Thursday, June 25, 2015

Most
of the white southerners whom I have known well left their region as young men
and women, at least in part because of its political values.Several of them have talked very frankly
about the psychology of their native region, and to them I owe some of the
ideas behind this painful post. But meanwhile, other white southerners whom I
never met have loomed large on my horizon for as long as I can remember: the
barons of the House and Senate in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Senator Richard
Russell of Georgia and House Rules Committee Chairman Howard Smith; the defiant
governors, George Wallace and Ross Barnett, who rallied their white
constituents behind segregation; and perhaps the most interesting of all, those
like Senators Lister Hill and John Sparkman of Alabama, who wereand emancipation
took place all over the South, the nightmare appeared to have come true.In the next ten years, the radical
Republicans insisted upon black suffrage, and black governments ruled a number
of southern states.They were not, as southerners claimed for a
century, simply corrupt and inefficient: some of them were the first southern
state governments to provide what even then were regarded as basic
services.But the white power structure
re-asserted itself through a campaign of terror led by the Ku Klux Klan, and
eventually wore out the North. After federal troops left, the white elite not
only terrorized and disenfranchised the black population, but created a new
myth of “redemption,” arguing that they had saved their people from the horror
of a race dictatorship.And until the
1950s, intimidation, including lynchings, kept the black citizenry
subjugated.Then, fueled in part by the
votes