For a long time, this evil appeared to prosper, but now the South screams of the violations of the Constitution by the Eisenhower Republicans which includes the Supreme Court and the Radical or Modern Republicans. The struck camel fights back. Evil never prospers for always. The South is paying for its political sins.

  Until 1954 every few blocks one found stenciled on sidewalks or buildings “We Like Ike,” but now these expressions are few and hard to find. Southerners no longer wish to remind themselves that Ike was from Dixie, and in a recent column, John Temple Graves inquires plaintively and rhetorically, “Will we ever call him Ike again in the South?”

  Take for Instance Spessard Holland*

  The customers in the gallery of the National Theater—those who do not live in the South, as they observe the drama of desegregation now playing, perhaps see the actors on the stage who are cast in the role of segregationists, as purely that and nothing more. Audiences always do—not as performances bringing to life characters created by a drama test but as creators and themselves—which is understandable, but naïve oversimplification to say the least. He is speaking the lines written by the voters of his constituency and his campaign, and though his own sentiments may be identical with that of his voters, not necessarily so. He is out to win an election, to voice views in opposition to the over majority of the constituency would be nothing short of folly—to spend such [an] enormous amount of money, time and effort to win an office, then to do and say what will be certain to offend and lose votes would be the height of foolishness goes without argument.

  But in any case, it is not necessarily true, that the candidate has no other sides to himself. Perhaps the claimant of the policeman from the Gilbert and Sullivan light opera The Pirates of Penzance says it all in “A Policeman’s Lot Is Not A Happy One”—Like the enterprising burglar when not a-burgling, the southern politician when not campaigning might like to hear the little brook a-gurgling, and listen to the merry village chimes[.]1 He may be addicted to good music and the finest in literature of all the ages, a fond family man and a lover of justice.

  Now take for instance Senator Spessard L. Holland of Florida, who has just won an overwhelming victory over the so-called Liberal, Claude Pepper, by presenting the case of the conservative or segregationist element of Florida, Holland plowed Pepper under by an impressive 86,000 majority which points up which actors follow the script and who got out there and ad libbed.2

  It would be very easy and plausible-sounding to flip the superior erudition and liberalism of Harvard rejected as too advanced and the acceptance of [Emory]—which would be hasty generalization and utter poppy-cock, for though [Emory] in Atlanta, Georgia, is no Ivy Leaguer among our educational institutions, it is certainly [adequately] equipped and staffed, and has turned out numerous very able men.3 In addition it is thoroughly accepted that no college can cram a student’s head and turn him out a walking encyclopedia of facts. All that a college attempts to do is to teach methods and sources of acquiring knowledge and the graduate goes on from there.

  And Spessard L. Holland, like his equally famous class-mate, Senator Russel of Georgia, has really gone on from there.4 The walls of his library are stacked from floor to ceiling with good books and he has read them, too. Just challenge him and you’ll find out how full he is of information on various matters, and how promptly he will go to the wall and pull out a volume of source material on the subject.

  As to the subject of the Negro in America he is loaded to the gills. He has perhaps every book ever published on the subject—some are very rare pre–Civil War publications, even. Therefore his stand on segregation is certainly not the result of lack of information. It must be sincere conviction that close mingling of the two ethnological groups can do no good.

  Yet Spessard L. Holland is no vituperous despiser of the brother in black, no taking the stand that Negroes are deprived by nature of the power of intellectual advancement. To the contrary, as he thoroughly demonstrated when he was Governor of Florida. His extraordinary efforts [on] behalf of Negro higher education entitles him to be looked upon as the Father of Negro education in Florida. He allocated money to provide facilities and to raise the standard of instructors, and generally gave the push that raised FAMC from a very mediocre and doleful institution to the scholastic rank that it holds today, and the boost went straight across the board to affect even the most obscure elementary school in the piney woods.5 Teachers with no more than an eighth grade education and the like, who had infested the state system for generations, found themselves being dumped out to be replaced by college-trained men and women. And he sounded the death-knell in Florida to that scourge of public schools in the South the “Professor.” These “Fessahs” were principals of schools, and many were as innocent of education as a Georgia mule. They had gotten and were keeping their appointments through the favor of some powerful white individuals who cared little or nothing about the effect upon Negro education, but whether their Negro friend was taken care of. Nor did these “Fessahs” care about anything more than first being called Fessah by the community which was being so defrauded by them, and second getting their salary checks.

  Under the Governor Holland drive in Negro education the ground was lined with fallen Fessahs like ripe guavas under a guava tree in season. Young men and women from Columbia, University of Chicago, Northwestern, Howard University, Fisk and Morehouse began to appear as their successors, and an era in Negro education had ended and another begun.

  Holland’s passion for education called forth screaming protests from certain members of his legislature. The then state Senator from Longwood shouted that Holland had made the state institutions of higher learning sacred cows. “All of the state funds that can’t be squandered at Gainesville are being wasted at Tallahassee (FAMC).” Then he asked and was told the salary paid to the late J. R. E. Lee, President of FAMC, and screamed, “Good God, no Nigger on earth is worth that much money.”6

  The spirit of what Holland was doing in Negro education got abroad. A group of instructors at Rollins College at Winter Park ha[d] offered their services to teach in Negro colleges and high schools, but a law placed on the books in the bitter years of the Reconstruction blocked them. In pique at the activities of the Freedmen’s Bureau, under which white men and women came south to teach—the law said that no white person could teach Negroes in the State of Florida.7 There was talk of the state taking over Bethune-Cookman College at Daytona Beach to supplement FAMC, but this too was blocked by a law passed in the same period which said that the state could not maintain more than one institution of higher learning for Negroes.

  Holland’s drive can be interpreted in this way—instead of hiding the Negro under his coat-tails to sneak him past the enemy lines, he sought to provide him with the weapons to take care of his own advancement—an infinitely more self-respecting attitude.

  And that would be typical of the man. He does not indulge in that patronizing habit of entertaining by quoting the sayings of some ignorant [unintelligible], aunt nor uncle. He likes for the person—of whatever race—to be able to hold up their own end of the conversation, or it seems like a waste of time and effort to him, and justly so.

  Now, Holland’s record in Negro education is well known in Florida—so well known and accepted generally that Claude Pepper saw no point in digging it up and flinging it in Holland’s teeth during the recent campaign to brand Holland as a Nigger-lover. The voters of Florida had twice elected him to the U.S. Senate in spite of it, which provides certain inferences. Contrary to outside propaganda, it can be inferred that the Florida voters on the whole do not object to higher education for Negroes, and candidate and governor Holland knew it. Nobody craved a racial ogre as governor. Separate, however equal, was the desire, and still is. That was all required of him.

  And here it should be observed that the South has a vocabulary understood by southerners. Certain words and phrases mean one thing to Dixie and something entirely different outside. For example segregation is interpreted as racial hatred by outsiders but not so in the South where it merely means separate social activities and connections—not hatred of Negro individuals. One can understand the fear of interbreeding by the White South if one examines frankly its past history in that connection. All during the centuries of slavery and up to 1900 it went on lavishly, but the white race could maintain its claim of purity by having a law which said that a child belonged to the race of its mother—hence all the products of miscegenation were automatically assigned to the Negro Race, but if the status were upset now, it would be no longer true and the sanction by law would tend to speed up this interbreeding which has been already in practice illegally in the South for so long. Hence the determined and massive resistance in the South to the ruling of the Supreme Court in the integration of public schools. The South is very frank about it. It is not Negrophobia, but a desire to remain unadulterated. Bear in mind that the agricultural South of the past had no need of the European immigrant to do its work, and so missed the waves of immigrants which have influenced the concepts of the North. So the South remains the purest English blood in the nation with all the insularity and self-sufficiency of the “right little, tight little island.” It does not welcome change.

  And to make confusion more confounded, the ethnic terms of White and Negro do not mean to the South the same thing they mean outside. They are almost abstractions and in both cases need not refer to individuals but denote a relationship. For instance a Negro who tells you he is against White people will correct you if you ask him if he is against Mr. Wilson, Sanders or Thompson. “I don’t mean them, I said white folks.” Which means [an] unidentified mass of white people at the least in the next county or more likely another state. Faceless masses unconnected with his life. Just white folks—not the people I know. This goes for the other side too. Negroes are just Negroes has nothing to do with the individuals they know. Again, they live somewhere else. The names are really impersonal [in] application. Present Company always excepted. Therefore the politicos white and black can fire away without injuring their relationship with members of the opposite race. It is recognized that it is a campaign.

  Another paradox is that there are no secrets in a southern community. Whatever the Negroes know, some white individuals will be certain to know and vice versa. Somebody is going to tell across the race line. For in spite of all the propaganda to the contrary, friendships of the firmest [and] the most loyal type exist in every community and somebody is going to betray his own race to the other. That is how deep the feeling goes in spite of difference of color, so do not tell to either side what you don’t want the other to know. It will surely be told.

  This is why Spessard L. Holland, in spite of his vast victory as an advocate of segregation, is not looked upon as an enemy by the majority of Negroes. None have been heard referring to him as white folks, let alone mean old white folks—he is still an individual, the unit that the South deals in. He and his wife are still Mr. [and] Mrs. Senator Spessard L. Holland.8

  His case is typical of a certain type of men in public life in the South—far from being obsessed by the race issue, they live full cultural lives when not campaigning.

  Take for instance Spessard L. Holland. He is devoted to the best in literature. His wife, Mrs. Mary Holland, is an accomplished musician and so their children and grandchildren are exposed to the best in music. The family group gives time to the appreciation of the master works of painters and sculptors, to say nothing of participation [in] outdoor sports. It is a close-knit, affectionate family with Mrs. Mary Holland the sort of center of things or as the Spaniards say the alma de casa, the soul of the house. There are some who say that Senator Holland is too withdrawn, but quickly add that Mrs. Holland is available with her warm and lively personality, and in this way serves her husband just as effectively as Martha Taft, wife of the late Robert A. Taft, served her also reticent husband.9

  Probably most of the southern Senators live a comparable life, wasting no more time and effort on the race issue than is absolutely necessary and feeding their senses on something more agreeable otherwise [End of existing manuscript.]

  Part Four

  On Politics

  The “Pet Negro” System

  Brothers and Sisters, I take my text this morning from the Book of Dixie. I take my text and I take my time.

  Now it says here, “And every white man shall be allowed to pet himself a Negro. Yea, he shall take a black man unto himself to pet and to cherish, and this same Negro shall be perfect in his sight. Nor shall hatred among the races of men, nor conditions of strife in the walled cities, cause his pride and pleasure in his own Negro to wane.”

  Now, belov-ed Brothers and Sisters, I see you have all woke up and you can’t wait till the service is over to ask me how come? So I will read you further from the sacred word which says here:

  “Thus spake the Prophet of Dixie when slavery was yet a young thing, for he saw the yearning in the hearts of men. And the dwellers in the bleak North, they who pass old-made phrases through their mouths, shall cry out and say, ‘What are these strange utterances? Is it not written that the hand of every white man in the South is raised against his black brother? Do not the sons of Japheth drive the Hamites before them like beasts?1 Do they not lodge them in shacks and hovels and force them to share the crops? Is not the condition of black men in the South most horrible? Then how doth this scribe named Hurston speak of pet Negroes? Perchance she hath drunk of new wine, and it has stung her like an adder?’”

  Now, my belov-ed, before you explode in fury you might look to see if you know your facts or if you merely know your phrases. It happens that there are more angles to this race-adjustment business than are ever pointed out to the public, white, black or in-between. Well-meaning outsiders make plans that look perfect from where they sit, possibly in some New York office. But these plans get wrecked on hidden snags. John Brown at Harpers Ferry is a notable instance.2 The simple race-agin-race pattern of those articles and speeches on the subject is not that simple at all. The actual conditions do not jibe with the fulminations of the so-called spokesmen of the white South, nor with the rhetoric of the champions of the Negro cause either.

  II

  Big men like Bilbo, Heflin and Tillman bellow threats which they know they couldn’t carry out even in their own districts.3 The orators at both extremes may glint and glitter in generalities, but the South lives and thinks in individuals. The North has no interest in the particular Negro, but talks of justice for the whole. The South has no interest, and pretends none, in the mass of Negroes but is very much concerned about the individual. So that brings us to the pet Negro, because to me at least it symbolizes the web of feelings and mutual dependencies spun by generations and generations of living together and natural adjustment. It isn’t half as pretty as the ideal adjustment of theorizers, but it’s a lot more real and durable, and a lot of black folk, I’m afraid, find it mighty cosy.

  The pet Negro, belov-ed, is someone whom a particular white person or persons wants to have and to do all the things forbidden to other Negroes. It can be Aunt Sue, Uncle Stump, or the black man at the head of some Negro organization. Let us call him John Harper. John is the pet of Colonel Cary and his lady, and Colonel Cary swings a lot of weight in his community.

  The Colonel will tell you that he opposes higher education for Negroes. It makes them mean and cunning. Bad stuff for Negroes. He is against having lovely, simple blacks turned into rascals by too much schooling. But there are exceptions. Take John, for instance. Worked hard, saved up his money and went up there to Howard University and got his degree in education. Smart as a whip! Seeing that John had such a fine head, of course he helped John out when necessary. Not that he would do such a thing for the average darky, no sir! He is no nigger lover. Strictly unconstructed Southerner, willing to battle for white supremacy! But his John is different.

  So naturally when John finished college and came home, Colonel Cary knew he was the very man to be principal of the Negro high school, and John got the post even though someone else had to be eased out. And making a fine job of it. Decent, self-respecting fellow. Built himself a nice home and bought himself a nice car. John’s wife is county nurse; the Colonel spoke to a few people about it and she got the job. John’s children are smart and have good manners. If all the Negroes were like them he wouldn’t mind what advancement they made. But the rest of them, of course, lie like the cross-ties from New York to Key West. They steal things and get drunk. Too bad, but Negroes are like that.

  Now there are some prominent white folk who don’t see eye to eye with Colonel Cary about this John Harper. They each have a Negro in mind who is far superior to John. They listen to eulogies about John only because they wish to be listened to about their own pets. They pull strings for the Colonel’s favorites knowing that they will get the same thing done for theirs.

  Now, how can the Colonel make his attitude towards John Harper jibe with his general attitude towards Negroes? Easy enough. He got his general attitude by tradition, and he has no quarrel with it. But he found John truthful and honest, clean, reliable and a faithful friend. He likes John and so considers him as white inside as anyone else. The treatment made and provided for Negroes generally is suspended, restrained and done away with. He knows that John is able to learn what white people of similar opportunities learn. Colonel Cary’s affection and respect for John, however, in no way extend to black folk in general.

  When you understand that, you see why it is so difficult to change certain things in the South. His particular Negroes are not suffering from the strictures, and the rest are no concern of the Colonel’s. Let their own white friends do for them. If they are worth the powder and lead it would take to kill them, they have white friends; if not, then they belong in the “stray nigger” class and nobody gives a damn about them. If John should happen to get arrested for anything except assault and murder upon the person of a white man, or rape, the Colonel is going to stand by him and get him out. It would be a hard-up Negro who would work for a man who couldn’t get his black friends out of jail.