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Southern customs are still largely based on the assumption that the Negro is an inferior being. But that assumption lacks the pseudo-scientific backing it still had a generation ago. For decades, the South's preoccupation with the Negro was a kind of cushion against reality, a diversion from the facts of poverty and stagnation. Southern "poor whites" had nothing if they could not feel superior to the Negro. During the past ten years, the South has been caught up in a great industrial boom; reality has become a little easier to face.
Although many Southerners today will agree that segregation is wrong in principle, the vast majority still fiercely defends it as right in practice. A mass of state laws and city ordinances enforces it. But Southerners seem to know in their hearts that it is not really defensible, and that the tide of events is against it. The result is a war in the South's own soul which many Northerners, who see the South only as stubborn and narrow-minded, fail to understand. A Southern Negro and former slave understood it. Said Booker T. Washington, the greatest Negro leader in U.S. history: "The outside world does not know . . . the struggle that is constantly going on in the hearts of both the Southern white people and their former slaves . . . While both races are thus struggling, they should have the sympathy, the support, and the forbearance of the rest of the world."
The Spirit: Hopes and Headaches
The Negro has suffered more than any other group of Americans. He has seen the white man at his worst, and he might have turned cynically against the white man's faith and values. But he has not. The Negro does feel bitter about his lot. But it is a bitterness greatly modified by hope, patience and humor. Negro intellectuals occasionally talk "African nationalism." But the majority of U.S. Negroes feel no more kinship to the Kikuyu of Kenya than to the man in the moon. They want to be, above all, Americans.
The most spectacular illustration of the Negroes' loyalty to the U.S. is the Communists' crashing failure to win recruits among them: by FBI estimates, no more than 1,400 Negroes ever belonged to the Communist Party at one time. Dr. Carlton Goodlett, young San Francisco Negro leader, gives these reasons: "More than anyone else, the Negro believes in the American opportunity to better himself. The Communist he sees as a rundown, underprivileged guy. The Negro just isn't interested in the underdog role. Secondly, he has learned to believe in the right to protest. People like myself, always protesting against injustice, wouldn't last ten seconds in Russia. Also, no single group in this country believes more strongly in God and the hereafter. The Negro doesn't want to catch hell on this side of the River Styx and on the other side too." A Negro lawyer put it this way: "It's bad enough to be black without being Red too." The Negro is still deeply religious, although American churches have been slow in fighting discrimination before the altar. Says Marie Johnson, wife of Fisk University's President Charles Johnson: "I think we got the best out of Christianity, because we had to have it. No matter how we may scoff,