The Zinn Reader (3 page)

Physical difference is so gross a stimulus to human beings, cursed as they are by the gift of vision, that once it is latched onto as explanation for difference in personality, intelligence, demeanor, it is terribly difficult to put aside. It becomes an easy substitute for the immensely difficult job of explaining personal and social behavior. Conservatives use it openly; liberals secretly, even unknowingly. It seems to be the hardest thing in the world to convince ourselves that once we've noted skin color, facial features and hair texture, we have exhausted the subject of race—that everything beyond that is in our heads, put there by others and kept there by ourselves, and all the brutal material consequences of centuries, from lynching to patronizing friendship, were spun from an original thread of falsehood.

The most vicious thing about segregation—more deadly than its immediate denial of certain goods and services—is its perpetuation of the mystery of racial difference. Because there is a magical and omnipotent dispeller of the mystery; it is
contact.
Contact—but it must be massive, unlike those "integrated" situations in the North, and it must be equal, thus excluding maid-lady relationships of the South—destroys the manmade link between physical difference and behavior explanation. Race consciousness is hollow, its formidable-looking exterior is membrane-thin and is worn away by simple acts of touch, the touching of human beings in contact that is massive, equal and prolonged. The brightness of the physical difference impression is relative; it stands out in that darkness created by segregated living, and is quickly lost in the galaxy of sense impressions that come from being with a person day-in, day-out.

In our country, the kind of contact that rubs away race consciousness is possible only in rare places, and intermittently. But it exists, in scattered underground pockets of resistance to the norm. One of them is the Negro college, where white people can become so immersed in a Negro environment that they are oblivious, at least temporarily, of race. The fact that they live on an island, against which waves of prejudice roll from time to time, means that they slide back and forth from over-consciousness on some days to a blissful racial amnesia on others.

A white student, after several months living, eating, studying, playing in a totally Negro college environment, visited a nearby white college and returned saying, "How pallid they all seemed—all those white faces and sharp noses!" This is a startling example of race consciousness in reverse, but it is encouraging to see how quickly one can change the temper of racial awareness by an inundation of sense experiences.

Once the superficiality of the physical is penetrated and seen for what it is, the puzzle of race loses itself in whatever puzzle there is to human behavior in general. Once you begin to look, in human clash, for explanations other than race, they suddenly become visible, and even where they remain out of sight, it is comforting to know that these nonracial explanations exist, as disease began to lose its eeriness with the discovery of bacteria, although the specific problem of identifying each bacterial group remained.

So long as evil exists—and it exists in poisonous heaps, South and North—the raw material for mystery is here. We can make the most—if we want to—of white mobs in Oxford, mass Negro indignation in Albany, blazing churches in Birmingham, gunfire on rural porches, and the sheer wonder of blackness and whiteness. But the specialness of the Southern mystique vanishes when one sees that whites and Negroes behave only like human beings, that the South is but a distorted mirror image of the North, and that we are powerful enough today, and free enough—to retain only as much of the past as we want. We are all magicians. We created the mystery of the South, and we can dissolve it.

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The history of that time usually records the dramatic moments—the Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the marches in Birmingham. What is often omitted is what happened more quietly in between the great events, and it is one of those historical moments I wanted to record in this piece, which appeared in the NAACP publication The Crisis in October of 1959. I was the faculty adviser to Spelman College's Social Science Club, which undertook as a project the desegregation of the Atlanta public libraries. I appear in this piece anonymously as "a representative of Spelman's Social Science Club."

On the afternoon of May 22, 1959, Dr. Irene Dobbs Jackson, a professor of French at Spelman College, accompanied by a young white faculty wife from Spelman, walked through the electrically operated door of the marbled and modern Carnegie Library in downtown Atlanta, went to the front desk, and filled out a membership application. She turned it in, and the slim girl behind the desk handed her a new membership card. The girl's voice was calm, but her hand trembled slightly, perhaps because Dr. Jackson was the first Negro ever to receive a membership card at a "white" library in Atlanta.

At the same moment, on the second floor of the library, violinist and music professor Earl Sanders, a bespectacled, dark-skinned young man, whose outbursts of good humor were a counterpoint to a powerful indignation, was thumbing through stacks of records to find some chamber music he wanted. Exactly three weeks before, while looking at records in the same room, he had been asked to leave. Now, as he approached the check-out desk, the attractive girl sitting there noted his selections with a friendly smile, and he walked out.

The desegregation of the public library system in the city of Atlanta took place quietly. Not until after the fact did the newspapers announce to the community that the main library and its fourteen branches, formerly reserved for whites, were now open to all. Atlanta Negroes, as word spread slowly among them, were surprised and gratified. There had been no lawsuit, no headlines, no violence. To explain the event, we need to examine a number of intertwining threads which knotted together in May of 1959, and which when unraveled, afford a glimpse into the subsurface mechanics of peaceful, purposeful social change.

A handful of Spelman students and faculty members, conscious of the unplanned and violent cataclysms that have shaken the world in this century, had been talking about the idea of deliberate social change. In a seminar on the philosophy of history, we explored two approaches which have dominated intellectual speculation: first, the notion that some great force, inscrutable like God, or ascertainable like economic necessity, is working behind the scenes of the human drama; and second, the more recent empiricist attempt to attack problems piecemeal by scientific scrutiny of individual phenomena rather than by insight into some universal explanation. We found ourselves critical of both these approaches, because they implied a passivity on the part of the intellectual, whose eye was at the telescope or the microscope but whose hands were rather idle.

More provocative than these ideas was one expressed by Charles Frankel in
The Case for Modern Man:
man is not a feeble creature pecking with a tackhammer at an impenetrable steel fence, but a free and mighty agent who, while studying the determinants of social change, can become a chief determinant himself. The potency of this idea actually has already affected some of the traditional schools of thought: the church fosters more and more activists for social reform; and the Marxists have shifted the emphasis from "inevitability" and the strength of "material forces" to the will and power of the Communist Party. Perhaps the atomsplitting of scientists has invested both communists and clerics with a new sense of command.

In our discussions at Spelman we played with the notion that man can coolly and deliberately locate a particular problem, survey the forces standing in the way of a solution, and either skillfully navigate around obstacles or, when the balance of power is just right, bowl them over. Translated into action and applied on a very modest scale, this kind of thinking played a part in the peaceful desegregation of the Atlanta public-library system, which opened to 150,000 Negroes of that city a wealth of books, paintings, and recorded music.

My students were at that time feeling uncomfortable about confining their studies to books while the South was being shaken by ideological and political upheaval. Why not select, out of the mass of events in the integration crisis, a limited field of combat where the enemy was weak and the possibility of gaining allies strong, and set out deliberately to occupy a tiny bit of territory? Why not plan and carry through to victory a minor skirmish in the big battle, through purposeful and rational action? The tactics, not quite customary for young women from a decorous and conservative Negro college, were to be those of guerilla warfare.

The library system was singled out for attention because it was a situation small enough to be handled by our little group, yet significant in its importance for the entire community. The relationship of forces seemed favorable. Atlanta's city administration, which supervised the libraries, had been showing more flexibility as it watched the growing Negro vote. The policy of separate libraries was not written into law; it was simply an administrative rule of the library's Board of Trustees, and it could be changed by action of the Board, on which the Mayor was an important influence. At that time, various groups, particularly the interracial American Veterans Committee, had tried to get the Mayor to act.

Not the least of the factors we considered was that action to desegregate the Atlanta library system represented a genuine need of students and faculty in the Atlanta University Center and of the city's Negro community. Of the three city libraries built especially for Negroes, one was a newly erected showplace, part of the post-war rash of attempts to introduce a bit more equality into the "separate-but-equal" premise of Southern life. But the Carnegie Library had no match in the Negro community. Built in downtown Atlanta some thirty years before, it housed an impressive collection of books in all categories, as well as paintings and recordings, which were available for loan. The "for whites only" label on the world's great literature was not only a moral challenge but a practical obstacle to learning.

As a first step, it was decided that students and Negro faculty, heretofore reluctant in the face of certain rejection, should begin visiting the Carnegie Library whenever they needed books unavailable elsewhere. They expected to be rebuffed. But the visits would continue. So, the advance guard of the gradually increasing stream of Negro visitors began passing through the electric-eye entrance to the Carnegie Library. It was accidental irony that the first book sought in this campaign was John Locke's
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
The Spelman student who requested this was given the same treatment that subsequent Negro visitors were to receive: a courteous query as to whether the Negro branch had been tried, and then assurance that the book would be sent to the Negro branch and made available there. When a student said the book was needed immediately, she was told it could be studied right there in the library, in a special room downstairs, or in the office behind the main desk—anywhere, so long as there would be no contact with the white patrons.

Here was a typical Southern paradox: across the street from the library, in one of Atlanta's leading department stores, Negroes and whites could brush by each other at the counters, try on the same clothes, and, thanks to the irresistable impetus of the profit motive, be treated as nearequals. But nonsense has been uttered with aplomb for a long time in the South, and no one proved better at it than degree-encrusted library officials. Spelman and Morehouse College students visiting the Carnegie Library accepted whatever service was offered them, and left. Their purpose was simply to make the library aware that Negroes were in need of its facilities.

The Atlanta Council on Human Relations, meanwhile, had been working on the problem. This newly formed inter-racial group was headed by a white Unitarian minister, Edward Cahill, and the dynamic Whitney Young, then Dean of the Atlanta University School of Social Work. They began a sixteen-month campaign of persistent effort to convince the Library Board of Trustees, through detailed research and rational argument, that Atlanta libraries should be open to all. They collected statistics, made special maps, and referred the Library Director pointedly to the American Library Association's Bill of Rights, which says that "as a responsibility of Library service there should be no discrimination based on race or nationality." The Library Board remained unmoved, and the Council on Human Relations wearily announced this fact in February of 1959: "The Council urges all groups and individuals in the city to take such action as they deem appropriate to persuade the Library Board to desegregate the tax-supported facilities of the public library system."

With this, Spelman and Morehouse College students stepped up their visits to the Carnegie Library. In March, I paid a visit to the Director of the Atlanta Library systems, to probe the prospects for desegregation. He was discouraging. Of course, he assured me, the policy was not his desire, but a rule upheld by the Board which he was bound to enforce. No, he could not take the initiative in making a change. If Negroes began to use the library there would probably be violence. If this was his fear, I suggested, why not desegregate quietly, since there would otherwise be a lawsuit and the change would come anyway, with more publicity.

In the event of a court order to desegregate, the Director said matter-of-factly, he would close the libraries, as Governor Faubus had closed schools in Little Rock, to prevent violence. Surely, I said, white people who use your library would not riot over the use of the library by a few Negroes. You don't know these folks, he replied. The interview was over.

The library director's argument was the same one advanced so often in the South on the eve of change: there will be trouble. But in 90 percent of the cases where desegregation had already taken place in the South (though one would never know this from reading newspaper headlines), there had been no violent reaction at all, only quiet if grudging acceptance. And although there is never any way of guaranteeing an absence of trouble, the probabilities in a case like this were on the side of peaceful change. We proceeded therefore to prepare a suit in federal court, and Whitney Young and I took the responsibility for getting plaintiffs, money, and legal help.

Just a few months earlier, the federal courts in Atlanta had given two favorable decisions, one desegregating the city's transit system, the other barring discrimination on grounds of race in the admissions policy of the University of Georgia. Several years before, a lawsuit had forced the municipal golf courses at Atlanta to admit Negroes. And in one Virginia county the mere threat of a lawsuit had opened up libraries to Negroes.

Our first job was to find plaintiffs, and this was not easy. A number of students were anxious to file suit, but they were discouraged by the complications of obtaining parental consent and of meeting other technical requirements, such as residence. Many Negroes were subject to economic reprisal if they dared participate in court action. I began to appreciate the work of the NAACP in handling lawsuits when I saw how difficult it was to get plaintiffs, something I had always assumed was no problem. But finally, two people came forward.

One was a young minister named Otis Moss, who was doing advanced study in theology and had often suffered from the inadequacy of the library facilities available to him. Moss's wife was a student in my American History course, articulate and intelligent. Moss himself, slim and very quiet, hardly seemed a social activist. (I began to make out the depth of the man only a year later at a mass protest meeting in Atlanta when the apparently shy Reverend Moss lifted the crowd to a state of high emotion with a magnificent speech.)

The other plaintiff was Irene Dobbs Jackson, Professor of French at Spelman College, a friend and colleague, who said quietly as we sat having coffee in the Snack Shop on the campus, "It's what my husband would be doing if he were alive." Irene Jackson's rock-like strength had been put to its most severe test when her husband, a prominent Atlanta minister, died, leaving her with six growing children. She continued their education somehow, took four of them to France with her, where she studied for several years and received her doctorate at the University of Toulouse. Dr. Jackson came from a well-known Atlanta family. Her sister, Mattiwilda Dobbs, a Spelman college graduate, became famous because she was the first Negro to sing a starring role with the Metropolitan Opera company. Her father, John Wesley Dobbs, was one of Atlanta's most distinguished citizens, a militant battler for equal rights and a great orator in the old Southern tradition. I heard him keep a crowd of thousands in an uproar one night at the Wheat Street Baptist Church. "My Mattiwilda was asked to sing here in Atlanta," he thundered at one point, "but she said, 'No sir! Not while my daddy has to sit in the balcony!'" Irene Dobbs Jackson told me: "Why, I've passed by the Carnegie Library a hundred times, and always wanted to go in. I think it's time."

Student visits to the Carnegie Library were now stepped up. City officials were apparently becoming uneasy, because a high municipal officeholder telephoned an Atlanta University administrator to plead that legal action be held up until the adjournment of the state legislature, which was in constant battle with the city administration.

What happened shortly after this, on May 19, 1959, I will quote from the notes I made on that day: