The Southern Mystique by Howard Zinn

Author:Howard Zinn [Zinn, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2011-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

Albany, Georgia: Ghost in the Cage

NOWHERE does the South envelop you so completely as in the Black Belt. All around Albany, Georgia, in nearby “Terrible Terrell” County and “Bad Baker” County—as in most of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana—the mystique of the South is overwhelming, stifling, depressing.

A nineteen-year-old boy, who came out of Terrell County to rest with us a few days in Atlanta, showed us the burn on his arm and blood on his shirt from the shotgun blasts that had grazed him and wounded another voter-registration worker a few nights before. He asked wryly: “Why is Hollywood still producing Westerns instead of Southerns?”

A week before, on the outskirts of Albany, Georgia, as I sat with another college student in a wild, black blaze of music in a Negro nightspot, he said to me between swallows of beer: “In Terrell, I always walk facing traffic. The other day a man in a truck tried to run me down.”

The Southern mystique, under attack in the border states and the metropolitan centers like Atlanta, Louisville, and Nashville, finds its last refuge in the Black Belt country of the Deep South. There it crouches, an invisible beast in a darkened cage, while the government of the United States, like an uncertain circus guard, pokes with its stick and occasionally snaps its whip, but hesitates to enter the cage. Hearing, in the roar of the beast, the echo of the cannon fired at Bull Run and Fredericksburg, our national political leaders prowl warily around the cage, not realizing that the sounds they hear are only echoes, that the crouching figure in the corner, more ghost than substance, waits only for someone decisively to clang open the door, so it can flee.

With all its verbal adherence to equal rights, and its occasional spurts of action, our national government has paused too long, while too many have suffered, in deference to the man-made mystery of the rural, Black Belt South. It has left the Negro there at the mercy of violence, dispensed by officers of the law. The executive branch of government particularly, retreating before the mystique, has abrogated a responsibility which was written into the Constitution by the Founding Fathers, and underlined in blood by the Civil War: to enforce constitutional rights in every corner of the Union, with all the ingenuity and, if necessary, the power, at its command.

And the American citizenry, in turn, have created a mythology of their own about the role of the national government in the South. Based on the premise that its leaders are motivated primarily by moral considerations, liberals have expected too much, and radicals, seeing our moderate government as deliberately devilish, have expected too little. But no mysterious stirrings of moral passion will decide national policy on race. The government—like individuals—has a hierarchy of values, in which political self-interest is at the top.

Moral considerations have always waited for a chance congruence with political interest, so that the latter, at least briefly, might be eclipsed. These rare eclipses awaken awe, and self-delusion, in the liberal viewer.

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