Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South | Facing History & Ourselves
Reading

Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South

Southerners discuss segregation after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case.
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At a Glance

Reading

Language

English — US

Subject

  • History
  • Racism

First published in 1956, Segregation is a collection of informal conversations with southerners in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Robert Penn Warren traveled through the South to talk with scores of individuals—taxi drivers, NAACP leaders, members of White Citizens groups, college students, preachers—to report on their responses to the Court's decision. The following are excerpts.

Excerpt 1

There is the very handsome lady of forty-five, charming and witty and gay, full of dramatic mimicry, a wonderful range of phrase, a quick sympathy, a totally captivating talker of the kind you still occasionally find among women of the Deep South. . . . She has been talking about the Negroes on her plantation, and at last, about integration, but that only in one phrase, tossed off as gaily and casually as any other of the evening, so casual as to permit no discussion: “But of course we have to keep the white race intact.”

But the husband, much her senior, who had said almost nothing all evening, lifts his strong, grizzled old face, and in a kind of sotto voce growl, not to her, not to me, not to anybody, utters: “In power—in power—you mean the white race in power.”

And I think of another Southerner, an integrationist saying to me: “You simply have to recognize a fact. In no county where the Negroes are two to one is the white man going to surrender political power, not with Negroes in those countries in their present condition. It’s not a question of being Southern. You put the same number of Yankee liberals in the same county and in a week they’d be behaving the same way. Living with something and talking about it are two very different things, and living with something is always the slow way.”

And another, not an integrationist, from a black county, saying: “Yeah, let ’em take over and in six months you’d be paying the taxes but a black sheriff would be collecting ’em. You couldn’t walk down the sidewalk. You’d be communized, all right. 1

Excerpt 2

The following excerpt is Warren’s response after a white lawyer shows him some segregationist literature.

I look at it. The stuff is not new. I have seen it before, elsewhere. It was used in the last gubernatorial campaign in Tennessee, it was used in the march on the Capitol at Nashville, a few weeks ago. There are the handbills showing “Harlem Negro and White Wife,” lying abed, showing “Crooner Roy Hamilton & Teenage Fans,” who are white girls, showing a school yard in Baltimore with Negro and white children, “the new look in education.” On the back of one of the handbills is a crudely drawn valentine-like heart, and in it the head of a white woman who (with feelings not indicated by the artist) is about to be kissed by a black man of the primitive physiognomy. On the heart two vultures perch. Beneath it is the caption: “The Kiss of Death.”

Below are the “reasons”: “While Russia makes laws to protect her own race she continues to prod us to accept 14,000,000 Negroes as social equals and we are doing everything possible to please her. . . . Segregation is the law of God, not man. . . . Continue to rob the white race in order to bribe the Asiatic and Negro and these people will overwhelm the white race and destroy all progress, religion, invention, art, and return us to the jungle. . . . Negro blood destroyed the civilization of Egypt, India, Phoenicia, Carthage, Greece, and it will destroy America!” 2

Excerpt 3

“Yes, it’s our own fault,” the rich businessman, active in segregation, says. “If we’d ever managed to bring ourselves to what we ought to have done for the Negro, it would be different now, if we’d managed to educate them, get them decent housing, decent jobs.” So I tell him what a Southern Negro professor had said to me. He had said that the future now would be different, would be hopeful, if there could just be “one gesture of graciousness” from the white man—even if the white man didn’t like the Supreme Court Decision, he might try to understand the Negro’s view, not heap insult on him. And the segregationist, who is a gracious man, seizes on the word. “Graciousness,” he says, “that’s it, if we could just have managed some graciousness to the race. Sure, some of us, a lot of us, could manage some graciousness to individual Negroes, some of us were grateful to individuals for being gracious to us. But you know, we couldn’t manage it for the race.” He thinks a moment, then says: “There’s a Negro woman buried in the family burial place. We loved her.” 3

  • 1Robert Penn Warren, Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1956), 26–27.
  • 2Ibid., 24–25.
  • 3Ibid., 56.

How to Cite This Reading

Facing History & Ourselves, “Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South,” last updated May 2, 2022. 

This reading contains text not authored by Facing History & Ourselves. See footnotes for source information.

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