Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South

by Robert Penn Warren, William Bedford Clark (Foreword)

First published in 1956, Segregation is a collection of Robert Penn Warren's informal conversations with southerners in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Warren, who in his own writings often explored the theme of race in American life, traveled through his native region to talk with scores of individuals―taxi drivers, NAACP leaders, members of White Citizens groups, college students, preachers―to report their responses to the Court's decision.

Genres: History, Race, Nonfiction, Southern, American, Essays

88 pages, Paperback

First published August 28, 1956

About the author

Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.

Reviews

[Larry Bassett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short (66 pages) book of observations and conversations, an oral history of segregation in the south by a noted author Robert Penn Warren. He is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of All the King s Men.

The Author’s Note says:

This report comes out of travel in Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana, the parts of the South that I have known best. It does not pretend to represent a poll-taking or a mathematical cross section of opinion. It is a report of conversations, some of which had been sought out and some of which came as the result of chance encounters.

It seems likely that this book saw the light of day because the author is well known and respected in the publishing industry. A lot of people could have written this book but they didn’t. One man had the life experience to have the conversations and the connections to get it published in 1956.

When I was young, my father and mother and sister and I drove from Michigan to Florida for Easter vacation. It was the time when the Interstates were just being built so you would drive for a while on a fast Interstate section and then drive for a longer while on a slow two lane road until you got to the next Interstate section. We drove on state and county roads through much of Mississippi and saw houses so dilapidated that you could see through the cracks in the walls and through the front door out the back door. There were black children in the yards, if you could call them that, near the houses, if you could call them that. It was a world that I had no understanding of. I never had an opportunity to meet any of those people. Warren did.

It is a town in Louisiana, and I am riding in an automobile driven by a Negro, a teacher, a slow, careful man, who puts his words out in that fashion, almost musingly, and drives his car that way, too. He has been showing me the Negro business section, how prosperous some of it is, and earlier he had said he would show me a section where the white men’s cars almost line up at night. Now he seems to have forgotten that sardonic notion in the pleasanter, more prideful task. He has fallen silent, seemingly occupied with his important business of driving, and the car moves deliberately down the street. Then, putting his words out that slow way, detachedly as though I weren’t there, he says: “You hear some white men say they know Negroes. Understand Negroes. But it’s not true. No white man ever born ever understood what a Negro is thinking. What he’s feeling.”
The car moves on down the empty street, negotiates a left turn with majestic deliberation.
“And half the time that Negro,” he continues, “he don’t understand, either.”

Robert Penn Warren moves about in this world as a white Southerner who had moved north. He was born in Kentucky and grew up in Tennessee. He asks black people and white people, “What are the white man’s reasons for segregation?” Often the conversation is slow and cautious but it sometimes escalates.

“Yes,” he says, “yes, they claim they don’t want mongrelization. But who has done it? They claim Negroes are dirty, diseased, that that’s why they want segregation. But they have Negro nurses for their children, they have Negro cooks. They claim Negroes are ignorant. But they won’t associate with the smartest and best educated Negro. They claim – “ And his voice goes on, winding up the bitter catalogue of paradoxes. I know them all. They are not new.

If you are wondering what race relations in the United States was all about in the 1950s, this will refresh your memory:

In the 1950s, race relations were changing in segregated America. The Supreme Court had finally admitted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that segregation violated the constitutional rights of American citizens. The court ruled that integration should happen "with all deliberate speed."
Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/partners...

The tone of much of the conversation with blacks is courteous.

Leave the “how” in detail up to the specialists in education. As for the “when” – the dark brown, jut-nosed man hesitates a second: “Well, Negroes are patient. We can wait a little while longer.”

Warren also talks to people who are not so patient as you remember that this is in the 1950s. The rough talk mostly starts in the 60s.

And when I go to a place to buy something, and have that dollar bill in my hand, I want to be treated right. And I won’t ride on a bus. I won’t go to a restaurant in a town where there’s just one. I’ll go hungry. I won’t be insulted at the front door and then crawl around to the back. You’ve got to try to keep some respect.

Courage and determination was still building for more and more blacks to demand respect rather than to accept insults. Warren found that a movement was building. Warren asked a variety of people, “What’s coming?” He asked a college student in the Deep South (his capitals), a country grade-school superintendent, the Methodist minister, the young lawyer in a mid-South city, the handsome, aristocratic, big gray-haired man, another college student, the taxi driver, a man in Arkansas, the planter, the Episcopal rector, the young man from Mississippi and the officer of the Citizens Council chapter. There were a wide range of answers.

In this short book you will read about the turmoil between man and man and the turmoil within men. (It is the 50s and it is still ‘man.’ We have not gotten to person to person or human to human yet.) I thought that the clash of beliefs within a person this was one of the most interesting aspects of the book to think about. It often results in the historical judgment of people being fairly forgiving by alluding to the common beliefs and mores of the time they lived and that are different in 2013.

This book was first published 56 years ago and is therefore a historical monument in its own right. It was republished by the University of Georgia Press in 1994 so is available online used. It may also be available at your local college or public library. The book is not unique in the information that it presents. It is unique in that it was written by a writer who was well known at that time (1956) and was willing to take a public position on what was the very politicized and controversial civil rights issue.

[Cassidy Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating and brutal read.

The parts that touch on segregationists that are only segregationists because of their fear of government control and people who have strong feelings one way or another but can't imagine becoming involved are terrifyingly relevant to modern day.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this slim volume, originally published as a piece in Life Magazine, Robert Penn Warren records conversations he has with residents of the American South as they are facing the inevitable Supreme Court Decision to mandate de-segregation in schools.

I was struck by the prevailing attitude among the white segregationalists that this change was inevitable-- and even morally correct-- but that it should be fought against in order to honor traditions and to fight "progress", which is in the Southern view according to Warren, the frightening "great anonymity of the modern world".
A "rich businessman", who is an active segregationalist tells Warren:
"Yes, it's our own fault. If we'd ever managed to bring ourselves to do what we ought to have done for the Negro, it would be different now, if we'd managed to educate them, get them decent housing, decent jobs."
A similar acknowledgment of the role that whites have played in the instituational subjugation of African-Americans comes from a less genteely articulate white taxi driver:
"It ain't our hate, it's the hate hung on us by the old folks dead and gone. Not I mean to criticize the old folks, they done the best they knew, but that hate, we don't know how to shuck it. We got that G_dd___ hate stuck in our craw and can't puke it up. If white folks quit shoving the ni____ down and calling him a ni____ he could maybe get to be a asset to the South and the country. But how stop shoving?"

Among the African-Americans that Warren spoke to there was also a combativeness, but in their case it was a push for progress and change. As one man says:
"My boy is happy in the Negro school where he goes. I don't want him to go to the white school and sit by your boy's side. But I'd die fighting for his right to go."
Warren describes the difficulty of the black position, the conflict between the desire to rise up and live equally among the white people and the desire to rub their faces in the success that they can achieve on their own. He writes:
"After all the patience, after all the humility, after learning and living those virtues, do I have to learn magnanimity too?"

One of the most important insights that this book gave me was the absolute necessity of the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education decision. White Southerners in the book discuss the inevitablility of integration and the rightness of it but not one of them seems willing to step up and be an individual advocate of change. One man discusses how relieved local governments will be when the decision finally comes down so that they can pin integration on the court ruling and not have to take responsibility themselves for the change. There even seems to be a distinct guiilt and even a desire for this change among people who are working actively against it. When one man is asked if he would prefer for the South to be given the opportunity to work out its own race policies, he says:
"I don't think the problem is to learn to live with the Negro....It is to learn to live with ourselves....I don't think that you can live with yourself when you are humiliating the man next to you."
I'm sure that the picture has many more ugly moments than Warren presents, and that all of these morally conflicted people lived right alongside people that are filled with the most despicable sort of crass racial hatred. But I also feel pretty sure that without the Supreme Court's moral leadership that we would be living in a world that tolerates a great deal more inequity.

Particulary in our current political climate, I hear a lot of media types mentioning the race blindness of the current generation, and how young people's insensitivity to race has helped propel Barack Obama to the incredible heights that he has achieved. I have to wonder if that "race blindness" (which I am well aware is not an absolute truth) could have been achieved if children in the 1950's had not been ordered by the highest court in our nation to sit next to one another at school.

[mwr · Rating 3 out of 5]

For anyone who has looked into race relations in the US in any detail, there's nothing new here.

What's noteworthy to the contemporary reader is 1) that it was published at all and 2) that the author has his own point of view on the matter, but does not bend every sentence to its service.

The author largely lets the people living through the conflict speak in their own words. He doesn't shy away from presenting irreconcilable points of view, or from letting people who share his own point of view come across as ugly. Nor does he give you the sense that he has a solution, or that he's selling you on some identity-affirming worldview. It at least leaves room for the reader to have some thought rather than to feel either angry or righteous.

It's kind of disheartening to realize that a mediocre book on a topic that remains essential today is far better, or more honest, than anything one would expect to be published now.

[Christopher Renberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an utterly fascinating read! The author interviewed numerous citizens of the South in 1956 after the Brown case had been decided. His questions center around what would happen now that the Court had spoken. Black and white respond honestly and with a variety I did not expect. Again, just an engrossing read to gain insight into what the folks tasked with implementing this decision, at least in the South (Brown was born in Kansas after all-this was a national issue and still is for that matter) thought about the pathway ahead of them. The author interviews himself as well to round out this compact yet penetrating read. Glad I picked this up.

[Frederick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written the year I was born it calls to mind the conflicts I witnessed on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the 1960s. Racism was complicated and was not just one thing. Warren doesn't sugarcoat either black or white attitudes at this time of great social struggle in American history. If you want to study the era you must read this.

[Clio · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of conversations with Southerners at the start of an important turning point for justice in the South. It's a quick read by a beautiful writer and definitely worth reading to reflect on the history that is yours as an American, Southern or not.

[Dan Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This likely had allot more impact in its own time.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

Segregation sees Robert Penn Warren step aside and let his interviewees, interviewed shortly after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, discuss their hatreds, fears, and hopes as the civil rights movement pushes on. It’s a specific moment in time, of course, but one with universal implications, as we see, towards the end, people accept their own prejudices as their own responsibilities—not anybody else’s, and certainly not the government’s.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short oral history gives a wonderful glimpse into the American mindset during the time of desegregation. With a diversity of perspectives represented from all over the American south, this book is essential to understanding the great change that occurred during the 1950's. Robert Penn Warren's great investigative journalism makes this a classic American work.