ROBERT PENN WARREN sat in his cluttered, book-jammed office at Yale University, thinking about home. It was December 1955, several months after Zora Neale Hurston had fired off her letter to the Orlando Sentinel, and he too was pondering Brown v. Board of Education. It had been twenty-five years since he published “The Briar Patch” defending racial Jim Crow as a cultural incubator, a shield against the alienating, pasteurizing forces of northern industrialism, an industrialism that had, ironically, ensnared him. Yale’s glimmer had lured him out of his southern pastoral to New Haven, Connecticut, a drab, once-Puritan city somewhere between Boston and New York.1
The aging Fugitive had come a long way but was still on the run. Indeed, something about Warren’s northern exile amidst the slate gray turrets of Yale seemed to make him all the more southern, defiantly so, like an ex-patriot who loved his home country precisely because he had left it, and all its problems, behind. He published four novels about the region from 1939 to 1950, including one about a corrupt Louisiana governor that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. Entitled All the King’s Men, the book drew inspiration from Depression-era populist Huey Long but also the rise of fascism in Europe, which Warren witnessed firsthand while visiting Italy in 1939.2
Accustomed to infusing his fiction with politics, Warren turned once again to the novel in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown, this time to tell a startling tale about southern slavery. Warren composed a female protagonist, Amantha “Manty” Starr, daughter to a wealthy plantation owner from Kentucky who grows up unaware that her mother, long dead, was a slave, making her a slave as well. She learns the secret of her past upon her father’s death, which strikes while she is at college in Oberlin, Ohio, a hotbed of abolitionist thought. Madly in love with a coldhearted antislavery activist named Seth Parton, Manty hears of her father’s death and returns to Kentucky, only to be captured by a creditor and sold downriver to a mysterious, handsome slave owner in New Orleans named Hamish Bond. Bond, a burly bear of a man, installs Manty in a luxurious apartment, lavishes her with gifts, and treats her as if she were free, hoping that she might fall in love with him which, of course, she does.
Manty’s and Hamish’s story advanced two controversial themes. First, that slavery was not simply a white project foisted onto innocent, freedom-loving Africans, but rather an institution that survived in large part due to the willing participation of Africans, including powerful African kingdoms that built fortunes on the procurement and sale of slaves to Europeans. Two, slavery in the American South was softened by intricate, often intimate bonds between slave owners and slaves, bonds that manifested themselves alternately as paternalism—a sense that masters owed a duty of care to their slaves—and/or paternity—the creation of actual familial bonds between masters and slaves. Such bonds, in Warren’s telling, humanized slavery in a way that northern abolitionists failed to understand. For example, Warren compared Amantha Starr’s indulgent experience as a privileged slave in New Orleans to the harsh, evangelical atmosphere that she endures at Oberlin. Her abolitionist crush demonstrates little empathy for others, even telling her at one point that “we must not be concerned with persons . . . Only with Truth!” Starr counters that while her father may have owned slaves, he treated them well, and so should be judged compassionately, a point that enrages her boyfriend, whose very name, “Seth Parton,” evokes the term “parson,” pushing him to sermonize that “the good master is the worst enemy of justice,” precisely because his “indulgence rivets the shackle” and his “affection corrupts the heart.”3
Warren had long resented abolitionist zeal, a point he had made clear in his portrait of John Brown in 1929, and now he returned to it following the Supreme Court’s ruling on segregated schools. Few readers were likely to miss the political context of the book, not to mention Warren’s vindication of the South in its pages. Not only did Warren portray Manty’s father/owner as a good man, for example, but the author also cast Manty’s subsequent buyer, Hamish Bond, as a benevolent figure. In one of the more improbable passages in the novel, for example, Bond agrees to free Manty by giving her manumission papers and putting her on a riverboat to Cincinnati, only to find Manty running back to him down the gangplank. Terrified at the prospect of returning to the parsimonious North, she abandons her boat at the last minute to remain with Bond, traveling with him to Pointe de Loups, his remote plantation north of New Orleans, where they are welcomed by singing slaves. Only with the arrival of the Civil War do things go awry, as Bond orders Manty, no longer a slave, to leave, pushing her on a course back toward the cold, alienating freedom of the North, a freedom that Warren conveyed by having Manty marry an idealistic Union officer who leaves her upon learning that she is black.4
Although set during the Civil War, Band of Angels revealed much about Warren’s thoughts on race, and racial justice, in the 1950s. Prominent in the book, for example, is the contrast between the impersonal, idealistic, right-thinking North and the intimate, slaveholding, wrong-thinking South, a theme that hearkened back to Warren’s biography of John Brown as well as his essay “The Briar Patch.” Band of Angels reiterated the idea that southern oppression was tempered by human compassion, and that whites and blacks often found themselves entwined in deeply personal relationships, the subjects of legal systems that appeared harsh on the surface but allowed remarkable room for mercy, mutual cooperation, and kindness.5
Of course, this was not the experience that most slave women in New Orleans faced. Unlike Manty, young women sold into slavery in the Crescent City were generally treated as commodities who existed to serve the carnal desires of their sellers—and also their buyers. This was particularly true of mixed-race slave women, or “fancy maids,” like Manty Starr. Warren made no mention of this in his novel, marking a general tendency on his part to downplay the harsh, violent aspects of southern slavery.6
Instead, he focused on the harsh, violent aspects of African societies that the slaves had left behind. For example, Warren included in his novel an astonishing description of a journey that Hamish Bond takes to procure slaves, landing on Africa’s western coast and then traveling “seventy miles” into its interior, to “Agbome,” a walled city with “mud palaces inside, sixty feet high, with skulls, millions of ’em, set on the wall, and jawbones, and skulls to make pavement for the king to walk on.” At Agbome, Bond encounters “Gezo,” a black king who drinks rum from a skull and wears a “shirt made out of a red-flowered damask that had been a table-cover in Liverpool before it got promoted to Africa.” Gezo commands a brigade of female warriors, or “Amy-Johns,” who take Bond on a “war-raid” that is so violent Bond injures his leg and intercedes on behalf of a “black infant” who is about to be clubbed, rescuing it back to America. Bond later christens the infant “Rau-Ru” and personally raises him to become his “K’la,” or manager, in charge of his Louisiana plantation.7
The tale is startling. Violence, bloodlust, and savagery fill its pages. Yet, Warren hewed close to primary sources in constructing his narrative, carefully cobbling together actual accounts of “Agbome,” or “Dahome,” in what is now Benin, as told by nineteenth-century British explorers. One such explorer was John Duncan, a Scottish soldier who described a journey inland from the west coast of Africa in October 1845, later published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London in 1846. Like Warren’s character, Duncan described a leg wound suffered while exploring the African interior. He also noted that the king of Dahomey, or “Abomey,” received him and “commenced a review of about 6000 female troops,” just like Warren’s “Amy-Johns,” all “well armed and accoutred.” Warren similarly pulled details from an account penned by British explorer Richard Burton in 1865, describing an inland trip to “Agbome,” or Dahomey. Burton recounted great ceremonies or “grand customs” that were “marked almost every day with human blood,” bearing a distinct resemblance to Warren’s “year customs” in Band of Angels, where female warriors danced “by squad, gang and regiment,” and the king presided over the “killing” of human “sacrifices.” Burton described a grand custom performed in honor of “Gezo,” the very same name of the king in Warren’s novel, and provided details of the sacrifices made during the customs, noting how some victims were “clubbed” and others “beheaded,” their bodies left “hanging head downwards” on massive scaffolds. Warren echoed this account, mentioning that some sacrifices were “bastinadoed,” others “throat-cut,” and all “hung up by their heels on racks.”8
It was gruesome. Yet even as Warren seemed to revel in the more violent aspects of Dahomey culture, he failed to mention other reports of the kingdom that were more flattering, including a two-volume study of Dahomey published by Melville J. Herskovits in 1938, detailing its political sophistication and defiance of primitive tribal stereotypes of African culture. Lamenting that “native” African cultures had “too often been written of in a deprecatory tone,” Herskovits praised Dahomey’s “excellence in technology and art, its complex political and social structure, its profoundly integrated world-view and its mythology rich in elaborate conceptualization,” all of which “may prove of help toward a truer and more realistic view of how far removed from the popular idea is the actuality of the cultural heritage of the New World Negro.”9
Herskovits’s argument that Dahomeans were not entirely unlike Europeans did not make it into Warren’s novel, nor did the cruelty that Africans faced once they were brought to the New World. For example, Warren made sure to note that during the middle passage, Bond ran a “clean” ship, allowing his slaves the same rations as his white crew, providing them with room to move, and even giving them time “on deck for air and dancing.” A romantic rendition of a slave ship, to be sure, but one that helped Warren advance the startling argument that the only person who really suffered in Band of Angels was Amantha Starr, who endured a crisis not of violent brutality but identity. Starr’s primary problem was her mixed-race heritage, the fact that she had grown up thinking she was white but was in fact black, and therefore suffered from an inner conflict over who, precisely, she was. As Warren explained it in a 1956 interview, “Manty is, of course, a victim too, but in one perspective at least, her view of herself as victim is what stands in the way of her achieving identity.”10
Read against the Supreme Court’s opinion in Brown, Band of Angels appeared a southern-slanted meditation on racial justice, including a subtle defense of the clear divisions between white and black that had been upheld by Jim Crow. The book made little mention of southern violence, for example, and focused instead on the psychological anxiety caused by interracial liaisons. Amantha’s primary challenge, as Warren told it, was to recover who, precisely, she was: an inner conflict, not an outward struggle. “The whole story is about an investigation of the nature of freedom,” declared Warren after the novel’s publication. “I mean she’s never free—you can’t set her free from the fact of the relationship to her father. Until she can forgive her father, she’s not free.” Of course, this downplayed the horrors of slavery, suggesting that the political status of blacks was somehow less important than their psychological self-perception. “You see,” Warren explained, “that’s the nature of freedom as she experiences it. It’s not just a piece of paper in the story, or the Battle of Gettysburg. The story is inside her.” If novels about slavery had once encouraged the North to reform the South as Uncle Tom’s Cabin had before the Civil War, Band of Angels suggested the opposite, that legal reform was irrelevant to more personal questions of self.11
As Warren added the final touches to his novel, Life magazine called, asking him to leave Yale and return South to do a story on race relations in the region. The assignment proved an uncanny chance for Warren to share his views of integration even before his novel came out and to provide his own version of events in the South after Brown. Since the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1954, grassroots opposition to the decision had exploded, led by an organization based in the Mississippi Delta called the Citizens’ Councils. Warren made plans to visit the Delta, both to meet with Citizens’ Council leaders and also to catch up with old friends like Hodding Carter, a newspaper editor in Greenville, Mississippi.12
As Warren saw it, racism existed everywhere, as did segregation, and northerners had no moral basis to lord it over the South. Instead, they should spend time—as he planned to for Life—trying to capture the complexity of southern life. White southerners were not the villains that the NAACP made them out to be, he believed, but rather an embattled minority seeking to preserve their rural, close-knit, pluralist way of life. To drive home this point, he compared them to Jews. “Southerners and Jews,” proclaimed one of Warren’s characters in the book, “you’re exactly alike, you’re so damned special.” Warren agreed, adding, “we’re both persecuted minorities.” It was a startling inverse of Zora Neale Hurston’s analogy, only involving whites not blacks. It suggested that Warren saw race much like Hurston did, as a matter of cultural heritage, not repression. It also suggested that Warren saw white southerners as the targets of northern aggression, a view that he had first expressed at Oxford. Now, over two decades later, he felt the need to defend his people once again, this time from the NAACP.13
Just as Life reached out to Warren, news of a racially charged killing made national headlines, as reporters described a kidnapping and murder of a fourteen-year-old African American named Emmett Till by two men in a small town near the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. The men, Roy Bryant and John William “J.W.” Milam, were World War II veterans and half-brothers. Bryant’s wife, Carolyn, claimed that Till had approached her at a general store where she worked, sexually assaulted her, and—as she ran for a gun—executed a “wolf-whistle” that was heard down the street, all acts that Roy later avenged by kidnapping Till from his uncle’s house and, with the help of Milam, killing him. Till’s battered corpse was later recovered in the Tallahatchie River and buried, only to subsequently be exhumed and brought to Chicago by his mother, who put her son’s corpse on public display.14
Chicago-based black magazine Jet ran a piece on Till’s murder in its September 15, 1955, issue, including a horrific photograph of Till’s mangled corpse, shocking readers. Soon, the national media picked up on the story, sending reporters to the small town of Sumner, Mississippi, to cover the trial of Milam and Bryant. When an all-white jury acquitted the two white men, the verdict drew angry responses in the North—responses that escalated to outrage when the white defendants subsequently confessed to the murder in an interview with reporter William Bradford Huie for nationally distributed Look magazine.15
The NAACP used the Till scandal to boost national support for civil rights, painting southern whites as racist and violent. On October 12, the organization called for a national boycott of all products made in Mississippi. Three days later, the group asked New York governor Averell Harriman not to return two black fugitives to the South, one wanted for assault and the other for theft, citing a “complete breakdown of law enforcement in the region,” based in part on the acquittal of Till’s killers. The NAACP also asked President Dwight D. Eisenhower to investigate the killing, along with the murder of two other African Americans in Mississippi, a minister named George Lee and an African American named Lamar Smith. The NAACP subsequently published a disturbing pamphlet entitled M is for Mississippi and Murder showcasing the Till killing; the murder of Lee, who was shot while registering to vote; and the killing of Smith on the lawn outside the courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi, for the same offense.16
By November, the Till killing, the Look story, and the NAACP’s campaign to paint white southerners as violent and racist had generated enough northern interest to prompt Life magazine to run a series on racial sentiment in the region, for which Warren was invited to contribute. Warren agreed, using the Life piece as an opportunity to revisit the question of segregation and southern culture. He organized his article around a series of interviews, some formal, some less so, conducted in Mississippi and other places across the South over the winter of 1955–56. He sat down with Citizens’ Council organizers and also with black business leaders and educators. He encountered individuals on the street, in hotel lobbies, and at historic sites. He talked with people on planes and visited individuals in their homes. Except for personal musings, however, he kept all identities secret, leaving the reader to assume that he was canvassing a representative segment of the southern population, even if, in fact, he was not. Whether interviewees were quoted fully, or even accurately, was impossible to tell. An abbreviated version of his conclusions appeared in Life magazine on July 9, 1956, and an extended book-length edition came out later that year.17
Warren opened the book, entitled Segregation: The Inner Conflict, with a northerner, a “big, bulging” man with “coal-black grime” under his fingernails who noticed the Yale professor reading an article about civil rights on a plane. The man engaged Warren immediately on the question of race, focusing on Autherine Lucy, a young African American woman who had matriculated into the University of Alabama in February 1956 only to spark immediate protest by white students. After three days of demonstrations, including vandalism, cross burnings, and attacks on black vehicles by white hecklers—all prominently covered in northern newspapers—the university decided to suspend Lucy, citing fears for her safety. The decision, along with the student violence, caused a national uproar, providing concrete evidence that white southerners were unreasonable and uncivilized.18
Warren’s anonymous northerner, however, took a more nuanced view of the situation. “Somebody ought to tell ’em not to blame no state, not even Alabam’ or Mississippi, for what the bad folks do,” he explained, in an oddly southern accent, for “folks in Mississippi got good hearts as any place.” That not all white southerners were “bad folks” would prove a recurring theme in Warren’s Life article and subsequent book, as did the notion that instigators on both sides of the equation, whether violent segregationists or radical black activists, were distorting the South’s image. “Folks could be more gen’rous and fair-thinking,” exclaimed Warren’s New Yorker. “You get folks not being affable-like and stirring things up,” he argued, “and it won’t work out.” This applied both to white mobs like those who raged across Alabama’s campus and to black activists like Lucy and the NAACP. “Folks on both sides of the question,” claimed the New Yorker, were to blame for the crisis.19
That Warren chose to feature a northerner sympathetic to the South in the opening lines of his book indicated that he aimed to challenge the NAACP’s grim portrayal of the region in M is for Mississippi and Murder. Further evidence of this emerged in a subsequent interview in the book, also with an unidentified white man who was “publicly on record against the Citizens Councils and all such organizations,” but who argued that Life magazine had itself exacerbated the South’s negative image by running a story on the Emmett Till murder that deliberately twisted facts, making Till’s family out to be more sympathetic than it was. Noting that Till’s father had died in the war, the magazine let readers presume that he was killed in combat, even though he had actually been tried, convicted, and executed for rape and murder. “Life magazine’s editorial on the Till case,” argued the unidentified white speaker, “that sure fixed it. If Till’s father had died a hero’s death fighting for liberty, as Life said, that would have been as irrelevant as the actual fact that he was executed by the American army for rape-murder. It sure makes it hard.”20
Life’s story on Till came out on October 3, 1955, describing the Emmett Till murder trial with a series of drawings and photographs, one of a ring that belonged to Till’s father who, the caption read, was “killed in France in 1945.” While the article did not expressly mention that Till’s father died a “hero’s death,” it also did not mention that he was executed by American forces for murder, which according to a subsequent story in the New York Times, he was. Warren’s mention of this fact deflated at least some of the NAACP’s narrative, casting aspersions onto Till’s parents. If, for example, Till had not been the child of a presumably criminal father, then perhaps he would not have been shuttled to his uncle’s house for the summer. Life’s subsequent effort to rehabilitate Till’s family at the expense of the truth lent credence to the interviewee’s sense “that the whole thing was a plot by outsiders” to help destroy “the way of life of Southern white people.”21
Warren worked further to diminish the Till story in a passage that told of a “twenty-one year old” white woman who drove her black cook home only to be heckled by black youths “in the middle of the afternoon.” “As she stop[ped] to let the cook out,” recounted Warren, “a group of negro boys, upper teen age, had whistled and called at her.” This, of course, was one of the acts that Till had allegedly committed against Bryant, though Bryant claimed he went a good deal further. “What did you do?” the white woman’s mother asked her. “I ignored it,” she responded, to which her mother interjected “That’s right . . . you have to ignore it.” Rather than hunt down the black youth who whistled at his daughter, the woman’s father simply observed, “It’s a new kind of Negro we’ve got around here now.”22
The passage was curious. The allusion to black youth whistling at white women clearly evoked the Emmett Till story. By including a white family who ignored such a move, however, Warren suggested that not all whites reacted violently to black sexual advances, and that M is for Mississippi and Murder was, at best, an exaggeration. M, as Warren told it, might have been for moderation. “The cook had come to her for advice,” recounted Warren, “about her sons, fifteen and nineteen,” both visiting from the North, “showing pictures of their white girl friends,” something that Till had allegedly done as well. The white employer whose daughter had been whistled at kept her cook’s confidence, explaining, “you just have to live past them. Ignore them.”23
While the passage on the white daughter who was whistled at did not make it into the final book, Warren did include another incident that minimized the Till case. “I remember the gang rape by four Negroes of a white woman near Memphis last fall,” he wrote, “shortly after the Till killing.” The crime to which he referred involved a thirty-six-year-old white woman who was allegedly taken “away from her escort” by a group of young black men “on a rural road and raped” in Tennessee, not once but “five times” in revenge for Till’s killing. According to Warren, one of the accused rapists exclaimed that “one of our boys was killed down in Mississippi the other day and we’re liable to kill you,” a threat they made as “they assaulted the man who was with the woman and told him to get going.” The incident failed to make major papers like the New York Times or Chicago Tribune but was mentioned by the Chicago Defender, a prominent black newspaper that noted four “juveniles” had been arrested and accused “of kidnapping and raping a 36 year-old white woman” in Memphis in September 1955.24
Warren’s reference to the Memphis rape suggested that southern whites were not the only violent parties in the South, nor were blacks the only victims of racialized crime. However, the story failed to garner anywhere near the attention that Till’s death did, an issue that clearly bothered Warren. As he explained it, northerners were willing to ignore racially motivated killings if they were carried out by blacks but were intent on showcasing killings by whites. Northerners were also more likely, argued Warren, to mask their own complicity in segregation by employing private means, like sending their children to expensive, private schools. “You may eat the bread of the Pharisee and read in the morning paper with only a trace of irony,” he commented in a passage that impugned northern liberals, “how . . . some Puerto Rican school boys . . . or Negroes or Italians . . . have stabbed another boy to death, or raped a girl, or trampled an old man into a bloody mire. If you can afford it, you will, according to the local mores, send your child to a private school, where there will be, of course, a couple of Negro children on exhibit. And that delightful little Chinese girl who is so good at dramatics. Or is it fingerpainting?”25
Warren balanced his sardonic take on northern liberals with a sympathetic portrait of southern moderates, or what he termed a “fifth column of decency” in the South, who believed that race relations should be guided by civility, mutual cooperation, and respect. To illustrate, Warren included a black interviewee, a “yellow girl, thin but well made,” who confessed to Warren that she was contemplating a move North to avoid the racial sleights of ill-mannered whites. “It’s how yore feelings git tore up all the time,” she confessed, noting that a white store clerk had referred to her husband as a “nigger,” prompting her to walk out. “The way folks talk, sometimes.” She concluded, “It ain’t what they say sometimes, if they’d jes say it kind.”26
The “yellow” girl’s plug for kindness resonated with the New Yorker’s argument that if “folks” were simply “more gen’rous and fair-thinking,” then race relations generally would be better. This led Warren to contrast southerners who were “affable-like” with southerners who were not, a point that he demonstrated by interviewing a white organizer for the Citizens’ Councils “in the tight, tiny living room” of his home near Jackson, Mississippi. The speaker, like all the characters in the book, remained anonymous, presented simply as “a fat but powerful man” who told Warren that he was fighting for what he termed “the old southern way, what we was raised up to,” likening the South’s struggle to a cooking experiment. “The court caint take no stick and mix folks up like you swivel and swull eggs broke in a bowl,” he explained, insinuating that integration would lead to interracial sex. “You got to raise ’em up, the niggers,” he claimed, “not bring white folks down to nigger-level.” It was an offensive argument, rendered in offensive language. “Segregation is the law of God and Man,” declared the organizer, warning that integration would “overwhelm the white race and destroy all progress, religion, invention, art, and return us to the jungle.” Warren’s speaker provided no data to substantiate his conclusions but spoke freely, using racial epithets and fuzzy logic to explain his opposition to Brown. Warren allowed him to rant, letting him impugn himself in the process. Clearly, this was not the best the white South had to offer, a point Warren confirmed by noting that the leader spoke not for educated white southerners but for the “angry,” the “disoriented,” and the “dispossessed.” Warren showed no sign of believing such nonsense but presented the leader’s extremist views as a foil for more sensible positions.27
Such positions, argued Warren, did not include antiquated theories of racial mixing and civilizational decline so much as concerns that Brown represented an assault on “constitutionality” which carried the nation “one more step toward the power state, a cunningly calculated step,” and expanded federal power under the guise of advancing a “moral issue” so that all “objector[s]” of such expansion suddenly appeared “enem[ies] of righteousness.” This, of course, was one of the central themes in his novel All the King’s Men, and it was a point that Zora Neale Hurston had raised in her critique of Brown. Warren joined her, suggesting that future Supreme Court opinions might not share Brown’s “moral façade” but would merely advance “government by sociology, not law.” Of course, Warren did not go so far as to call the Court Red, but he nevertheless tolled a decidedly Agrarian bell by linking southern resistance to concerns about a northern “leviathan” that he and his Nashville Fugitive compatriots had long feared.28
To skirt charges that his fears of centralized government were simply disguises for racism, Warren confessed that he was open to the idea of integration—so long as it was not forced. Integration would come, he argued, “when enough people, in a particular place, a particular county or state, cannot live with themselves any more. Or realize they don’t have to.” Certainly more progressive than the Citizens’ Council organizer, Warren nevertheless placed the timetable of integration firmly in the hands of southern whites, who at some point would decide that segregation had outlived its usefulness. This, of course, was a case for southern folkways rather than judicial imperatives, an implicit request that the North allow the South to evolve on its own time, gradually. “If by gradualist you mean a person who would create delay for the sake of delay,” argued Warren, this was not him. However, “if by gradualist you mean a person who thinks it will take time, not time as such, but time for an educational process, preferably a calculated one, then yes. I mean a process of mutual education for whites and blacks. And part of this education should be in the actual beginning of the process of desegregation.”29
Here was an arguably progressive impulse, a sense that the most overt, humiliating aspects of Jim Crow—the separate water fountains and bus seats—could be eliminated without also requiring aggressive federal action like integrating schools. Such integration, implied Warren, would come only when the South was ready for it, when its folkways had evolved to a point that no one believed separate education served any further purpose. Until then, the North should lay off, allow the South’s fifth column of decency to do its thing, and allow time for a more gradual process of change. Although elements of the South’s folkways were violent, to be sure, Warren downplayed this aspect of the southern tradition and stressed conviviality, noting that “the races had made out pretty well in the South,” in part due to its fifth column of sympathetic citizens, who conducted their interracial affairs with “some sort of human decency and charity”30
To shore up his point that no one in the South really wanted to integrate, Warren included a string of black voices who expressed doubts about Brown. For example, Warren interviewed an African American who declared that hopes for immediate integration were “absurd,” and it was “foolish thinking for people to believe you can get the South to do in four or five years what the North has been doing for a hundred years. These people are emotional about their tradition,” argued the speaker, “and you’ve got to get an educational program, and this will be a slow process.” The black man concluded by noting that “the ultimate goal” of African Americans in the South was not “just to go to white schools and travel with white people on conveyances over the country. No, sir, the Negro, he is a growing people and he will strive for all the equalities belonging to any American citizen. He is a growing people.” This was a nod to a latent sense of black nationalism in the South, a sentiment with which Warren sympathized, corroborating his argument that civility and mutual respect were ultimately more important, even to blacks, than the opportunity to go to school with whites. Another black speaker, an “eminent Negro scholar,” confirmed this, noting that integration, per se, was not the black South’s sole, or even primary, goal. “It’s not so much what the Negro wants,” explained the scholar, “as what he doesn’t. He does not want to be denied human dignity.”31
Warren seemed particularly interested in black voices that stressed dignity over desegregation. For example, he included an African American woman from Tennessee, a “school inspector for country schools,” who was reluctant to integrate. “We don’t want to socialize,” she confessed. “That’s not what we want. But I don’t want to be insulted.” This hearkened back to Warren’s interest in civility and his sense that whites were not the only group in the South averse to forced integration. “We do everything the white folks do already,” argued the inspector, “even if we don’t spend as much money doing it. And we have more fun.” An African American man, also from Tennessee, echoed this sentiment. “My boy is happy in the Negro school where he goes,” he declared. “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.” A black college student affirmed the man’s view, declaring that “the Negro doesn’t want social equality. My wife is my color. I’m above wanting to mix things up. That’s low class. Low class of both races.”32
After acknowledging black doubts about integration in the South, Warren included an interview with himself, conceding that segregation as a formal matter of law needed to end but also expressing concern about federal power and the northern press. “Do you think the northern press sometimes distorts southern news?” he asked himself. “Yes,” he responded, meanwhile expressing anxiety over the encroaching power of the federal government, or what he termed “the power state,” commenting that any process toward integration needed to be gradual, involving “a process of mutual education for whites and blacks.” “Gradualism is all you’ll get,” he observed; “history, like nature, knows no jumps. Except the jump backward, maybe.”33
Warren’s article and book left readers with a distinct impression that Brown represented federal overreaching, and that the South was better off sorting out its racial tensions on its own terms, in its own time. Warren foregrounded black speakers who seemed to collectively argue that interracial respect, economic opportunity, and an end to white-on-black violence were paramount, creating the overall impression that integration by itself was not an urgent priority, even among African Americans. Meanwhile, he failed to interview a single black proponent of immediate compliance with Brown, a lacuna that was all the more glaring given the simmering civil rights activism in the South at the time, including a sustained bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. The boycott began just as Warren started work on Inner Conflict in December 1955, sparked by the refusal of an African American woman named Rosa Parks to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery bus. Shortly after her arrest, black leaders organized a general boycott of the city’s bus service, encouraging riders to carpool or walk to work. News of the boycott drew national attention as early as December 6, 1955, when the New York Times ran a piece on the demonstration, followed by consistent coverage through the spring of 1956, including a series of front-page stories in February, many featuring a twenty-seven-year-old black Montgomery minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. Life magazine published a prominent article on the boycott in March, part of a larger string of stories on the South, including Warren’s piece.34
Warren made no mention of the Montgomery bus boycott in either his Life article or subsequent book. While it is certainly possible that Warren felt Montgomery was getting enough attention on its own, prompting him to seek out voices less heard, the absence of an interlocutor sympathetic to King’s program of direct action, nonviolence, and immediate compliance with federal law left readers with the profound sense that this was not in fact a popular view among African Americans in the region. By occluding Montgomery, in other words, Warren diminished it. Civil rights, one was left to assume, simply did not coincide with southern folkways.