropologists. Against their gauzy dreams of African “civilization,” the obscenities of the Mau Mau and the atrocities of the Congolese provide reality as hard as Dr. Johnson’s stone. One refutes it _thus_.

In 1944, Otto Klineberg brought together in one volume several of the monographs prepared by American students on the Negro as background memoranda for Dr. Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish sociologist whose subsequent _An American Dilemma_ was to be seen generally, and influentially, by the Supreme Court of the United States. The first paper in Klineberg’s collection was put together by Dr. Guy B. Johnson, professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of North Carolina. Dr. Johnson served for three years as executive director of the liberal Southern Regional Council; he is a trustee of Howard University. These credentials strongly suggest that Dr. Johnson was picked by the Myrdal team to describe “the Stereotype of the American Negro” on the assumption that he would summarize the popular conception of the Negro only to say, in the end, that there isn’t a word of truth in it. If so, the Myrdal associates must have been startled by the blunt memorandum Dr. Johnson prepared. He went through the works of thirty-one representative Negro writers and forty-two representative white writers, covering the entire spectrum of political coloration, and boiled down his findings under twelve headings. His list, he emphasized, was not a list of “race” characteristics. It was “a descriptive list, based upon a fair degree of consensus, of the interests, habits and tendencies which might serve to characterize the ‘typical’ Negro.” This list of “Negro personality and culture traits” follows:

_Mental_: Relatively low intellectual interests; good memory;
facile associations of ideas.

_Temperamental_: Gregariousness or high interest in social
contacts; philosophical or get-the-most-out-of-life type of
adjustment; high aesthetic interests; love of subtlety and
indirection; adaptability.

_Aesthetic_: Love of music and dance; oratory and power of
self-expression; high interest in and appreciation of the artistic.

_Economic_: Relatively low interest in material things, such as
care of money, property, tools, etc.; line of least resistance in
habits of work; relative lack of self-reliance.

_Personal morals_: Double standard of morals and ethics, i.e., one
for his behavior toward Negroes and another for his behavior toward
whites; in sexual conduct, higher interest in sex, high sexual
indulgence, and larger sphere of permissive sexual relations.

_Family and home life_: Relatively low solidarity; high frequency
of common-law matings and separations; role of mother strong;
warmth of affection toward children; high rate of illegitimacy.

_Religion and the supernatural_: Rather high emotional
tone; personalization of God and saints; high interest in
“superstition”--i.e., belief in various supernatural forces and
ways of controlling them.

_Law observance_: Relatively high incidence of social disorder;
drunkenness, fighting, gambling, petty stealing, etc.; resentment
against the white man’s law.

_Public manners_: Tendency toward extroversion in public contact;
easy sociability, loud talk; relative carelessness in speech and
dress.

_Race pride_: Not yet highly developed; inferiority feelings
common; acceptance of white standards of physical beauty to a large
extent.

_Race consciousness and leadership_: Lack of cohesion; high
intragroup conflict and cleavage; distrust of leaders; lack of
strong race-wide leadership.

Now, what does Dr. Johnson say about this Negro “stereotype”? Insofar as the list of characteristics has any validity, he comments, it is more applicable to the Negro masses than to the minority of highly sophisticated and acculturated Negroes. But how much validity does it have? Here was the shocker. For Dr. Johnson himself noted that these same characteristics had been attributed to the Negro by both white and Negro writers; and this being so, “there is more than a slight presumption in favor of the reality of the characteristics.” He suggested that the Myrdal associates “assume that after all there is _some_ truth or basis of reality to the traits which are persistently mentioned in literature and in popular thinking.”

“It is true,” Dr. Johnson remarked, “that the whole trend of scholarship at present is to look upon the traits which the dominant group attributes to a minority group as nothing more than stereotypes which have been invented for the express purpose of justifying the position of the dominant group and controlling the status of the subordinate group. These stereotypes are sometimes referred to as myths, the implication being that they have no realistic basis whatever. It should be pointed out, however, that it is probably not necessary for a dominant group such as the white people in America, to invent and perpetuate stereotypes which are wholly unfair and untrue in order to maintain its own status of dominance.... The point here being made, which is simple and which rests upon a common-sense assumption, is that the stereotypes which a dominant group develops concerning the traits of a subordinate group will be to some extent based upon observable characteristics in the subordinate group, and that while the stereotypes may be permeated with prejudice and with the ideology of inferiority, _they may still reflect a certain amount of truth concerning the subordinate group_. In other words, if we can deduct from the popular stereotypes the moral judgments and the implications of inferiority and the exaggerations, we may have left a body of belief which affords considerable insight into the traits of the subordinate group.” [Emphasis added.]

The Johnson list goes to the very heart of the South’s resistance to the desegregation of its public schools. When it is asked why the South opposes integration, one might provide a tolerably complete answer simply by citing Dr. Johnson’s twelve summary findings: _This is why._ The most Dr. Johnson will say of the “stereotype” is that it contains a “certain amount of truth.” In my own observation, and in the observation of the white South generally, the list contains a vast amount of truth. I would dissent from the Johnson findings on a couple of points only: I doubt that the “Negro masses” (any more than the white masses) have a “high interest in and appreciation of the artistic,” and it seems to me the summary of the Negro’s typical “public manners” is overdrawn. Since 1943, when Dr. Johnson prepared his summary, a phenomenal growth has taken place in a Negro middle class, and much of the “loud talk” and “relative carelessness in speech and dress” has given way to cultivated speech and to a certain elegance in dress. In my observation, the colored children of Richmond frequently are cleaner, shinier, and more neatly dressed than many of their white counterparts.

In general, however, this purported “stereotype” provides an accurate and faithful mold of typical Negro behavior and personality. Are these traits a consequence of racial inheritance? The overwhelmingly popular view of anthropologists, social and physical, is that these are _not_ innate characteristics. The entire school of Franz Boas, embraced by Kluckhohn, Benedict, Klineberg, Clark, Rose, Comas, Montagu, and many others, holds firmly, and in some cases almost hysterically, that whatever lags may be observed in typically Negro culture, as contrasted with typically white culture, these shortcomings are entirely owing to environment. As the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry puts it, “these handicaps are a consequence of racial discrimination rather than of racial inferiority.”

The view, however, is not unanimous, nor is the manner in which these “environmental” views are advanced universally acclaimed.

“If we in America are going to make any sense out of the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision,” Dr. Frank C. J. McGurk has remarked, “we will have to be more factual about race differences and much less emotional. We can have our dreams, if we like to dream, but we should be willing to distinguish between dreams and reality. Already, we have gone too far toward confusing these two things. As far as psychological differences between Negroes and whites are concerned, we have wished--and dreamed that there were no such differences. We have identified this wish with reality, and on it we have established a race relations policy that was so clearly a failure that we had to appeal to distorting propaganda for its support.... There is ample evidence that there are psychological differences between Negroes and whites. Moreover, these differences are, today, of about the same magnitude as they were two generations ago. These differences are not the result of differences in social and economic opportunities, and they will not disappear as the social and economic opportunities of Negroes and whites are equalized.”

Dr. McGurk is associate professor of psychology at Villanova. The quotation comes from his famous (or infamous, depending on one’s point of view) article in _U. S. News & World Report_ of September 21, 1956. Several years later, Dr. McGurk provided an introduction for Nathaniel Weyl’s _The Negro in American Civilization_, in which he expanded briefly on the same theme. Weyl’s book, published by Public Affairs Press in 1960, is an almost indispensable work to the student of this subject who is sincerely interested in getting “both sides.” (Another valuable work, also published by Public Affairs Press, is Carleton Putnam’s _Race and Reason: A Yankee View_; Putnam has driven the Liberal anthropologists practically to apoplexy by the unfair tactic of reading their works and taking them seriously--something no layman is expected to do. The rule is that non-anthropologists must treat anthropologists respectfully, even when anthropologists write nonsense). Like Putnam, Weyl was raised and educated in the integrated North. He set out to write his book with Northern preconceptions; but the more deeply he dug for facts, the more he discovered that “material which passed for the objective findings of social scientists could more accurately be characterized as rationalizations and propaganda wearing academic cap and gown.” He demonstrated the intellectual courage to abandon his preconceived ideas, and to conclude after an exhaustive study that “the presumption is strongly in favor of innate psychic differences.”

In his introduction, Dr. McGurk describes Weyl’s book as a refreshing antidote to the one-sided, environmentalist argumentation that is all most college students ever receive, and he goes on to urge that from the standpoint of the scientist, the problem of race should be studied in an objective manner: “Appeals to beliefs, morals, ethics, or political philosophy are out of place; the issue is one of fact.... Ethnic differences are facts. In the psychic area, these differences are important facts. It seems much more sane to face these differences and investigate their causes impartially than to play ostrich about them.”

Let us go back, for a moment, to Dr. Johnson’s “stereotype.” Manifestly, many of the characteristics he finds most widely attributed to the Negro are incapable of statistical measurement. Empirical data could not well be compiled, for example, on “relative lack of self-reliance,” or “love of subtlety and indirection.” But one characteristic found to be more typical of the Negro than of the white is “high sexual indulgence, larger sphere of permissive sexual relations, ... and high rate of illegitimacy.” The illegitimacy, at least, can be statistically tabulated, and the appalling facts can be faced.

What are the facts? First, the illegitimacy rate among Negroes in this country is roughly _ten times_ the illegitimacy rate among whites. Second, the condition is not improving, but on the contrary appears in many areas to be growing worse. Third, a disproportionately high rate of illegitimacy among Negroes obtains not only in the South, but throughout the United States.

These are the grim figures from the National Office of Vital Statistics:

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ILLEGITIMATES AS A PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL LIVE BIRTHS
UNITED STATES, 1940-1959
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_1940_ _1945_ _1950_ _1955_ _1959_
White 1.95 2.36 1.75 1.86 2.21
Nonwhite 16.83 17.93 17.96 20.24 21.80
--------------------------------------------------

Consider the record in two Southern States, Mississippi and Virginia. Here are the figures from Mississippi:

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ILLEGITIMATE BIRTHS, MISSISSIPPI, 1935-1960
-----------------------------------------
WHITE NEGRO
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
_Per cent _Per cent _Per cent
of all All White All Negro
_Year_ _Number_ Births_ _Number_ Births_ _Number_ Births_
1960 8,407 14.2 388 1.4 8,019 25.0
1959 8,091 13.4 370 1.3 7,721 23.7
1958 7,581 12.8 310 1.2 7,271 22.4
1957 7,815 12.9 272 1.0 7,543 22.2
1956 7,791 12.5 294 1.1 7,497 21.5
1955 7,909 12.5 274 1.0 7,635 21.4
1950 6,778 10.5 283 1.0 6,495 17.4
1945 5,499 10.2 223 0.9 5,276 17.5
1940 4,699 8.9 268 1.2 4,431 15.0
1935 3,978 8.2 265 1.2 3,713 14.1
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

The vital statistics take on additional meaning when they are translated in terms of human beings. In the five years 1956 through 1960, white mothers in Mississippi gave birth to 1634 illegitimate children. In the same period, Negro mothers gave birth to 38,051 illegitimate children.

Substantially the same picture may be seen in the records of Virginia. Between 1938 and 1958, the white illegitimacy rate in Virginia declined slightly, from 2.6 to 2.3 per cent. In this same period, which witnessed astonishing gains in Negro education, Negro housing, Negro income, and Negro job opportunities, the rate of Negro illegitimacy increased from 19.5 per cent to 22.9 per cent.

The records of five Virginia cities and five Virginia counties of substantial Negro population are entirely typical:

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ILLEGITIMATE BIRTHS AS A PERCENTAGE
OF TOTAL NEGRO BIRTHS

CITIES
_Richmond_ _Norfolk_ _Roanoke_ _Danville_ _Lynchburg_
1935-39 27.2 24.6 25.1 26.6 29.5
1955-58 30.3 22.0 26.6 29.0 28.1

COUNTIES
_Prince _Charles
_Halifax_ Edward_ _Pittsylvania_ City_ _Greensville_
1935-39 12.4 14.5 12.8 14.3 14.2
1955-58 19.9 21.5 18.6 23.4 22.0
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

The U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare periodically releases data on the nation as a whole. The figures for 1957 illustrate the story. In that year, 1.9 per cent of all white births were illegitimate; 21.7 per cent of all Negro births were illegitimate. Negro illegitimacy ran as high as 27.9 per cent in St. Louis, 29.3 per cent in Atlanta, and 34.6 per cent in Knoxville. The influx of Negroes into Washington, D. C., has given the nation’s capital, to the nation’s shame, what the Washington _Post_ has termed “undisputed first place in illegitimacy.” In 1957, nearly 19 per cent of all births recorded in the District of Columbia were illegitimate--5.8 per cent of the whites and 26.5 per cent of the Negroes.