The Charlotte News

Thursday, November 24, 1938

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: We strongly disagree with the premise put forward in "Jim Crow Again", while understanding its reason.

Perhaps, it is the generation in which we grew of age, in the 1950's and 1960's, but we strongly believe that there is no substitute for justice in the present--that justice delayed is justice denied, as the popular phrase went and ought still to go, no matter the reason. There is no reason for injustice, no matter how inured to such a condition anyone or group of ones one becomes.

We believe, an impossible premise to test, that Cash, too, with the passing of another decade, would have adhered to this more impatient opinion, after the War, a War which saw many African-Americans who could not even vote, regardless of age, die and wounded in the service of their country. And we believe even more that by the turn of yet another decade afterward, there would have been little doubt in Cash's mind that the South would not change from its stubborn past, with the likes of Wallace and Faubus and Thurmond taking the place of Bilbo and Cotton Ed, without active Federal intervention, as he would have seen the violence in reaction to something as innocent as the attempt lawfully and peacefully to integrate the public schools in the South, seen the violence in reaction to something as innocent as an attributed wolf whistle at a white girl by a boy of 13. Would Cash have been in favor of such integration? Some scholars, ignoring the fact that Cash wrote before these societal forces,--for he encouraged them with his writing more than many realize--have questioned it. Our response to such nonsense is that the reader best go back and read the book yet again if you come out doubting that Cash would have wholeheartedly been at the forefront of editorial praise for such efforts to integrate society. He likely would not have been on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, for it was not his style to go out on the streets. But he would have been there in spirit.

The truth is that without the entry of the Federal government into the process, the Force Bill, the Civil Rights bills, of 1948, of 1957, of 1964, Brown v. Board, the enforcement by the National Guard, the Army, and the rest, the South would never have changed--indeed is, in some parts even today, still at it, doing its level best to return to that old miserable status quo of "separate but equal", hidden behind such well-known euphemisms as "school voucher programs", paternalistic "volunteerism", and the like.

No one can be forced to live together, it is true. No one able to afford a different means of education can be forced to attend fully integrated schools. But no one may prevent someone from buying a home next door which someone else desires to sell to that person either, no matter whether that person is black or Red or even a redneck Jeeter Lester.

People are as they are and are damned well going to be, to be let to live as they will within reason, or to live without freedom worth having. (Not to say, however, that one has the right to shoot up the place--for that affects others beyond one's property boundaries in a closely bounded society.)

Jim Crow be damned. And his laws with him. Never should have been, never should be again--for anyone, black, white, red, brown, or indifferent.

It took blood to undo them finally, these despicable laws which had separate water fountains, separate hospital wards, separate seating areas on the bus, on the train, separate balconies in the theatre, separate galleries in the courtrooms in some locales--a blood sacrifice which only had to be insofar as the enforcers of them and their political manipulators who passed them and signed them at the legislature and state house, city council and city hall, insisted that it had to be. It was not the fault either of those who insisted upon their constitutional rights, inherent in humans, or of those politicians and statesmen, newspapermen and professors and lawyers and ministers, who insisted, at their own political, economic, reputational and physical peril, that these rights would be exercised by all. But, the blood ran in order to bring it about, just as Cash dreaded and predicted it probably would, had hoped it might be averted by a more steady, even-handed move to educated progress at the university level in the South, unfortunately, while sensible and practical, simply too slow in the end to have had enough practical effect than to enerve enough people to determine that change would come, by force of the Supremacy Clause if necessary, by force of bayonetted soldier if necessary, but that it would come, not tomorrow, but today.

Twenty-five years and a day from this date, the nation, or all who were sensitive and sane, regardless of party or political persuasion, would wear its grave empathy for the veil and collectively memorialize in Arlington beneath the Custis-Lee Mansion its slain President, a President slain if not immediately and directly in fact over the issue of civil rights, certainly as a result of the atmosphere thus disgracefully enforced by the recalcitrant politicians and their henchmen and minions, primarily in the South, but also in the industrial cities of the North as well, in the suburbs of the West, throughout the country, wherever segregation was enforced, whether by legislative action or by tacit acceptance of narrow-minded idiocy, purblind ignorance. Those dark days that weekend which had just days earlier been so full of hope and promise for the future--yet, hope and promise not to be stilled merely by that of the spadesman's turn of soil upon the casket vault--would galvanize the better part of the nation to change. And 42 years later, the flame lit that incongruously clear November afternoon, though flickering from time to time, still burns bright, and not only just in Arlington beneath the Custis-Lee Mansion, but perhaps most brightly of all in some places in the South, those places most tortured by the backlash to that for which that flame eternally stands.

Whether this editorial below, incidentally, was by Cash is impossible to tell. Likely it was, but then again, maybe not, bearing none of his signature phaseology, and, it being Thanksgiving, and his first editorial of the day, plainly his for the trademark "little reader" comment, being plainly a slapped together piece from nothing of consequence, and the second one on Caldwell being one extended off the top of his head from his book page writing, and with the rare day occurring where none were on the international situation, it is altogether possible that he had the day off while someone else filled the bulk of the space, as Cash spent about 30 minutes the previous day writing the first two, one a five-minute filler, one a recapitulation. Regardless, certainly in another year and a half, by the time he wrote the latter words of his book, he was reflecting not the complacence of this editorial but rather cautious warning to the South of what lay ahead in terms of blood-letting should it not change peacefully by its best and brightest lights.

The piece below certainly ignored to a great degree the idea that in 73 years since the Civil War, the South, while making some seeming progress on the worst, most violent aspects of Southern mean culture, the code of lynching, had still made no real advance of any note in the areas of socialization and integration of society, integration of the Southern mind to notions concordant with reality of human nature, not lending to its more typical gallivanting into phantasmagoria, part color-book religion, part romantic guilt for youthful hedonism, part hate, all engendered by ignorance and mean circumstance, the harsh turns of vicissitudinous Nature. And without that advance, with apartheid being the rule of law and the unwritten rule otherwise, the South, the country, would never have changed, not in any measurable sense. For with behavioral change, forced or otherwise, comes change ultimately of beliefs, as mutual understanding inevitably increases sitting side by side at lunch, and with change of beliefs, change of attitude and values follows. Slow it goes generationally still, but without integration, which could not have been achieved voluntarily against the backdrop of such ingrained and structured belief systems otherwise, it could have never begun, not really. As we said, still exists to the extent it can without embarrassment of individual conscience, the intervention of the law, or both. Separation only maintained the same old ingrained prejudices which beset both sides of the divide, black and white, and continued the stereotyped notions, Steppin and Jeeter and the rest.

And this also from this day's page, to demonstrate the contra view in 1938 to that of the Bundists in America:

(New York Staats-Zeitung und Herald)

Because we believe in the inherent decency of the German people, we herewith protest against the dark powers that use this murder [the assassination of Vom Rath in Paris] as a welcome excuse to let loose the lowest instincts against defenseless people, trying to cover up these wanton acts with phrases like "indignation of the people," which bear the stamp of the Ministry of Propaganda... We protest against desecrations of the German name through fanatics in the ranks of the party who are trying to drag a great people into the mire of their sadistic lowness... We hope fervently, through our belief in the German people, for the dawn of a better day which will put an end to all mental agony.

If the first annual report of the North Carolina State Board of Alcoholic Control were handed over to our financial editor to condense and put in the paper, he would probably come up with this headline:

LIQUOR STORES NET N. C. $1,743,525.20

Wet Counties Get Million and Quarter, State Half-Million

On the other hand, if the report were to go to some socially-conscious staff man who was more interested in public morality than in bank balances, the headline would probably come out this way:

LIQUOR BOARD BELIEVES BOOTLEGGING ON WAY OUT

Its Extinction In Wet Counties Predicted In One More Year

And--aha!--if the report came to the sanctum itself, which is to say the editorial department, with instructions to interpret it broadside for all the little readers who will not themselves take the time or trouble to read it, one might expect something like this:

CONTROL WORKING BEAUTIFULLY IN 27 TAR HEEL COUNTIES

Board Reports Achievements In Law Enforcement And Substantial Profits

Georgia has been in an uproar over "Tobacco Road," the play about degraded poor whites written by its native son, Erskine Caldwell. Augusta and Savannah took it out in denunciation, but Atlanta was so upset that it proceeded to attempt to suppress the performance, only to be set back by a court decision.

What the oppressors claim is that the play is obscene and a menace to morals. And obscene it is, in the sense that it portrays obscene and shocking people. But not at all in the sense that it menaces morals. For it could only do that if one could suppose its inciting somebody--say De Gourmont's "young girl"--to imitate its people. And it is quite impossible to imagine anybody on earth being incited to imitate old Jeeter Lester and his brood. On the contrary, it is admirably calculated to generate horror at all the vices to which Jeeter is addicted. The language of the thing is the authentic language of the people it represents, certainly, and so is calculated to shock. But then, nobody has to go to it.

But really, of course, it isn't any question of obscenity or strong language which is exercising Georgia, but wounded patriotism--the notion that the play is somehow a libel on the state. But Caldwell has never suggested that Jeeter and his crew are typical of Georgia, but only that there are such people in Georgia. There are--and in North Carolina and all the rest of the South--the tenant farmer and share-cropper types at their lowest and worst. And if that offends us, why, then, the way to deal with it is surely not to pretend that it isn't so and try to hide from it by suppressing a play, but to face the facts and consider what can be done about it.

Incidentally, while starkly realistic, we disagree a little with old Remy: There is music and poetry, in humans at least; and therein lies love, not purely animalism. Doubt it? Oh hell, go spin an old L.P., Pilgrim...

"I shall call the pebble, 'Dare.'"

For once we find ourselves feeling that old Cotton Ed Smith of South Carolina, is half right. We dislike him, and particularly do we dislike his Negro-baiting, which he exploits for political purposes. And we do not at all agree that the mere passage of a resolution by the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, calling for the abolition of the Jim Crow laws, in itself creates "an extremely dangerous situation." Nevertheless, we do think that the action proposed is presently out of the question.

We have no intention of arguing the case for these laws on a basis of absolute rational justice. And we are uncomfortably aware of certain parallels that can be drawn. But absolute rational justice is a rare--perhaps a non-existent--thing in this world. And in the settlement of such problems, it is necessary, willy-nilly, to take emotional patterns and tradition into account. The plain fact is that the surging instinct of the overwhelming majority of Southern whites is such that the repeal of the laws could result only in dangerous friction and conflict--in the steady exacerbation of the race issue. And for the Negro himself, we think, that would be much the greater evil of the two.

It would be different if the South, with a ticklish racial situation to deal with, hadn't made admirable progress in handling it. It would be different if the Southern Conference for Human Welfare represented the South instead of only a rarefied intellectuality beyond the average Southerner's remotest comprehension. It would be different if it weren't for the fact that there is only one way to solve the Negro problem, and that is to let it solve itself in time.

Assuming that there is nothing at all to the rumors which blew up a storm in the Civil Service Commission, the Council was quite right in glossing over the whole business yesterday, the Mayor in letting Mr. Patterson temporarily withdraw his resignation, Mr. Baxter in foregoing his intention of holding an interrogatory session. And as far as some of the rumors go, we think it is safe to assume that there is nothing to them--for the Council so to assume, we mean, lacking actual charges. But the Civil Service Commission ought to feel a compulsion to go to the bottom of them, if there is any bottom.

So much is due the persons and departments whose good names are involved. During this week, the newspapers, emboldened by the controversy, have come closer and closer to saying outright what the rumors are. The public has been given to understand that high City officials, "it is rumored," have regularly supplied themselves with contraband liquor from the Police Departments vault, that the Police Department is in cahoots with some of our politer criminals, that the detective division shut its eyes to the open operation of the butter 'n' eggs lottery.

Now, mere rumors, it is true, have no standing. If they did, we would go from one investigation to another and then start all over again. But these rumors, baseless as they may be, have been given wide circulation. So far as the public knows, they have not even been specifically denied. They ought to be. They ought to be brought out into the open from whoever is uttering them before whoever is accused by them, and confirmed or refuted.

He was pretty mad, was Mr. Gene Alley, lawyer man from Murphy come down out of the hills yesterday to complain to the State Board of Elections that the Republicans up that way had robbed the Democrats out of an election.

If that's true, then it was bad of the Republicans. We deplore it. But all the same, we can't resist the inclination to chortle a little. If the Republicans did all the things alleged against them, then they were doing it simply because the election laws made it possible for them to do it. Surely--those laws were enacted by Democrats and designed only for the use of Democrats. But there is no more grimly pleasant sight than the spectacle of a man hoist by his own petard.

If Mr. Alley really wants to complain about something, then let him turn upon his own party. That party and its leaders have had ample proof for a long time that the election laws they have passed are admirably adapted to promote fraud, and have done exactly nothing about it. And despite the widespread scandal this year, they apparently don't mean to do anything about it in the next Legislature. Said our Raleigh correspondent, Mr. Averill, yesterday:

And so long as His Excellency and his following keep on feeling that way about it, we shall go right on chortling when we hear that the Republicans have here and there managed to turn the tables.