How Am I to Be Heard? by Margaret Rose Gladney

Author:Margaret Rose Gladney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1993-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

tlc, UGA 1283A

Dorothy Canfield Fisher wrote Smith on March 5, 1956, on behalf of a group of Quakers in her hometown of Arlington, Vermont, who wished to express their concern for the increase in racial tensions in the South and ask what they could do to be helpful in “the great moral crisis of our country’s history.” Following is the first of a series of letters Smith wrote Fisher in the spring of 1956.12

Neptune Beach, Florida

March 10, 1956

My dear Dorothy Fisher:

How good you are to write me. I am deeply touched by your letter. And by the thoughts of the little group of Friends of whom you wrote. Yes I do, I think, understand something of their way of life and thinking. I have always worked with them, especially in the field of human relations, and have developed for them an immense respect and admiration. Whatever real religion I have finds its psychological home in their way of life.

The situation is, of course, quite bad down here. As I see it, much of our difficulty is due to the fact that the real leadership of the South cannot be heard either in the South or in the North. […]

I think of the creative work going on down here: the fine sermons against segregation, against mob violence, against disesteem for the Supreme Court which so many of our young preachers have preached; I think of the small groups of women who are working steadily, persistently day by day in their home towns trying to give insight, to illumine the situation not with angry arguments but by talk of children and their growth, by stressing the moral aspects of the segregated way of life; I think of the teachers who are quietly discussing this in their school rooms. This is spiritual and mental yeast and it will have its effect. But people in the North know nothing about it; and people in the South who depend upon their newspapers for what is happening down here know nothing about it.

For instance: there is the Till case.* We all, all of us who are decent people, were deeply shocked. But in the papers, only the angry Mississippians were given a voice. One child who came South to visit his grandparents was killed. But every summer, thousands of little colored children come South to visit their grandparents and go back home unharmed. This is a custom of Negroes who have moved North, to send their children back South to see Grandpa and Grandma out on the farm, etc. Last August, I went to New York from Georgia. I boarded my train at Toccoa, Ga. Two old colored people were sitting there in our new integrated waiting-room. (But who knows about these integrated waiting-rooms in the small towns?) They had with them two small colored girls. I got on the train and went to my roomette. The two children got on and were put by their old grandfather (a farmer, and rather ignorant and “country”) into the roomette opposite mine.

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