The strongest voices in the South today say that segregation must be kept: Governor James Byrnes in his inaugural was not so intent on expressing his views on foreign policy that he did not assure his listeners of his unaltered opposition to the Fair Deal. Hodding Carter, the liberal mentioned above, is not so liberal that he does not see it as “tragic for the South, the Negro, and the nation itself” if segregation is done away with. And “only a fool,” Lillian Smith quotes from the Atlanta _Constitution_, “would say the Southern pattern of separation of the races can, or should be overthrown.” But if segregation must be kept, it must now be predicated on something else than Negro inferiority.
And what else is there? The cynical ideology of power-worship, what H. A. Overstreet calls “the fight-and-grab image,” the philosophy of hate. It is what Hitler came to. It is the result of a pattern of thinking desperately threatened by science and social change.
I am an integrationist. I have been for a long time. It is not a principle that I arrived at through intellection. Until the past few years, I did not bring to bear on it whatever intelligence I have. I felt my way to it, just as some men, in spite of obstructing experience, feel their way to ideals of honesty, sobriety and continence. Nor was the feeling of my way wholly conscious. It was rather like the action of one who kicks and splashes frantically to save himself from drowning and suddenly finds that he has reached a shelf on which he can stand in the river bed. His objective was not the shelf, but just to be saved. I kicked and splashed in all directions, and suddenly there I was.
I was an integrationist when the Communists camped almost nightly on my trail in the early 1930’s and lighted beckoning bright fires in the frightening dark of that time. I did not believe then (any more than now) that the moment the bars of segregation are lifted all the white women of the South will fall into the arms of Negro mates. Many of my acquaintances gleefully professed to believe this and would just as gleefully declare that Negroes lynched for rape had been only unlucky in being caught with their always-willing white paramours. They found substance for this opinion in both fact and fiction, which too loudly proclaimed the revulsive feeling of the white female for the Negro and the inviolable purity of white womanhood. My acquaintances believed that Southern whites protested too much.