Black Like Me (19 page)

I watched, wondering at the uselessness of the man’s bad manners. Then at a stop, a group of whites walked to the front and behind them a sedately dressed Negro woman in her fifties. I felt
the driver’s dilemma and was amused by it. Should he say “Watch your step, please,” when the statement would be addressed also to the Negro?

“Watch your step, please,” he finally said, opening the doors. The whites stepped down without response, but the Negro lady nodded politely to him and said, “Thank you,” knowing full well his warning had not been meant for her. It was a moment of triumph. She proved herself more courteous than his white passengers and more courteous than he; and she did it without the slightest sarcasm. The subtlety of it escaped the whites on the bus, but it in no way escaped the driver or the Negroes at the back. I heard stifled chuckles of approval from behind me. The driver slammed the doors harder than necessary and lurched the bus forward.

I arrived at the Trappist monastery with its two thousand acres of wood and farmlands and entered the courtyard as the monks were chanting Vespers. Their voices floated to me. A brown-robed Brother led me to a cell on the second floor and informed me supper would be at five.

The contrast was almost too great to be borne. It was a shock, like walking from the dismal swamps into sudden brilliant sunlight. Here all was peace, all silence except for the chanted prayers. Here men know nothing of hatred. They sought to make themselves conform ever more perfectly to God’s will, whereas outside I had seen mostly men who sought to make God’s will conform to their wretched prejudices. Here men sought their center in God, whereas outside they sought it in themselves. The difference was transforming.

We had supper at five - homemade bread, butter, milk, red beans, spinach and a peach.

At six thirty we went into the chapel for the last prayers of the day. I knelt in the chapel balcony, looking down on ninety white-robed monks. When Compline was finished, they turned out most of the lights and chanted the solemn
Salve Regina
so beautifully, so tenderly, we felt the crusts of our lives fall away and we rested in the deep hush of eternity. When the last echoes died to silence the monks filed out. Another day had ended for them.
They went to bed at seven and would get up to begin a new day in the morning at two. The same thing has happened in Trappist monasteries throughout the centuries. I felt the timelessness of it and I remained a long time alone in the darkened chapel - not praying, simply resting in the warmth where all senses are ordered into harmony, where hatred cannot penetrate. After my weeks of travel, when I had seen constantly the rawness of man’s contempt for man, the mere act of resting in this atmosphere was healing.

I went down the hall to take a shower and wash my clothes in the sink. As I returned to my cell, I found a monk, the guest-master, who had come to see if I needed anything. We talked for a time and I explained my research project to him.

“Do Negroes often come here as guests, to spend a few days, Father?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” he said. “Though I don’t suppose many really know about this place.”

“This is the Deep South,” I said. “When you have Negro guests, do you have any trouble with your white guests?”

“No … no … the type of white man who would come to the Trappists - well, he comes here to be in an atmosphere of dedication to God. Such a man would hardly keep one eye on God and the other on the color of his neighbor’s skin.”

We discussed the religiosity of the racists. I told him how often I had heard them invoke God, and then some passage from the Bible, and urge all who might be faltering in their racial prejudice to “Pray, brother, with all your heart before you decide to let them niggers into our schools and cafés.”

The monk laughed. “Didn’t Shakespeare say something about ‘every fool in error can find a passage of Scripture to back him up’? He knew his religious bigots.”

I showed the priest the booklet on racial justice,
For Men of Good Will
, written by the New Orleans priest Robert Guste, in which most of the questions and clichés about the Negro are discounted, particularly that God made the Negro dark as a curse. Father Guste says, “No modern biblical scholar would subscribe to any such theory.”

The monk nodded. I insisted on the point. “Is there anyplace
in the Bible that justifies it - even by a stretch of the imagination, Father?”

“Biblical scholars don’t stretch their imaginations - at least reputable ones don’t,” he said. “Will you wait a moment? I have something you must read.”

He returned almost immediately with the book
Scholasticism and Politics
, by Jacques Maritain.

“Maritain has some profound things to say about the religion of racists,” he said, leafing the book. “You might review this page.” He placed a cardboard marker at the page and handed the book to me.

The monk bowed and left. I listened to the rustle of his thick robes as he walked down the hall in the tremendous silence. I then had a visit from a young college instructor of English - a born Southerner of great breadth of understanding. He told me that his more liberated views of the Negro were in such contradiction to those of his elders, his parents and uncles, that he no longer went home to visit them. We talked until midnight. He invited me to go with him to visit Flannery O’Connor the next day, but I told him that since I had only a few hours, I felt I must spend them in the monastery.

He left. The cell was cold. The Georgia countryside slept outside. Since I would not be getting up at two to begin the day, I decided not to sleep. I felt the steam radiator on my hand. It was without a hint of warmth. The Maritain lay on the cot. I got into bed and opened the page the monk had marked.

Speaking of the religiosity of racists, Maritain observes:

He goes on to say that this kind of religion, which declines wisdom, even though it may call itself Christian, is in reality as anti-Christian
as atheism.

I was startled that the French philosopher could so perfectly characterize the racists of our Southern states. Then I realized that he was describing racists everywhere and from all times - that this is the religious trait of men who twist their minds to consider racial prejudice as a virtue - whether it be a White Citizens Council or Klan member, a Nazi
gauleiter
, a South African white supremacist or merely someone’s aunt who says, “Nobody’s worse than those Italians (or Spaniards, or Englishmen, or Danes, etc.).”

I slept and woke up shouting from the old familiar nightmare of men and women closing in on me, shuffling toward me. I lay there fully dressed under the cell’s bare globe, trembling. I felt myself flush with embarrassment at having disturbed the Trappist silence. Surely monks sleeping in other cells, their bodies exhausted from work in the fields and hours of prayers, heard me and lay awake wondering.

T
his morning
the young professor drove me back to Atlanta. Along the roadside, oaks were spectacularly red against the green of pines. In town I registered at the Georgia Hotel, a luxury hotel, where I was treated with the utmost suspicion and discourtesy. Did the staff have doubts about my “racial purity”? Though I had bags and was well enough dressed, they made me pay in advance and I could not make a phone call without their insisting I come down immediately to the desk and pay the dime. I had never encountered such obtuseness in a first-class hotel, and I told them so, but this only increased their inhospitality. I decided not to stay.

The
Black Star
photographer, Don Rutledge, arrived in his little Renault from Rockvale, Tennessee, around noon. We were to
do a story together on Atlanta’s Negro business and civic leaders, and perhaps some others. I liked him immediately. He is a tall, somewhat skinny young fellow, married and has a child - a gentleman in every way.

T
hree days
of hard work, from morning until late at night. My interview notebooks were filled up, but at night I was too tired to write in my journal and went immediately to bed. We had had the most splendid help and cooperation from such Negro leaders as attorney A.T. Walden, businessman T.M. Alexander, the Reverend Samuel Williams, and the immensely impressive Dr. Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse … also many others.

I had arrived in Atlanta feeling that the situation for the Negro in the South was utterly hopeless - due to the racists’ powerful hold on the purse strings of whites and Negroes alike; and due to the lack of unanimity among the Negroes.

But Atlanta changed my mind. Atlanta has gone far in proving that “the Problem” can be solved and in showing us the way to do it. Though segregation and discrimination still prevail and still work a hardship, great strides have been made - strides that must give hope to every observer of the South.

At least three factors are responsible:

First and most important, the Negroes have united in a common goal and purpose; and Atlanta has more men of leadership quality than any other city in the South - men of high education, long vision and great dynamism.

Second, as one of the leaders, Mr. T.M. Alexander, explained to me, though the State of Georgia has never had an administration sympathetic to the Negro cause, the city of Atlanta has long been favored with an enlightened administration, under the leadership of Mayor William B. Hartsfield.

Third, the city has been blessed by a newspaper,
The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution
, that is not afraid to make a stand for right and justice. Its most noted columnist (and now publisher), Ralph McGill, Pulitzer Prize winner, is significantly referred to as “Rastus” by the White Citizens Councils.

In the South, where most newspapers, even the great metropolitan dailies, have shown themselves shortsighted and uncourageous, or - worse - have propagandized as though they were organs of the Councils and Klans, the importance of those newspapers that live up to their journalistic responsibilities cannot be sufficiently emphasized. A handful of the latter, headed by such men as Mark Ethridge, Hodding Carter, Easton King, Harry Golden, P.D. East and Ralph McGill, plus a few others, have stood up for the freedoms of all men.

McGill and his colleagues gamble their fortunes and their reputations on the proposition that it is journalism’s sacred trust to find and publish the truth and that the majority, if properly informed, will act for the good of the community and the country. The great danger in the South comes precisely from the fact that the public is not informed. Newspapers shirk notoriously their editorial responsibilities and print what they think their readers want. They lean with the prevailing winds and employ every fallacy of logic in order to editorialize harmoniously with popular prejudices. They also keep a close eye on possible economic reprisals from the Councils and the Klans, plus other superpatriotic groups who bring pressure to bear on the newspapers’ advertisers. In addition, most adhere to the long-standing conspiracy of silence about anything remotely favorable to the Negro. His achievements are carefully excluded or, when they demand attention, are handled with the greatest care to avoid the impression that anything good the individual Negro does is typical of his race.

We spent our time, significantly, between the three-block section on Auburn Street where Negro financing and industry controls some eighty million dollars, and the section of the six Negro colleges. A close parallel exists between the two, for most of the business leaders are connected with the schools of higher learning, either as teachers or directors. In addition, all of these men are religious leaders in the community. As Alexander stated:
“If we know anything, it is that if virtues do not equal powers, the powers will be misused.”

About twenty-five years ago two men came to Atlanta to teach in the university system. Both were economists. They found Atlanta a thriving intellectual center for the Negro. In the slave years any attempt at literacy among Negroes was severely punished. In some communities a Negro’s right hand was mutilated if he learned to read and write. The Negro therefore prized education as the only doorway into the world of knowledge and dignity to which he aspired. The climate was right to begin a program that would lead them to economic respectability. L.D. Milton and J.B. Blayton, the two economists, recognized that so long as the Negro had to depend on white banks to finance his projects for improvement and growth, he was at the mercy of the white man. They recognized that economic emancipation was the key to the racial solution. So long as the race had to depend on a basically hostile source of financing, it would not advance, since the source would simply refuse loans for any project that did not meet with its approval.

These two men said in essence: “Let everyone in the community pool what little resources he has with others.” By uniting the small power of small sums, by skillfully manipulating it, they could achieve a consolidated financial power. This action resulted in the founding of two banks in Atlanta. Recently, I discovered, an instance arose where the Negro leaders used their economic leverage in a typical manner. It became necessary for the Negro community to expand its physical limits. An area of white residences served as a bottleneck. The housing committee met and Negroes and whites alike agreed to have Negroes purchase this block of homes. The white lending agencies, however, refused to make the loans. As usual the Negro leaders called a meeting to discuss what might be done. They agreed to set aside a large sum of money from which applicants could make loans to buy these houses. After such loans were made, the white lending agencies called and said: “Don’t take all that business away from us. How about letting us handle a few of those loans?” Business that had been refused a few days previously was now welcomed.