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Doubtless Sincere New Characters in the Civil Rights Cast LAUREN F. WINNER With each new book on civil rights, the movement's dramatis personae grows larger. The old cast of black heroes still has center stage, but supporting actors who used to be walk-ons now have speaking parts. We know about gentleman segregationists like James J. Kilpatrick and Ku Kluxers like Sam Bowers. We can read about white liberal black sheep like Virginia Durr and moderate ministers like Episcopal Bishop Charles Carpenter.1 Scholars, in other words, recognize that to speak of "the white experience" of the civil rights movement is absurd; "the white South," after all, comprised George Wallace and Casey Hayden and everything in between. But when it comes to the decade after Brown, we still too often fall unthinkingly into that lazy and inaccurate catch phrase "the black experience": The black church. The black middle-class. The black community . Towhite Americans, scholars readily attribute lots of experiences, lots of churches, lots of politics, and, usually, lots of middle-classes. But black Americans have only one of each. The literature on the early and middle decades of Jim Crow has begun to challenge the portrayal of a monolithic "black community." To cite just two examples: Glenda Gilmore, writing about the progressive era, has recently reminded scholars to be cautious about "either mythologizing African American solidarity or applying notions of class formation based upon white experience." Adam Fairclough's nuanced portrait of black teachers "in the AgeofJim Crow" reveals teachers who tousled with ministers and other leaders in black communities; and demonstrates that "education—and the lack of it—became sources of ... class tension" among African Americans.2 This essay suggests simply that black southerners during the era of civil eights were no more homogenous than their parents and grandparents. In 1943 Carter G. Woodson acknowledged that "There are a few [Negro] defenders of segregation who are doubtless sincere ." Almost sixty years later, we should follow Woodson's lead and begin to study those black defenders of segregation.3 157 158 New Characters in the Civil Rights Cast Black southerners responded to the civil rights movement in a variety of ways. Many risked their lives to support the freedom struggle, but others distanced themselves from the activists. There were those who opposed the movement because they were terrified ofeconomic intimidation and violence. Anne Moody's mother, for example, was probably acting out of fear when she tried to forbid Moody to attend an NAACP convention in Jackson. Voter registration reports in the early '60s described "That prohibitive kind of fear which binds the minds of the people here, especially the Negroes . . . [An] appalling, nebulous fear/' Other African Americans eschewed the movement because they believed that black leaders should be spending their time not on integrating lunchcounters , but, as one Greensboro, North Carolina resident put it, on cracking down on teens' "guzzling" alcohol, extramarital sex "practiced right under our noses on every ill-lighted stairway," and other symptoms of moral decay. Still other black southerners were among the so-called gradualists. Either too dignified or too up-tight to embrace the demonstrations and marches, the sit-ins, and the pray-ins, these African Americans urged even the leaders of SCLC—who, by the end ofthe movement, would be considered gradualists themselves by some of the younger, more radical activists—to take it slow.4 Finally there were those who rejected integration outright. A 1966 study by Donald Matthews and James Protho found that one in three "Negroes is not committed to the goal of racial integration," with 16% favoring "strict segregation" and 15%favoring "Something in between" strict segregation and integration.5 Black nationalists who abhorred Jim Crow but sought an alternative more radical than integration constituted part of that 16%. But according to Matthews and Protho's study, most of the African Americans favoring segregation were not "potential black nationalists," but "old style 'Uncle Toms.' "6 Black defenders of segregation look, at first blush, very much like black nationalists, especially in their preference for all-black institutions; but black defenders of segregation differ from nationalists in two key ways. First, while both groups criticize NAACP-style integration, nationalists articulate a third alternative to integration and Jim Crow, while segregationists preferred to stick with the status quo. Second, absent from black defenders ofsegregation's political vocabulary was the demand for self-determination. They called for allblack institutions, but not autonomousall-black institutions; indeed, some [18.117.81.240] Project...

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