Confederate "Heritage" Month 2002, April 2: A 1946 polemic against Southern segregation and Jim Crow laws

A Southern writer and human rights activist named Stetson Kennedy did an informative and impassionate polemic in 1946 against the white supremacist system in the American South, Southern Exposure. He wasn't writing "critical race theory" - even the academic term wouldn't be invented for decades yet. But he was very critical of the racial discrimination and the oppressive system based on it in the former Confederacy.

But today's Republicans would surely consider him a Mean Librul practitioner of "cancel culture." Because: "Stetson Kennedy’s “Frown Power” campaign of the 1940s and 1950s was an effort to address racism in a network fashion. To combat everyday racism, Kennedy encouraged anti-racist whites to respond to racist remarks simply by frowning." (Perhaps a revolution is not what we need by Henry Civic Media 10/06/2010; my emphasis)

OMG! He encouraged people to frown at racist comments! Didn't he respect the free speech rights of blithering white bigots? These intolerant liberals are such hypocrites!!

But Kennedy was by no means focused only or even primarily on manners. He was blunt about the extent of white racism in the United States and the former Confederate states. Citing the results of a survey done by Negro Digest [later Black World] in 1945 and writes:

The fact that 61 per cent of the Southern respondents agreed that all men are created equal, and then only 4 per cent would admit that Negroes are equal to whites, is just one indication of the insanity produced by the Myth of the Master Race.

The extent to which prejudice obtains throughout the nation was also probed in 1943 by the research firm of Elmo Roper for Fortune magazine. "Are there any groups in this country who might be harmful to the future of the country unless curbed?" it asked. Of those queried, 16 per cent thought Negroes should be curbed, 14 per cent specified the Jews, 10 per cent said Bundists [supporters of the Nazi-sympathetic German-American Bund], and 9 per cent said Japanese. Apprehension, significantly, was highest in the upper-income brackets and in the New England and mountain states.

An earlier poll in 1942 found that when asked if they thought there were other groups of people who were trying to get ahead at the expense of people like themselves, 22 per cent named the Jews, 12 per cent said big businessmen (plus 4 per cent who said the rich), 9 per cent said labor, 6 per cent accused politicians, 4 per cent said black-market operators, and 3 per cent said Negroes. None of these figures, however, should be regarded as reflecting the full amount of prejudice in America. A great many people who hold prejudices do not like to admit as much, and this has been particularly true since the Nazis turned prejudice into world war. (my emphasis)

The 61% of Southerners in the survey who agreed that "all men are created equal" is an interesting number in more than one way. During the Second World War (December 1941-August 1945), patriotic hype was intense. And the "all men are created equal" phrase from the Declaration of Independence was and is a very iconic one. And the Pledge of Allegiance also includes the "liberty and justice for all" concept. So the fact that only 61% agreed with that is itself a measure of how strong white racism was among the respondents. The "only 4 per cent would admit that Negroes are equal to whites" is a bit harder to interpret. It was presumably both a recognition that African-Americans were in fact not equal to whites and a normative judgment that they should not be considered equal to white people.

And Kennedy was right that it was an illustration of "the insanity produced by the Myth of the Master Race."