The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 

March 26, 2006 Sunday

Main Edition

 

SECTION: @ISSUE; Pg. 1B

 

HEADLINE: EYE ON HISTORY: South's past may have no future

 

BODY:

 

Jimmy Carter turned his famous high-beams on the small crowd, which was dense with academics.

 

"When I heard that this was devoted to the end of Southern history, I thought I'd better get over here before it happened," the former president joked. "And also before most of you lose your jobs."

 

He spoke to historians assembled at Emory University for a two-day conference called "The End of Southern History?" After assuring the eminent group that "I know more about Southern history than you do," Carter, 81, set about describing his South, the one where he grew up with black children as his best friends, the South that sent him into politics and propelled him to the White House.

 

"I grew up during the Great Depression years," he said. "I lived in a little community called Archery. All my neighbors were black. I had no white neighbors. So I ate and worked and played and fought and wrestled and went fishing with my black neighbors.

 

He described going to the movies with a friend.

 

"We'd get on the train, I would go to the white part, he would go to the colored part. We'd ride to Americus, Georgia, get off the train and walk down the street, hand in hand, to the local theater and buy tickets. I would buy mine in the front of the theater. He would go out in the back and buy his. I would sit in the mezzanine. He would sit on the third floor. After we saw the film, we'd walk down the street, hand in hand, get on the train separately and go back to Archery."

 

Inside, read what a new wave of historians is making of Carter's South. Page C3

 

GRAPHIC: Photo: RICHARD HALICKS / Staff"I know more about Southern history than you do," Jimmy Carter told historians.

 

 

SECTION: @ISSUE; Pg. 3B

 

HEADLINE: The South returns to America: In North, 'massive white backlash'

 

BYLINE: RICHARD HALICKS

 

BODY:

 

Historians are telling another story of the postwar South --- long the nation's stepchild. They say that the region, deeply troubled as it was, was simply part of a deeply troubled nation.

 

Matt Lassiter (right), an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan, grew up in Sandy Springs --- "on the John Lewis side of the John Lewis / Newt Gingrich border."

 

Lassiter and Joe Crespino, assistant professor of history at Emory, organized the two-day conference at Emory, "The End of Southern History?" which featured lectures and comment from nearly 20 historians from across the country.

 

In Lassiter's lecture, "De Facto / De Jure Segregation: The Strange Career of a National Myth," he talked about the nature of segregation in the North and West in post-1945 America. Lassiter sought to show how segregation in the South --- enshrined as it was in the law --- and segregation in the North and West were simply different brands of the same evil. The "North" (which has come to mean anyplace outside the South) didn't adopt legal segregation, but neighborhoods and homes were nonetheless often as segregated as those in the South. Some excerpts:

 

Racial discrimination in the Jim Crow South represented segregation in law --- de jure. Racial discrimination in residential and education patterns in the North and West reflected segregation in fact, but not enforced by law --- de facto. . . .

 

Very few Americans today know that two months before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the 1963 March on Washington, he tested an early version of the speech in downtown Detroit. . . . "We must come to see" [King said] "that de facto segregation in the North is no less injurious than actual segregation in the South. . . ."

 

The New York Times ran an expose in 1956 and it summarized the consensus that racism was a psychological problem located within the white liberal conscience --- following Gunnar Myrdal's indictment --- not a structural product of public policies. The Times said, "Many Negroes and some whites feel that resistance to real integration in private housing in the North is as stubbornly rooted as the resistance to integrated schooling in the South. The final solution to the problem of segregation in the North lies in the hearts and minds of people."

 

The courts in the early 1960s began to draw a clear constitutional distinction between illegal de jure segregation that resulted from deliberate state action and permissible de facto segregation that encompassed anything and everything else. The NAACP forced this issue with an orchestrated campaign against public school segregation in dozens of Northern and Western communities, part of what the organization called an "all-out attack against Jim Crow schools, Northern style."

 

An early victory came in New Rochelle, a Westchester County suburb of New York City, after the NAACP demonstrated that the school district had repeatedly gerrymandered and re-gerrymandered attendance zones to maintain an all-black elementary school. The district court ruled: "Compliance with the Supreme Court's edict [Brown v. Board of Education] is not to be less forthright in the North than in the South. It doesn't matter whether the segregation is labeled by the defendant de jure or de facto, as long as the school board by its conduct is responsible for its maintenance."

 

During 1963-64, as the nonviolent direct-action movement reached a climax in the Deep South, civil rights activists launched a wave of marches and boycotts to protest de facto segregation in dozens of Northern and Western cities, including Boston, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles and more. This chapter of history, before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, before the riots in Watts and Detroit, before the media discovered black power, has all but disappeared from the standard narrative of the civil rights era.

 

In New York City, a series of integration demonstrations culminated in 1964 in the largest single civil rights demonstration in American history; a one-day boycott by more than 300,000 African-American and Puerto Rican students. . . . A few months later, a commission appointed by the New York City school system said total desegregation of schools is simply not attainable in New York City in the foreseeable future and nothing can change that fact. . . .

 

On Sept. 14, 1964, Mississippi became the last Southern state to undergo public school desegregation when 39 black students entered formerly all-white elementary schools in Jackson. The news did not make the front page of The New York Times because of a boycott of modest desegregation techniques in New York City by more than 275,000 white students. This massive white backlash came in response to a voluntary one-way desegregation plan that civil rights activists denounced as Southern-style gradualism and tokenism.

 

By the mid-1960s this growing estrangement between liberal policy-makers and civil rights leaders and activists exposed a hard truth: that a national consensus for racial integration had never existed beyond the difficult-enough struggle to assemble the political will to intervene against the worst excesses of Jim Crow in the South.

 

In 1964, when the U.S. Congress finally broke the Southern filibuster and passed the Civil Rights Act, liberal sponsors had to openly exempt Northern and Western localities with the assurance that "desegregation does not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance." And hypocrisy charges by Southern politicians abounded.

 

 

GRAPHIC: Photo: Associated Press. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (center, foreground) walks in the vanguard of a crowd estimated at more than 10,000 persons who gathered in Chicago in July 1965 to protest school segregation.

Photo: Matt Lassiter is an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan.

Photo: Associated PressPolice officers break up a scuffle between demonstrators outside South Boston High School. A court-ordered busing program to integrate public schools had just begun.

 

 

SECTION: @ISSUE; Pg. 3B

 

HEADLINE: The South returns to America: MORE COMMENTS

 

BODY:

 

"There are no longer any more of these kinds of structural differences [slavery, Jim Crow, school segregation] between North and South. And yet there's still this real sense that the South is somehow a place apart. . . . What we're suggesting in this conference is that, as many differences as there have been throughout history between the South and other parts of the nation, there are also important similarities. By only focusing on differences, you obscure important connections between the South and the rest of the nation."

 

--- Joe Crespino, assistant professor of history at Emory University and author of the forthcoming "In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution" (spring 2007)

 

"The last Southern president elected was Zachary Taylor, 126 years earlier. You can't imagine, young people like you, how deep was the prejudice in the rest of the nation against the South. We were stigmatized, despite William Faulkner, as illiterate, and incompetent, and backward and racist."

 

--- Jimmy Carter, talking about his run for the presidency in 1976

 

"Where I grew up, in Sandy Springs, right outside Atlanta, I had no sense of a Southern identity. Most of my friends were from --- their fathers were from the Midwest. If you had asked me about race, I would have talked about Mississippi. Growing up, I thought Mississippi was the place with the racial problems, not Atlanta. Atlanta was the new South."

 

--- Matt Lassiter, associate professor of history, University of Michigan, and author of "The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South"

 

"Mayor [Richard] Daly forced Adlai Stevenson Jr. to introduce me, which he did very reluctantly. He gave me one of the worst introductions I've ever had in my life. I was really --- everybody in the hall looked embarrassed when Adlai got through ostensibly introducing me. And I got up and I didn't know what to say. I said, 'Adlai, I don't appreciate what you just said. But when your father ran against Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, he didn't carry Illinois --- his home state --- but he carried Georgia. And when he ran four years later, in 1956, he didn't carry Illinois. But he carried Georgia.' And I think that was a reminder to people that we were one nation and that we looked with favor on each other, regardless of geography."

 

--- Jimmy Carter on his Illinois primary victory over Stevenson

 

GRAPHIC: Photo: File. Jimmy Carter says he encountered prejudice toward the South during his first presidential campaign in 1976.

 

LOAD-DATE: March 26, 2006