Southern Stalemate by Christopher Bonastia

Author:Christopher Bonastia [Bonastia, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226063911
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

Lessons from Elsewhere

Civil rights advocates often claimed that racial oppression hurt the United States globally in the battle for the hearts and minds of nonwhite citizens in nations, many recently decolonized, that were choosing between Soviet-style communism and American-style capitalism. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told the Arkansas Gazette that school desegregation controversies in Little Rock and elsewhere in the South “are not helpful to the influence of the United States abroad.” According to a 1963 Harris poll, over three-quarters of Americans believed that racial discrimination here diminished the United States internationally.32 J. Rupert Picott, executive secretary of the black Virginia Teachers Association, reported that he was asked repeatedly about Prince Edward schools while traveling in Asia. Picott contended that some solution must be found “for the sake of America and its leadership in the world—for the sake of the children.” Wall would have none of it, responding bluntly in print: “Prince Edward schools are operated to educate Prince Edward children, not to please Asians or those people of any other countries.” Two weeks later, media outlets reported that the arrest of the president of the state NAACP at a sit-in in Lynchburg “reached the peoples of Africa and Asia with whom the United States government wishes to maintain cordial relations.” Wall’s response? “The people of Asia and Africa don’t give two hoots.”33 James Kilpatrick made a similar claim:

Perhaps the people of India, or of Burma or Ceylon, are so ignorant, or so gullible, that the South’s practice of school segregation is seen as an oppressive act far worse than anything which exists in Soviet Russia—or, for that matter, in their own caste-conscious backyards. Perhaps. But if these people are so blind to truth that they cannot distinguish between the land of the free in the South and the home of the slave in Siberia, nothing can be expected to open their eyes. More than this: the Southerner scarcely can be criticized very harshly if he places the conceived welfare of his own child above the supposed good opinion of Mr. Nehru.34

Moreover, Wall argued, black political power abroad and desegregation experiences in the States suggested that the county’s resistance was the most sensible stance. Wall pointed to the recent independence of the Congo from Belgium as “a living example of the futility in granting rights and responsibilities to people before they are ready to assume them with responsibility and intelligence.” The reader was left to draw parallels to the local situation. In the United States, “the experience of Little Rock shows the wisdom of Virginia in taking steps to save her people, both white and Negro, from the awesome results of [a] like experiment [in school desegregation], sought by a few, emotionally upset by outside stimuli.”35 The Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors sent Arkansas governor Orval Faubus a supportive telegram in late 1957, praising his response to the attempted integration of Little Rock’s Central High School. Faubus responded with his “appreciation”:

The State of Arkansas has never mistreated any minority group and certainly no responsible citizen advocates such a thing now or in the future.

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