In Love with Defeat. H. Brandt Ayers

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СКАЧАТЬ the 1901 Alabama Constitution, which banished blacks and eliminated as many poor whites as possible through a cumulative poll tax.

      Once set in motion, historical inertia holds fast and steady, rolling through the decades. Alabama fought integration with bombs, blood and frenzy, while its “better” class preserved its favored tax status in the Constitution and cowed the white majority with fear of property taxes and hints of black domination. History bred into too many Alabamians a bitter resignation that says: “Our lousy schools were good enough for me and my kids. I don’t want none of your progress, race-mixin’, taxes and home rule. I’m all right, just don’t mess with me.” In North Carolina, by contrast, forward historical forces prepared Carolina to build the wealth-fountain that is Research Triangle Park, for peaceful integration, and a consolidated university system with top-ranked research programs.

      All that would become clear to me in time. But the gubernatorial campaign going on when I arrived had all the elements of a traditional no-party election of that time, the only question being which one of the segregationist candidates was the better man—whether conservatives or progressives would govern. Those were the two wings of the Democratic Party, the arena and the contrasting ideologies, which would have divided the two parties, if there had been a competitive Republican Party. The first primary was a culling process, which discarded the lesser candidates and chose the two prime contenders for governor.

      It would become apparent to me in later years that a far bigger story was going on than the traditional cleavages within the all-segregationist, all-Democratic South. That was the story of progressive Southern governors channeling the churning white waters of racial turmoil into pools of relative peace. The state was also finding ways to accelerate the waves of economic growth that had been unleashed in the South by, among other causes, the end of discriminatory freight rates in 1952. That was the story of Luther Hodges and Terry Sanford who stood at the head of an invisible line of progressive Tarheel governors stretching back to 1900 and before, and who became my models for judging political leaders in Alabama and the rest of the South.

      This 1960 runoff election was taking place just six years after Brown v. Board of Education—that first rumbling edge of the approaching civil rights storms. North Carolina had developed a political culture that provided some sanctuary from the storm fronts. The march of progressive education governors included Charles Brantley Aycock in 1900; the more conservative, J. C. B. Ehringhaus in 1932; and the populist-progressive, W. Kerr Scott, in 1948. It would certainly have to include Luther Hodges, who saved the public school system in the immediate aftermath of the Brown decision and Terry Sanford, who blunted race as a political issue and rationalized the state’s higher education system.

      Sanford was to be part of the North Carolina continuum of education governors. Ironically, his runoff opponent was himself an educator, a racist with a Phi Beta Kappa key, Dr. I. Beverly Lake. Dr. Lake was no shirttail demagogue. He was Harvard-trained, had studied utility law at Columbia, won a reputation as a consumer advocate as a state assistant attorney general, and had taught law at Wake Forest College. In short, he was a bigot with refinement. Dr. Lake would have been an ideal candidate for Alabama, reminiscent of former Alabama Governor Frank Dixon, east coast-educated, with the dignified good looks of a Methodist bishop. Governor Dixon gave a fighting keynote address at the Democratic breakaway “Dixiecrat” Convention in 1948, damning the Democratic Party and asserting that the States’ Rights movement would defend “against those who would destroy our civilization and mongrelize our people.” Later, Governor Dixon muted the racial themes, putting a high-minded gloss on the Dixiecrat movement in order to attract allies from outside the South. In private correspondence, he was more candid, lamenting that “the Huns have wrecked the theories of the master race with which we were so contented so long” and referring to blacks as “apes” and “gorillas.”

      The flame of demagoguery, which would roar to life in the flammable Alabama atmosphere, was banked by the determined common sense of North Carolina leaders. Within weeks of the May 1954 Brown decision, a mortally ill Governor William B. Umstead had appointed a commission to study the state’s response, headed by a distinguished former North Carolina Speaker of the House, Thomas J. Pearsall. Before the year was out, Governor Umstead had died and was succeeded by the lieutenant governor, Luther Hodges, a former textile executive and Marshall Plan administrator in Germany. Hodges retained the Pearsall commission, which by December reported a plan to transfer pupil assignment from the State Board of Education to city and county boards. It was a local-choice solution, which did not defy the Supreme Court, made it possible for enlightened systems to gradually integrate—or to mount legal resistance—without locking the entire state in one immobilizing court order.

      While North Carolina was adopting the Pearsall Plan and reelecting Governor Hodges in 1956, Alabama was adding Amendment 111 to its constitution, which exempted the state from the responsibility for educating its children. The amendment was described clearly as segregationist in newspaper articles at the time. “This is the intent and purpose of this amendment. (It) will prevent any child in Alabama being compelled by Alabama law to attend a mixed school,” said F. E. Lund, then the president of Alabama College at Montevallo, in an August 25, 1956, story in the Montgomery Advertiser. In the same story, former State Superintendent of Education W. J. Terry said passage of the amendment was needed so “we can make sure that Alabama’s public school system will continue to function in every county of our state on the segregated basis which has always been maintained.” The amendment was recommended by a legislative committee established in 1953 to study ways to maintain school segregation. In an August 26, 1956, article in the Advertiser, state Senator Albert Boutwell of Jefferson County said the amendment would allow the legislature to abolish a public school system to avoid a court order to integrate a school. Another article quoted then-Lieutenant Governor Guy Hardwick as saying the amendment gave the people of Alabama an opportunity to answer the U.S. Supreme Court and “the radicals of the north.”

      North Carolina’s Pearsall plan finally approved by voters in 1956 was chameleon-hued. It provided comfort for segregationists and realists alike, but its very centrist sensibility put Hodges in no-man’s-land between hostile extremes—outspoken racists such as Beverly Lake and liberals such as Jonathan Daniels at the News and Observer. The most ungovernable rhetoric came from Lake, who fumed all the way through an integrated meeting on the Pearsall plan called by the governor, and seemed to regard the NAACP as a personal affront. A few days after the meeting, Lake told the Asheboro Lions Club: “We shall fight the NAACP county by county, city by city, and if need be school by school and classroom by classroom to preserve our public schools as long as possible, while organizing and establishing other methods of educating our children.”

      It was the language of “Massive Resistance” preached by the courtly scion of the Virginia political machine, the gentleman farmer, newspaper publisher, and U. S. Senator Harry F. Byrd Jr. It was the bitter-end resistance that would be waged by the handsome young Alabama governor John Patterson, a year after North Carolina adopted its moderate Pearsall Plan. In his 1958 campaign, Patterson courted the Ku Klux Klan and won its formal endorsement in his victory over a then-statesmanlike George Wallace. On election night Wallace pledged to intimates that he would “never be out-nigguhed again,” and he wasn’t. Patterson, soon after his election, assembled constitutional lawyers who advised a campaign of delaying tactics—a chief element of which was to drive the NAACP underground.

      Alabama and North Carolina presented a duel between reason and emotion: a thoughtfully articulated vision opposed to a clutch of inarticulate feelings—resentment, insecurity, and anger. Alabama’s constant harangues against the government of the United States and hysterical posturing in opposition to its laws would infect the state with a kind of psychosis. This verbal Niagara of fear seemed consciously designed to create mass dementia: A belief that our nation’s government was malevolent, infected by alien ideology bent on crushing long-held values, forcing obedience to unnatural associations and patterns of daily life. Molded by such behavior and speech, the minds of too many Alabamians were conditioned to believe they were doomed to a perpetual Pickett’s charge against a hated enemy, and forever fated to be crushed СКАЧАТЬ