The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South

Introduction

Introduction Our primary images of the American South in the 1950s and 1960s concern vivid struggles over power. Some of those struggles took place in the streets, some in the courts, some in legislatures, some in schools. Our images involve protest and counter-protest, demands to be heard and refusals to acknowledge those demands, marches and violence, heroism and stubborn resistance to change. We tend to think more about people acting than people thinking. How can we understand how people connected thought and action? The essays in this collection examine ideas and the roles they played in the South in the civil rights era. Studying ideas should help add some nuances and complexities to stories we already know. It may also be a way to tell new stories and reconceptualize some old ones. These essays investigate a wide range of thought in the civil rights era South. When people challenged authority, or defended it, what ideas did they uphold? What were their moral and intellectual standards? What language did they use, and what sources did they cite? What issues did they feel needed explaining, what issues did they take for granted, and what issues did they avoid? The history of ideas asks us to study people trying to figure things out. Some people sought ideas that satisfied their own search for what Charles Marsh calls "ultimacy and the divine." Some sought ideas that would buttress their own place in power structures or would challenge society as it existed. Some people's confrontation with ideas was more about strategies ; they wanted to know what worked. Others confronted ideas about morality and justice; they wanted to know what the world might be, at its best. The history of ideas is often best at studying people in the process of asking questions. For some time now, historians of intellectual life have made efforts to go beyond the work of well known systematic thinkers with university training, literary ambitions, and publishers. Thus, this collection studies both people who hoped the published versions of their intellectual efforts would convince other people to follow them, and also those like Fannie Lou Hamer or Jim Johnson who never saw themselves as intellectuals. While several essays concentrate on the most studied southern intellecix x Introduction tual in the 1950s and 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., others deal with activists, preachers, editors, and politicians whose ideas have received relatively little attention. Intellectual history also brings into the picture some characters we do not often confront in southern history. Hegel and Karl Earth. ArthurSchlesinger , Jr. and Lionel Trilling. William F. Buckley and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. These are not southerners, obviously, but their place in this volume emphasizes that southern life, especially southern thinking, took place in national and international contexts. What one also finds in this volume are serious efforts to make judgments about the power and validity of the ideas under discussion. Were they good ideas? Did they makesense? When people tried to apply them, did they work, and did anyone agree with them? Do we agree with them, and should we? Some of these essays challenge existing orthodoxies and may therefore draw criticism. I hope so.Thinking seriously about ideas in history should force us to reconsider things we felt comfortable that we understood. The civil rights movement established most of the agenda for southern thinking in the 1950s and 1960s, so this volume begins with five analyses of ideas within the civil rights movement, especially those of Martin Luther King, Jr. The volume then moves on to people who responded to the civil rights movement, with equivocation, denial, or resistance. It includes a discussion of white southern moderates and the reasons they had little success, and it concludes with discussions of intellectual and political conservatism, and finally discusses the thinking ofAfrican Americans who did not join the civil rights movement. David Chappell begins the volume with a discussion of the dramatic differences between "The Intellectual Roots of the Second Reconstruction " and the intellectual assumptions of most American liberals in the mid-twentieth century. Liberalism, he argues, stressed optimism about the potential of both individuals and groups to identify and overcome problems, to pursue justice and even perfection once they understood they had the chance. He identifies that strain of liberalism with the thought of Swedish writer Gunnar Myrdal, author of the widely read and quoted An American Dilemma. Runningcounter to that sense ofoptimism about overcoming problems were the ideas of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr , who always reminded readers...