Maintaining Segregation: Children and Racial Instruction in the South, 1920-1955 by LeeAnn G. Reynolds

Author:LeeAnn G. Reynolds [Reynolds, LeeAnn G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Civil Rights, Political Science
ISBN: 9780807165669
Google: 9YMjDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2017-05-08T10:57:48+00:00

CHAPTER 5

TO MAKE THE TOLERABLE INTOLERABLE

Black and White Racial Awakenings

Writing in response to Richard Wright’s 1940 novel, Native Son, Mississippi author David L. Cohn concluded, “Mr. Wright obviously does not have the long view of history” because he demanded both political rights and social equality for African Americans and was not willing to wait for them, as Cohn and other like-minded racial moderates had been advising black southerners to do for some time. Cohn stressed, “Justice or no justice, the whites of America simply will not grant to Negroes at this time those things that Mr. Wright demands.”1 The proponent of an elite-led gradualism that he believed would result in the eventual amelioration of race relations within the segregated system, Cohn thought an untimely appeal for immediate change in the social and political status of African Americans in the South would have dire consequences. Thus, he warned Wright and those who might be influenced by his work, “hatred and the preaching of hatred, and incitement to violence can only make a tolerable relationship intolerable.”2

Cohn’s reaction to Wright is revealing in that the act of making the tolerable intolerable is precisely the task that civil rights leaders faced in subsequent decades. Their goal was to convince black and white southerners that the segregated conditions they had lived with for more than a half-century were so unbearable that they must come to an immediate end. White moderates such as Cohn failed to recognize that tensions, like those subsequently created through nonviolent direct action, were necessary to effect meaningful social change through the creation of either disorder for the community or internal conflict for the individual. A number of black and white southerners remembered encounters in the decades before the civil rights movement through which they, as their successors would during the 1950s and 1960s, came to view life in the segregated South as intolerable. These realizations, or awakenings, resulted from a variety of experiences, such as travel outside the region, military service, college education, exposure to social or literary criticism, and personal encounters within the rituals of segregation. Through these experiences black and white southerners began to engage in a critique of the system they had learned to accept as a fact of southern life.

Historians have often identified such awakenings in the work of either black or white southerners. Leon Litwack deemed the moments when black children first realized life would be different for them “racial baptisms.”3 John Cell noted, “The moment of discovery, when the black personality first comes to full recognition of the realities of life under white supremacy, is a constant topic of Afro-American autobiography.”4 Fred Hobson drew on the autobiographies of elite white southerners to inform his analysis of “the white southern racial conversion narrative.”5 Recognition of the importance of such moments, whether one calls them awakenings, baptisms, or conversions, is central to the study of southern autobiography from this period; one must also recognize, however, that both black and white southerners remember experiencing such moments. While the

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