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{ 167 } part iii the amassment of resistance But however it is cast, no doubt is left that the South lies under moral indictment as certainly as it did in the days of the Abolitionists. This realization is peculiarly lacerating to the Southern spirit, which is usually genial and gregarious . . . . Humor has always been a great defensive weapon of the South’s public men; a skillful raconteur can convert the most bitter conversation into an amiable joke—and raise doubts that a gentleman so mellow and full of human juices could actually be guilty of high crimes. But most Southerners simply retreat into unreality. It isn’t so, they say (and with their hearts if not their minds, believe). —Harry Ashmore, An Epitaph for Dixie Perhaps the most well-known and well-documented criticism of the South accompanied the civil rights movement, which permanently altered the southern landscape and dominated the political environment of the 1950s and 1960s. World War II, which had increased the economic production of the South and ushered in a new era of American nationalism, had offered a reprieve, albeit short lived, from regional criticism. However, the pressure to dismantle southern racial boundaries increased significantly as American patriotism focused on the atrocities of the German Nazi regime. And the founding of the United Nations in 1945, C. Vann Woodward argued, opened “to the outside world a large window on American race practices.”1 As representatives from every corner of the globe descended on the United Nations headquarters in New York, they were greeted, at times, by descriptions of racial atrocities in the South as reported in national newspapers and journals. “To many of these people,” insisted Woodward, “the Jim Crow code came as a complete shock. Those who had heard anything at all of the system before coming to America often discounted the stories as propaganda. Now they witnessed its workings daily.”2 As criticism of the South reached international audiences, the United Nations launched investigations into these racial practices, publishing numerous reports of the findings. 168 } The Amassment of Resistance Pressure for change began to build inside the white southern community as well, as southern writers and journalists began to discuss the psychological damage that Jim Crow had caused not only African American southerners but their white oppressors as well. Specifically, Jim Cobb, in his essay “Does ‘Mind’ Still Matter?” claimed that the internal criticism of the 1940s and 1950s increasingly focused on the absurdity of southern behavior: “Works like Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dreams followed Cash’s lead by presenting southern life as, in one reviewer’s words, ‘a schizophrenic invention without parallel, an insane dichotomy from the cradle to the grave.’ Stetson Kennedy’s Southern Exposure describedtheSouthas‘thenation’spathologicalproblemNo.1’andwarnedthat the insanity of the South ‘infected the entire nation.’”3 This growing emphasis on the psychology of racism was a clear repercussion of the exposure and defeat of Hitler’s ethnic cleansing. What southern critics—internal, national, and international—began to assess would become the focus of the Supreme Court in the 1950s. Most notable, the notion of inferiority actually appears in the legal language of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that desegregated American public education. The U.S. District Court of Kansas, which initially had heard the case in 1951, wrote in its decision that “segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. . . . A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn.” Chief Justice Earl Warren would quote this exact passage from the Kansas district decision in his majority opinion in 1954. The inferiority complex thus gains additional credibility as a psychological reality endorsed by the American legal system. Scholars have labeled the period that followed the Brown decision as the decade of Massive Resistance,anall-outlegalandpoliticalfightagainstintegrationthatcommenced with the 1956 Southern Manifesto authored by Virginia senator Harry F. Byrd and South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, which declared such resistance. However, the intermittent years reveal a transformation from moderation to Massive Resistance that has been somewhat overlooked. By contemporary standards, and as assessed by some scholars, the Virginia state plan for integration, developed by Virginia’s Commission on Public Education—also called the Gray Commission—reads as a radical, programmatic , but legal, method to suffocate integration in its infancy. However, in light of the drastic measures taken only a few years later by Governor J. Lindsey Almond Jr., including the chaining of school doors and gates...

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