When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories

Son of the South

© MurrayLee.com 51 Son of the South John Seigenthaler, Sr. I am a son of the segregated, racist South. I declare it neither as a self-condemnation nor as a confession, but simply to acknowledge a grotesque fact of life in a conflicted and cursed time and place. Those who look at the region as it is today are entitled to wonder why we who were acculturated to the ways of an earlier time could not (or would not) recognize either the conflict or the curse. Here, I wonder myself. n From birth through childhood and well into adulthood, my hometown, Nashville, Tennessee, was as racially partitioned by law, custom, and white preference as any city in South Africa at the peak of apartheid. White Nashvillians of my generation are quick to explain that our town was not as racist as Selma or Montgomery in Alabama, or Stone Mountain in 52 J o h n S e i g e n t h a l e r , S r . Georgia, or Oxford or Philadelphia in Mississippi. Black Nashvillians will tell you it was a difference without distinction. Think of any public place where a resident of my city might need or wish to go—a hospital, restaurant, restroom, hotel, school, park, church, theater, trolley, or bus—and that place was ruled by Jim Crow laws and the Confederate tradition of enforced racial separation. Every government-owned building where citizens were required to do business —the courthouse, city hall, state capital, or health department— was required to have separate “white” and “colored” restrooms and drinking fountains to protect “the health of the community.” In courtrooms, there were only white judges and white jurors to decide disputes over property, liberty, and sometimes life. People of color who could afford it often hired white lawyers to represent them and spoke and thought of the word “justice” in quotation marks. Department stores and government office buildings opened their doors to all citizens, but once inside, white customers and taxpayers routinely received preferential treatment by white sales people and white bureaucrats—and there were only white sales people and bureaucrats . “First come, first served” could mean that the second or third or fourth person to come, if that person was white, was served first. Everywhere posted signs mandated the Jim Crow law: Colored to the Back Negroes Sit in Rear White Drinking Fountain Colored Drinking Fountain Negro Balcony Upstairs White Men Only Black Men Only White Ladies Only Even those who could not read had no trouble understanding. The signs silently declared what white southerners demanded, what state law and local ordinance required, and what the United States Supreme Court said was constitutional. African Americans had no option but to accept the obnoxious directives or face public insults, verbal or literal slaps in the face, and possible arrest. S o n o f t h e S o u t h 53 Behind the meaning of those signs was the ingrained Southern certainty that people of color were less intelligent, less capable, less moral, less clean, and less deserving. There was an innate Southern sense that “they” were inferior. n It was as if white people had embraced the blind ignorance of H. L. Mencken, the columnist and cynic (who was neither blind nor ignorant on other issues) when he wrote on “the failure of the educated Negro.” “His brain is not fitted for the higher forms of mental effort. His ideals . . . are those of a clown. He will remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then the white race will be fifty generations ahead of him.” To grow up white in the South at that time was to see black people in streets every day and yet (as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man explained) never to see them; it was to ignore the gross unfairness that was so starkly visible; it was to believe the lie of “separate but equal”; it was to deny the emotional pain suffered by blacks; it was to adopt the myth that racial segregation was permanent, proper, ordained by God, and endorsed by government; it was to laugh hilariously at Stepin Fetchit, Hattie McDaniel, and Amos ’n’ Andy, as if they were prototypical . It also was to hear every day the word “nigger” from the lips of somebody—and most days from several somebodies—in the workplace and in...