
          Black and White and Rosy.
          Reviewed by Bussey, Charles J.Charles J. Bussey
          Vol. 12, No. 4, 1990, pp. 17-18
          
          Black, White, and Southern:
Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present by
David R Goldfield (Baton Rogue: Louisiana State University Press,
1990. xviii, pp. 321.)
          The American South reminds me of ancient Sparta. Both were
entrapped by their past, by their fear of change, and by their using
every means at their disposal to keep outside ideas and people
away. The charge "outside agitator" was prevalent in Sparta, as it was
in the American South. David Goldfield's book, Black, White and
Southern, reinforces this analogy.
          "Appearances are important in the South," writes Goldfield,
"and white Southerners have a great capacity for ignoring
unpleasant things.... But at some point it is no longer possible to
pretend." Goldfield has written a book using religious
metaphors. "It is," as he says in his preface, ". . .a book
about redemption, a Southern story that begins by defining the sin of
white_supremacy and how it poisoned a region and its people; it
continues by relating how that sin came to be expiated, and how the
sinner and the redeemer managed to be transformed without destroying
their unique land, the South.... "
          Goldfield's analysis of "racial etiquette" is provocative, and I
think correct in the conclusion that it "was, above all, a system of
control." Southern racial etiquette bolstered the notion of white
supremacy and strengthened the concept of black inferiority. By
treating blacks as less than human, white Southerners turned the
American Dream upside down. Blacks got their small rewards when they
lived down to low expectations, were punished when they attempted to
secure an education or to develop landowning ambitions. Loud protests
to the contrary, white Southerners like my Mississippi family never
knew or understood their black neighbors.
          In fact, they only rarely saw them. William Alexander Percy
understood that, and wrote in 1941 "that whites and blacks live
side by side, exchange affection liberally, and believe they have an
innate and miraculous understanding of one another. But the sober fact
is we understand one another not at all." The Mississippi Delta
aristocrat was right, but was as trapped as the rest of the white
South and could take no action.
          Goldfield is especially articulate and convincing in 

analyzing
change in the South. He argues persuasively that change had to come
from outside the region. There was too much accommodation within, even
from white Southern liberals, for change to have occurred unaided
inside the region. "White Southern liberals," he said, "were
not only marginal to the process of change, but in some cases actually
inhibited it; and the intrusion of the outside world did not set back
the cause of racial equality but, to the contrary, enhanced its
chances for success."
          One thing particularly disturbing to me, a white Southerner, was
the "respectable resistance" movement led by white intellectuals and
members of the aristocracy. A key figure in resisting the 1954 Brown
decision to integrate the school was James Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick,
today a respected conservative and syndicated columnist, wrote
editorial after editorial in the 1950s and early 1960s in support of
the dual school system, offering arcane arguments to support an
anachronistic way of life.
          Although this is not a history of the civil_rights movement,
Goldfield provides an adequate account of that era. But though he
emphasizes the role of school desegregation in bringing change to the
South, he fails to mention the role of Head Start. From the beginning,
key administrators of that most successful of the "Great Society"
programs viewed Head Start as a tool for integration. Julius Richmond,
the first Director of Project Head Start, said that Head Start began
"with a very conscious determination...to...develop integrated
programs." Although not always successful, Richmond said, Head
Start at least "highlighted the issue, and we kept working toward
this and communities kept learning that we were serious about
this."
          Goldfield is not very convincing in his argument that Southern
mores have shifted regarding race. He believes that "the debate
over black poverty has shifted from race to class issues.... " And
that "for the crusade against economic injustice, Southern blacks
and whites are likely to be partners."
          There is considerable evidence that race remains vitally important
as a Southern dynamic and as an inhibiting factor in the fight against
poverty. Likewise, there is a significant debate going on right now
concerning the effect integration has had on improving the quality of
life for blacks in both the North and the South. The July 1990 issue
of Sojourners magazine, for example, is devoted to that very question;
one of the authors argues, for example, that integration was co-opted
by whites. Goldfield is, I think, more optimistic than current
circumstances warrant. His desire, along with mine, is that black and
white together can descend from "the mountaintops of hope" to "the
green valleys of complete equality and justice." That, however,
remains a dream, not a foreseeable reality.
          Nonetheless, Goldfield's book is an important contribution for
people who seek to understand being black, white and southern. His
bibliographical essay is thorough and provides a key starting point
for any reader.
          
            Originally from Mississippi, Charles Bussey now  is on
the History faculty of Western Kentucky University. He is  researching
the life and work of Julius Richmond, the  architect and first
director of Head Start.
          
        
