Brown Decision, Jim Crow, and Southern Identity

3. Brown and Belonging: African Americans and the Recovery of Southern Black Identity

56 3 Brown and Belonging African Americans and the Recovery of Southern Black Identity A decade before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision invalidated racial segregation in the public schools, writer Sterling Brown began his contribution to the controversial volume What the Negro Wants by citing a recently published history of Georgia whose white author took great comfort in the fact that the “Anglo-Saxon . . . race makes up nearly one hundred percent of the population of the South.” Brown attributed the apparent invisibility of more than one-third of the state’s inhabitants to the propensity of whites to see “only the people that count.” In the stage play that was the Jim Crow South, he seemed to be saying, blacks were not actors so much as part of the set, discernible only as a distant, undifferentiated forest rather than up close, as individual trees.1 Brown’s point was not lost on his friend and protégé of sorts, Ralph Ellison, whose protagonist in the 1952 novel InvisibleMan encountered the first evidence of his own invisibility in the South’s tightly woven fabric of custom and law that smothered individual black personalities under a thick blanket of racial stereotypes. A few years earlier Richard Wright’s semiautobiographical Black Boy had shown how these stereotypes were used, in turn, to support the dogma of caste that had imposed them in the first place. As a young man, Wright had actually made whites uneasy and suspicious with his refusal to steal, and thereby affirm the congenital moral weakness of his race. Whites also noticed his reluctance to “laugh and talk” with other blacks in the happy-go-lucky manner that supposedly demonstrated their fundamental contentment with their lot in the Jim Crow South. Not only had the southern whites who claimed they “knew ‘niggers.’ . . . not known me,” Wright insisted, but by pressuring him to be “what the whites had said that I must be,” they had prevented him from really knowing “who I was” as well. Accordingly, he had left the South after realizing that its white racist mentality “could recognize but part of a man, could accept but a fragment of his personality and all the rest—the best and deepest things of heart and mind—were tossed away in blind ignorance and hate.”2 Reflecting these sentiments in a very emotional way, two days after the Brown decision came down, Ralph Ellison wrote his former mentor at Tuskegee, rejoicing that “the court has found in our favor and recognized our human psychological complexity and citizenshipandanotherbattleoftheCivilWarhasbeenwon.”Though acutely aware of “the problems that lie ahead,” Ellison found it “hopeful and good” that “the judges have found and Negroes must be individuals. . . . [H]ere’s to integration, the only integration that counts: that of the personality.”3 Here, then, was the message that black writers had been sending for decades. “Negroes want to be counted in. They want to belong,” as Sterling Brown had put it in 1944, and “however segregation may be rationalized, it is essentially the denial of belonging.” Critics charged that the Brown decision was grounded in sociological theory rather than actual legal precedent. However, the Brown court’s finding, that setting black schoolchildren apart “solely because of their race . . . may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone,” revealed remarkable empathy for those whose “belonging” had been denied. As Eric J. Sundquist has explained, in Brown the Court made integrated education the means by which African Americans would finally achieve the end of “valued and meaningful membership in the nation.”4 Most contemporary liberal observers assumed that blacks cared only about belonging as Americans and not as southerners as well. Focusing on the suffering imposed by the southern racial system, Brown and Belonging 57 external critics found it logical to conclude that the last thing that any black person would crave would be an identification with the South. Most who rejected white southerners’ protestations that the blacks who faced constant abuse and exploitation in the Jim Crow South were nonetheless contented and carefree simply embraced the counterfallacy that all African Americans must be totally and eternally estranged from a place where they had endured so much injustice and hardship. Recognition that black southerners could have emotional ties to the South also ran counter to the emerging black power/black pride movements of the 1960s, which focused on...