The Best of I.F. Stone by I. F. Stone

Author:I. F. Stone [I.F. STONE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2012-02-22T05:00:00+00:00

When the Bourbon Flowed

As the Little Rock school integration crisis continues, Stone visits Arkansas and sketches a vivid portrait of two worlds, black and white—deeply intertwined yet mutually uncomprehending.

. . .

September 22, 1958

WE TOOK THE FIRST PLANE out of Washington for Little Rock after hearing Chief Justice Warren read a tense and crowded courtroom the order that integration proceed. The plane’s first stop was at Nashville, and passengers came aboard carrying its evening newspaper, the Banner. A black headline across page one indicated that we had reached the South. It said, with White Citizens Council objectivity, “Mix Now, Little Rock Told.” On the editorial page, under the caption “Education Be Hanged!” there was a cartoon which pictured the Chief Justice as a burly man leaning arrogantly on a huge gavel. Behind him was a blackboard on which he had triumphantly crossed out the word “deliberate” in the phrase, “all deliberate speed,” and written in the word “breakneck.” A page one Associated Press bulletin claimed that a “jubilant” Mrs. Daisy Bates, local leader of the NAACP, had “hinted” that she expected “more mixing” soon, though I was later to learn that Mrs. Bates in Little Rock was harder to reach than the Secretary of State on Duck Island and twice as cautious and that any such “hint” must have been deduced by the AP man from the way she said “no comment.” A staff correspondent in Little Rock quoted the Reverend Wesley Pruden, the segregationist leader, as saying, “The South will not accept this outrage, which a Communist-dominated government is trying to lay on us.” This was my introduction to a regional journalism which prints such statements matter-of-factly.

We sat forward on one of four seats. Two of them, facing each other, were occupied by a gray-haired elderly white woman and a middle-aged colored woman who seemed to be traveling together. Though the former, from her accent, did not appear to be southern, she turned out to be a gentlewoman returning from a summer in Massachusetts to her plantation home below Memphis with her Negro maid. When the maid, a sturdy woman, went to the rest room, the white lady told us her maid had been with her for twenty-five years and that she had given the maid a $2500 gift on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her coming to work for her. This was to illustrate her point that there were good relations in the South between the races. “There is real love between us,” the white woman said of the Negroes who grew up on her plantation. She blamed the trouble in the South on “white riffraff.” She said her great-grandfather had tried to free his slaves before “the war” but they pleaded with him that they would not know how to make their way in the world. (Later that evening in Little Rock I was to meet another woman who told me that her great-grandfather had tried to free his slaves but that they begged him not to. I began

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