FOUR MONTHS AFTER Bakke was decided, President Jimmy Carter signed a resolution restoring Jefferson Davis’s citizenship to the Union. Like most high-ranking Confederate officers, Davis had lost the right to vote after the Civil War, part of his punishment for rebelling against the United States. Now, Carter welcomed him home, declaring that it was time to “clear away the guilts and enmities and recriminations of the past,” a nod toward a new era of national acceptance of the once-recalcitrant South. Of course, Carter himself hailed from that South, a farm in southwest Georgia in the heart of the region’s conservative plantation-belt. Yet, he cast himself not as a Confederate holdout but a moral, Christian, small-town farmer, noncomplicit in the South’s history of violence and racial injustice. Promising “a government as good as our people,” Carter ambled humbly onto the national stage, a peaceful man of strong moral fiber, precisely the kind of individual that Harper Lee might have cast in one of her novels, a benevolent southerner with positive, unassailable, moral values.1
Carter’s repatriation of Davis coincided with a growing sentiment among white southern leaders and intellectuals that the region had transcended its racialized past and was now ready to rejoin the nation, perhaps even lead it. As literary critic Michael Kreyling put it, southerners in the 1970s aimed to “decentralize race and to substitute community,” arguing that the Civil War was not fought simply to preserve white supremacy or to maintain slavery but to combat the North’s “materialistic, acquisitive society,” which compromised small-town sensibilities and led to the “dehumanization” of average folks. Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Harper Lee had all advanced this position in their fiction. Now Warren returned to his desk, sounding a similar chord in an essay commemorating Carter’s decision to restore Jefferson Davis’s citizenship, using the move to laud the “heroism and honor” of the Old South while praising Davis as a man for whom “honor” was a “guiding star,” unlike the mercenary “pragmatism” of modern America where “the sky hums with traffic, and eight-lane highways stinking of high-test rip across hypothetical state lines, and half the citizens don’t know or care where they were born just so they can get somewhere fast.” In a voice remarkably reminiscent of his days as a Nashville Agrarian in the 1920s, Warren lamented mass culture and industrialization as “technologically and philosophically devoted to the depersonalization of men,” a sentiment that had been simmering in southern literary circles for decades. Now such views came bubbling to the surface of the national culture as the president of the United States, a southerner, repatriated Jefferson Davis, a southerner, mere months after Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., also a southerner, invoked the first Reconstruction to counter the Second.2
All celebrated the end of assimilation as a national ideal, praising the rise of racial and ethnic pluralism, a campaign that they decoupled from black calls for aggressive government programs aimed at compensating African Americans for past discrimination. Southern whites like Lewis Powell and Jimmy Carter joined northern whites in extolling white ethnicity, deftly penciling themselves into a larger tableau of white ethnic/immigrant particularism, in part to counter black demands for reparations, in part to recast the South as home to an embattled white minority uniquely suited to speak for the restoration of traditional, small-town values against a menacing federal leviathan. This latter claim, a rereading of the South as a bastion of local liberty and an ensuing case for a type of multiculturalism independent of any effort to achieve racial equality, proved the hallmark of a new era.
To illustrate, Jimmy Carter traveled to South Bend, Indiana, in 1976 only to announce that the federal government should refrain from interfering with the “ethnic purity” of urban, immigrant neighborhoods in the North. Although Carter did not quibble with Brown, he nevertheless promised that he would not “use the Federal Government’s authority deliberately to circumvent the natural inclination of people to live in ethnically homogenous neighborhoods.” This shocked some, particularly those who assumed that Carter was on board with civil rights. However, Carter’s empathy for Irish and Italian Americans in South Bend coincided with the same type of pluralist thinking that Powell had promoted in Rodriguez, Keyes, and Bakke, the notion that certain neighborhoods might prefer culturally homogenous populations, and that diversity between such neighborhoods was worth preserving, even if it meant upholding things like school district lines that inadvertently perpetuated segregation and inequality. Carter embraced this, indicating that “bad effects” could come from “injecting” a “diametrically opposite kind of family” or a “different kind of person into a neighborhood.”3
Critics, including former civil rights activist and Carter ally Andrew Young, declared the candidate’s statement a “disaster,” prompting the white farmer to apologize. However, Carter did not amend his views so much as his terms, junking “ethnic purity” for “ethnic character” and “ethnic heritage.” Echoing Warren, Welty, and Lee, Carter confessed that “people have a tendency—and it is an unshakable tendency—to want to share common social clubs, common churches, [and] common restaurants,” meaning, of course, that he saw “nothing wrong with a heterogenous type American population,” and that there was nothing wrong with “a lower-status neighborhood that is black primarily or Latin American primarily or Polish primarily or of Germanic descent primarily.”4
President Carter joined Powell in elevating such arguments to the national level. As Carter saw it, neighborhoods that happened to be segregated along residential lines were fine, and the federal government should play no role in realigning them to achieve racial balance. He promised voters, for example, that he would not invoke his presidential authority or influence to “move people of a different ethnic background into a neighborhood just to change its character.” This had obvious implications for the rapid resegregation of American cities due to white flight, a dilemma that some hoped might be solved by locating subsidized, low-income housing in suburban districts. Carter opposed this, declaring that he did not support the construction of “high-rise, very low-cost housing” in neighborhoods with “expensive homes.”5
Carter’s sense that ethnic neighborhoods warranted preservation and that government action should not be used to disrupt community ties coincided closely with the line of reasoning followed by Powell on the Supreme Court. In decisions like Rodriguez and Keyes, Powell had made it clear that the achievement of racial balance was secondary to the preservation of local communities, and that preserving such communities promoted pluralism, if also inequality. Precisely this faith in America’s “uniquely pluralist society” informed Powell’s decision in Bakke, which celebrated diversity but shut the door on federal causes of action aimed at compensating blacks for past discrimination, a position that black activist and Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall lamented as a clear blow to civil rights.
Yet, white southerners discounted voices like Marshall’s in the late 1960s and 1970s, praising instead African Americans who expressed an aversion to integration and a pride in uniquely black cultural formations. For example, Warren wrote a paean to black activist James Farmer in the New York Review of Books, extolling Farmer’s rejection of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s doctrine of nonviolence in lieu of Black Power in the late 1960s. While many white intellectuals found the rise of Black Power unsettling, Warren found it refreshing, noting that the move away from nonviolence marked a shift in the nexus of civil rights away from black elites and toward the grassroots. “The chances for violence increase” with the “development of a mass base,” explained Warren, casting black violence as an inevitable outcome of the popularization of black protest. “For a mass base,” he argued, “involves the ignorant, the unemployed, the unemployable, and the alienated, who have no comprehension of a doctrine of nonviolence, only their ‘own fierce indignation.’” Casting King as an elitist who did not represent the majority of African Americans, Warren hinted that iterations of Black Power had always been present in the black South, a sensibility that grew more energized as the movement progressed. Of course, this was precisely the point that Stokely Carmichael had made during his conversation with Warren in 1964, two years before Carmichael rolled out the slogan “Black Power” in Greenwood, Mississippi. During that early talk, Warren had gotten the black activist to concede that even at its apex, King’s doctrine of nonviolence was not simply an aspirational tactic but also an elite effort to demonstrate to whites the superiority of black discipline and resolve.6
Although King’s self-righteous articulations of black moral superiority rankled Warren, the southern writer admired Farmer, particularly his frank claims that the victories of the early civil rights demonstrations “‘inspired a renewed search for black identity,’ the quickening of a desire for a ‘valid’ visibility.” This implied a move toward more pronounced articulations of blackness that would later be advertised by leaders like Carmichael, which Warren respected. “As the movement in general, and CORE in particular, broadened the base,” he suggested, “the emphasis on integration, which had been largely rooted in the Negro middle class, was shifted to an emphasis on race and nationalism, which had been the traditional appeal of the Negro masses.” Such an upsurge in mass interest in identity, continued Warren, had always been latent among the majority of blacks in the South and marked a welcome turn toward pluralism among black elites. To “accept” their “blackness,” he argued, African Americans needed to move “from an early simplistic idea of integration to the idea of a fluid, pluralistic society with the maximum range for individual choices.”7
Sounding a chord that went back to his novel Band of Angels, Warren took the emergence of Black Power as a positive endorsement of a new black consciousness, free from the assimilationist ethos of Brown. Warren also took Black Power as an incentive to probe his own sense of identity and the complicated relationship between that identity and the South’s history of racial violence, something that he did in a 1974 poem entitled “The Ballad of Mr. Dutcher and the Last Lynching in Gupton.” The verse tells the story of a mysterious white man with a “gray” face, a “gray coat,” and a “small gray house” who harbors a strange secret, “as though there was something he knew but knew that you’d never know what it was he knew.” As it turns out, the man is adept at lynching blacks, a revelation that emerges one “hot” afternoon when “some fool nigger, wall-eyed drunk and with a four-hit hand-gun, tried to stick up a liquor store.” The offender tries to escape but is apprehended, providing Mr. Dutcher with an opportunity to hang him, which he does.8
Warren’s poem was startling. For one, his invocation of the word “nigger” in 1974 was controversial, even offensive. Warren himself had derided the term in Who Speaks for the Negro? priding himself on the fact that his father had not allowed the word in their house. “If one of the children in our house had used the word nigger,” remembered Warren in 1965, “the roof would have fallen in.” Yet out it came in 1974. Warren could certainly have argued that this was an effort to convey historical accuracy about life in Gupton, but that only begged the question: why invoke a lynching in the nondescript hamlet of Gupton—in 1974?9
The answer appeared to lie in Warren’s theory of identity, which he also related to racial violence. For example, the identity of the poem’s main character, Mr. Dutcher, turned out to be closely bound up with his relationship to race, and in particular his special race-related skill: lynching. Thus, he ceased to become “gray” only when he snuffed out a “black” man, thereby making him decidedly “white,” his birthplace the “big white oak” from which the African American is hung. “But isn’t a man entitled,” concludes Warren’s poem, “to something he can call truly his own—even to his pride in that one talent kept, against the advice of Jesus, wrapped in a napkin, and death to hide?” While Warren had never endorsed lynching, his poem proved an odd corollary to the racial politics of the early 1970s, in particular militant assertions of Black Power. Warren’s verse seemed to imply that white violence had forged white identity, and that violence had always played a role in identity formation, whether white or black. Just as blacks were beginning to publicly and militantly define themselves against whites, in other words, so too did Warren feel comfortable publicly drawing characters who defined themselves militantly against blacks, in essence acknowledging the role that white violence had played in forging white identity in the South. This painted a very different picture of racial/ethnic difference than the one advanced by white ethnics in the North, who tended to argue that their unique identities stemmed from their places of origin, not their violent interactions with other ethnic groups. Warren suggested, by contrast, that southern identity was forged in southern conflict, and that conflict, as a social phenomenon, helped forge racial and ethnic difference. Violence in America could not simply be written off as a byproduct of “social dislocation, poverty, or illiteracy,” he suggested, “but was in fact a creative/destructive force that had helped shape the landscape of southern, and by extension American, culture.”10
Warren had made a similar point in Who Speaks for the Negro? where he recalled “an oak tree” with a “rotten and raveled length of rope hanging from a bare bough,” beside the “decrepit, shoe-box-size jail” in Guthrie, Kentucky, his hometown. The rope was the remnant of a lynching, a practice that men at the time “mysteriously” had to do but that Warren doubted he could do, for he lacked the courage. “I remember, too, that I got the idea that this was something men might do,” he recalled, “might mysteriously have to do, put a rope around a man’s neck and pull him up and watch him struggle; and I knew, in shame and inferiority, that I wouldn’t ever be man enough to do that.” It was an odd statement, suggesting that the extra-legal killing of blacks conferred some kind of manhood on its perpetrators, a manifestation of southern honor steeped in violence. For Warren, the allusion to extra-legal killings reinscribed his larger theory that southern violence had helped maintain the lines of racial difference and, by extension, racial diversity in the region. No guilt-stricken liberal, Warren seemed to acknowledge that with expressions of identity came expressions of violence, and that just as the legacy of white violence in the South had to be acknowledged as a contributor to white identity, so too did militant articulations of Black Power need to be acknowledged as inevitable, even necessary, expressions of black identity. If the rise of Black Power left northern liberals feeling disappointed and excluded, in other words, Black Power—and its rejection of nonviolence—made Warren feel vindicated, demonstrating that black calls for integration were contrived by elites and that the black masses, like all masses, ultimately enlisted violence in their cultural formation.11
That southern culture and southern diversity were forged in a violent dialectic between white and black, not geographic origin, religious tradition, or linguistic genealogy, reemerged once again in Warren’s writings in 1975 when he published yet another racially ambivalent/offensive poem entitled “Old Nigger on One-Mule Cart Encountered Late at Night When Driving Home from Party in the Back Country.” This verse, published in the prominent New Yorker, also featured the highly offensive n-word and told the story of a white man who leaves a party “in July, in Louisiana” after dancing with a beautiful young woman, only to encounter on the “wrong side of the road,” a “fool-nigger” driving a mule with a wagon filled with “rusted bed springs.” The narrator barely avoids a violent crash, possibly even his own death, but not before seeing the black man’s face, which Warren described in Edvard Munch-ian terms, replete with “bulging” eyes that gleamed “white” in the dark and a mouth “Wide open, the shape of an O, for the scream / That does not come.” This near-death experience with a black caricature enabled Warren to suggest that white and black in the South existed in violent contradistinction to one another, one driving a modern automobile and the other a primitive wagon, one coming from a day of leisure and the other toil, but both capable of killing the other, the near aversion of which proved a defining, identity-affirming moment. “Brother, Rebuker, my Philosopher past all Casuistry,” queries Warren’s narrator after nearly avoiding the head-on collision, “will you be with me when I arrive and leave my own cart of junk / Unfended from the storm of starlight . . . / To enter, by a bare field, a shack unlit?” Suddenly placing himself in the black man’s position, Warren suggested that their material disparity, the car versus the cart, the leisure versus the toil, only obscured a more complex dialectic between blacks and whites in the South, one in which blacks served not simply as “Rebuker[s]” but also, oddly, as “Brother[s],” who helped to orient individual identity within the cultural constellation of the region. In his final line, for example, Warren cast the black/white dialectic as a relationship both rife with danger and with meaning, a critical part of what enabled the South to resist the alienating forces of northern mass culture and industrialism, a point that Warren made by concluding his poem with a reference to Arcturus, the brightest star in the northern hemisphere: “Can I see Arcturus from where I stand?” He suggests that the entire episode signified a parable of southern identity, or rather the orientation of that identity vis-à-vis violence, inequality, and race.12
Old allies approved. Cleanth Brooks, one of the original Nashville Agrarians, praised Warren’s mule cart poem, noting in a letter to Warren dated April 3, 1975, that “I like very much indeed ‘Old Nigger’ etc. I think the final section is superb. It repeats one of your big themes but does so in its own way and with a special richness of tonality. Indeed, this section represents you at your very best.” Over half a century had passed since Brooks had joined Warren in their Nashville revolt, a time that might have allowed for some evolution in their thinking. After all, I’ll Take My Stand had been pilloried, Warren had publicly disavowed his “Briar Patch” essay, and the South had undergone a Second Reconstruction. Yet, just as Warren’s celebration of Jefferson Davis and recovery of the n-word in recent poems evinced a rebel spark, so too did Brooks’s salute to Warren’s uncomfortable poem hint at a return to old Confederate battle positions, a celebration of the South that was at once agrarian, plural, and unequal.13
Ironically, the very faith that Warren and Brooks retained in the South’s unreconstructed past led them to advance an early, ambitious, multicultural portrait of American letters, a project that they attempted in a two-volume textbook cowritten by Yale professor and literary scholar R. W. B. Lewis entitled American Literature: The Makers and the Making. Published in 1973, the book comprised one of the first literary anthologies in America to include a significant amount of work by black authors, a topic that Warren and Brooks began discussing in the summer of 1970, when Warren wrote Brooks encouraging the inclusion of a “black section” in the text. Volume 1 of the anthology extended from the colonial era to 1865 and included two black writers, David Walker and Frederick Douglass, along with a subsection entitled “Folk Songs of the Black People,” which canonized spirituals like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Go Down, Moses.” To Warren and Brooks, such songs reflected the “genius” of the black race, a genius that enabled them to make a case for an independent black culture forged in slavery that had nevertheless generated contributions of significant cultural value to the American scene. Citing Melville Herskovits, for example, Warren and Brooks acknowledged evidence of a “cultural continuity” between Africa and the black South, an extremely controversial topic in the 1970s as some tried to argue that slaves had lost all cultural ties to their African origins while others lobbied for an Afrocentric approach to black history, locating modern black cultural practices in African soil. Warren and Brooks acknowledged both perspectives, noting that “researchers have more and more emphasized the idea that African elements did survive, in the spirituals as in other forms of black music in America.” To establish this point, they cited James Weldon Johnson, the very black intellectual who had worked with Guy B. Johnson at UNC in the 1930s on black folklore. However, Warren and Brooks also recognized that African Americans had improvised, sometimes by inventing their own modes of expression, sometimes by modifying white influences in the New World. “The slaves, usually long out of Africa and speaking only English,” wrote Brooks and Warren, “had developed their own new culture out of whatever had been preserved from [their] racial past, whatever might be called racial temperament and sensibility, and what had been assimilated from the surrounding white world.” Warren and Brooks found no problem attributing literary significance to such black cultural innovations. In fact, they even elevated some black art forms over white, noting for example that white “spirituals” struck them as “generally dull,” while black spirituals boasted “a language marked by great originality and power.” Referencing James Weldon Johnson again, they noted that “even the phrases that have come to be accepted as the titles are often of suggestiveness and poetic beauty: ‘Go Down Moses,’ ‘Joshua Fit de Battle ob Jerico,’ [and] ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot.’” Praising the “dramatic and poetic quality” of such compositions, along with the fact that they were “highly organized” as “literary compositions,” Warren and Brooks held Negro spirituals in high regard and deemed them significant enough to represent a separate, valuable black culture, what they called the “genius of the race,” a term resonant with Zora Neale Hurston’s views of racial culture in Herod the Great.14
Volume 2 of Makers and the Making contained even more African American voices, including a section on black literature from Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance that included Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson, and a second section on the Harlem Renaissance, with excerpts from Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston’s inclusion in the anthology was notable for two reasons. One, she was the only black woman to make the collection, and, two, her work had been largely forgotten since the publication of Seraph on the Suwanee in 1948, leaving her destitute and alone in Florida until her death in 1960. Despite her descent into obscurity, however, Warren and Brooks found her early work on black folklore in the South compelling enough to include in their canon-making survey, leading them to incorporate excerpts from her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, and her ethnographic account of black communities in the South, Mules and Men, in their textbook. This was two years before Hurston enjoyed a national resurgence of interest thanks to an article in Ms. magazine in 1975.15
While modern critics could certainly fault Warren and Brooks for not giving African Americans more credit for “making” American literature, they proved ahead of their time in recognizing and incorporating black artists, including obscure ones like Hurston. Not until the 1980s would serious discussions about the exclusion and inclusion of minorities in literary canons explode on college campuses, at least some of that debate fueled by negative reactions to the Nashville Agrarians’ early emphasis on reading texts separate from their historical and political context. Yet it was Warren’s and Brooks’s tie to the New Criticism that made their inclusion of black voices particularly notable, suggesting that they acted not out of political pressure but out of a genuine sense that African Americans had in fact contributed works of literary significance to American letters, independent of politics. They even went so far as to acknowledge the formation of a distinct black culture in the American South and to theorize questions of black southern dialect. “The dialect of the spirituals,” wrote Warren and Brooks in their textbook, “is not to be accounted for as simply a malformation or corruption of the pronunciation of standard English.” On the contrary, they argued, it was “a rather old-fashioned English, filled with seventeenth and eighteenth century standard forms that, with the passage of time, have become obsolete.” To demonstrate, they noted that certain words associated with black vernacular speech actually boasted nineteenth-century English roots, including “wud” for “with,” “de” for “the,” “yer” for “your,” and “dan” for “than,” yielding sentences like “let him kiss me wud de kisses of his mouth; for yer love is better dan wine,” culled from a version of the “Song of Solomon” in Sussex, England, in 1860.16
That black southerners spoke a form of ancient English corroborated Warren’s longstanding view that Jim Crow had served as a type of cultural greenhouse, or incubator, and was not simply a system of racial repression. Warren had made this argument in his “Briar Patch” essay four decades earlier, even as the ensuing years brought with them a dramatic surge in prointegration assimilationist thought, including the recommendations of Gunnar Myrdal in American Dilemma that black institutions and traditions be destroyed. By 1978, Myrdal was mum, and the Fugitives, like Jefferson Davis, were returning to the national stage. Just as Warren, Lewis, and Brooks began to speak once again of separate racial cultures and talents, elevating black writers like Hurston to the pantheon of the “Makers” of American literature, so too were they joined by an emerging cadre of black voices, including southern black writers who were themselves interested in recovering the work of writers like Hurston as well.
This was new. During the 1930s and 1940s, black critics like Alain Locke, Sterling A. Brown, and Richard Wright had all criticized Hurston for writing in black dialect, a “socially unconscious” move that only corroborated white stereotypes of black folk. By the 1950s, Hurston’s conservative views, including her critique of Brown, further alienated her from black literary circles, leading her to a life of relative isolation in Florida. That Warren and Brooks sought to resurrect her in 1970 could conceivably have been viewed, particularly from the standpoint of older critics, as simply a white effort to focus on the lowest echelons of black life. However, the rise of Black Power, Black Studies, and a political aesthetic that came to be known as the Black Arts Movement (BAM) brought with it a renewed interest in black folklore, precisely because it was not integrated into white, mainstream culture. A young African American writer helped pioneer this move after visiting Hurston’s unmarked grave in 1973 and then publishing a widely read article about her for Ms. magazine in 1975, two years after Brooks and Warren had published Hurston in their anthology. The writer’s name was Alice Walker.17