Flashes of a Southern Spirit: Meanings of the Spirit in the U.S. South

Five. The Myth of the Biracial South

5 The Myth of the Biracial South Charles L. Black, a born-and-bred white southerner, was teaching at the Yale Law School in 1957 when he wrote an article for The New Republic in which he outlined the legal and moral appeals that might be made to sympathetic whites to promote desegregation of the South. At the end of the essay, he revealed a dream he had long had, formed from pondering “[his] relations with the many Negroes of Southern origin that [he had] known, both in the North and at home.” He continued: “Again and again how often we laugh at the same things, how often we pronounce the same words the same way to the amusement of our hearers, judge character in the same frame of reference, mist up at the same kinds of music. I have exchanged ‘good evening’ with a Negro stranger on a New Haven street, and then realized (from the way he said the words) that he and I derived this universal small-town custom from the same culture.” Despite such cultural affinities, whites and blacks in the South, though, had failed to acknowledge them, these common traits that reflected a kinship. “My dream is simply that sight will one day clear and that each of the participants will recognize the other,” Black hoped. If this happened, “if the two [races] could join and look toward the future together — something would have happened uniquely 94 Chapter Five beautiful in history. The South, which has always felt itself reserved for a high destiny, would have found it, and would come to flower at last.”1 Black’s words in 1957, when the black freedom movement was well underway, expressed a mythic view of southern culture that would become in the 1970s a major ideological underpinning of the contemporary American South. The myth of the biracial South embodies the idea that the region has the potential to achieve a truly integrated society characterized by harmonious race relations with meaning for American culture and beyond. Like a good evangelist, Leslie W. Dunbar, executive director of the Southern Regional Council, expressed this faith even more directly in 1961, testifying to his belief “that the South will, out of its travail and sadness and requited passion, give the world its first grand example of two races of men living together in equality and with mutual respect.”2 This chapter examines the historical origins of this myth of the biracial South, explores its full emergence in the 1970s, suggests its meanings for various southerners, and briefly assesses its development since the 1970s. The South, of course, has long been the focus for mythmaking, both by southerners themselves and by outsiders. Since George Tindall’s seminal article “Mythology: A New Frontier in Southern History” (1964), scholars collectively have developed a framework for interpreting southern history in terms of myth. The mythic perspective on southern history would begin with the idea of a colonial Eden, then portray the romantic Old South and the crusading Lost Cause followed by the materialistic New South, and proceed into the twentieth century, replete with repeated expressions of a savage South, and yet the myth would culminate seemingly in the idea of the Sunbelt, which mysteriously fused the South with the heart of darkness, Southern California, in a prosperous world anchored by Disneyland and Disney World. Racial myths have been prominent in this frame of mind, especially the myth of white supremacy, which became institutionally embodied in the Jim Crow laws from the 1890s to the 1960s. The South’s distinctiveness in such myths was within a national context. Winthrop Jordan properly points out that “racial attitudes in the South have been peculiar not for their existence or their content but for their virulence, saliency, pervasiveness , and the predisposition of white people to overt action and of black people to fear, accommodation, resistance, and retaliation.”3 The Myth of the Biracial South 95 One of the most enduring southern myths has been that of the savage South, the opposite of the myth of the biracial South. It traces back to the colonial era and flowered in full expression in the antebellum era of North-South conflict. The South appeared in the national culture as backward, sexually licentious, irreligious, alcohol drenched, and morally suspect. In an ironic reversal, the Menckenesque version of the savage South in the 1920s saw the region...