Brown Decision, Jim Crow, and Southern Identity

Introduction

Introduction When I learned that I would be delivering the Lamar Lectures in 2004, I thought immediately of the fiftieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Shortly after that, of course, it occurred to me that I was probably not the only historian who had made this connection and that doubtless a slew of books and anthologies were already in the works and slated for publication in 2004. This meant that by the time my lectures were in print, the scholarly community and the reading public would have been awash in discussions of this topic for at least a year. However, as some of these half-century assessments of Brown began to appear as books and articles, I was struck by their general negativity and dismissiveness toward the accomplishments of both the Brown decision and, for that matter, the entire civil rights movement. Having made it a lifelong habit to check the wind direction and then run directly against it, I concluded that in order to remain true to form, I should remind folks of what the Brown court and the activists who took the spirit of its ruling into the streets were up against, both historically and contemporaneously. I chose to do this at least in part, I am sure, because as a well-traveled southerner and southern historian now returned to the little town where I grew up, I am continually struck by the magnitude of the changes in racial interaction that have occurred since I was coming along during the last decade and a half of Jim Crow. As a very young boy in the early 1950s I saw black children, only a little older than I was, trudging up the road in all kinds of weather to Colored Zion School, a two-room structure about a mile away. On several occasions I asked my mama why they didn’t ride a bus like the one that carried white kids right past our house (and Colored 1 Zion School), and her flustered assurances that the black children really didn’t mind and probably even preferred it that way left even a naive little boy no more convinced than, I now realize, she was. Later in my childhood, after saying “Yes, sir” or “Yes, ma’am” to black adults or drinking from the same dipper as my black playmates, I received the rebukes that were part of the indoctrination in the rituals of caste that practically every southern child of that era, black or white, was expected to learn and take to heart. As a teenager, I got my first lesson in the economics of discrimination when, after an extremely arduous seven-hour “afternoon” of helping one of my father ’s friends get up some hay, he asked if I was willing to accept the same pay that he gave Boston Gaines, a black man who worked for him on a regular basis. After agreeing readily, I received the princely sum of $2.50, which was half of what he paid Boston for a twelvehour day. Though I did not always comprehend it fully at the time, in my youth I saw countless, sometimes brutal, demonstrations that, in the Jim Crow South, the content of an individual’s character or personality counted for little or nothing compared to the color of his or her skin. The memory of some of these incidents makes me cringe even today, and I know that, at the time, they contributed to the steady accretion of doubts about the way whites both regarded and treated African Americans. Still, these doubts remained largely submerged until 1964, which, in a much less dramatic and certainly not the least bit heroic way, became a sort of personal “freedom summer” for me. That June and July I attended Georgia’s very first Governor’s Honors Program for gifted high school students at Wesleyan College in Macon. Not only was this my first extended stay away from home, but except for one high school English class, it was my first real excursion beyond the parroted verities of my textbooks into the real world of ideas. It was also my first experience with black classmates of any sort, much less extremely bright and confident ones who had been raised 2 Introduction in homes far more affluent than my own. Not only was I suddenly among whites, both students and faculty, who favored integration...