IN NOVEMBER 1962, James Baldwin disavowed the idea of racial integration, calling white America a “burning house.” “I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be ‘accepted’ by white people,” exclaimed Baldwin in the New Yorker, for whites “had robbed black people of their liberty,” “profited” from their crime, and corrupted America in the process. They were “criminal,” Baldwin charged, “terrified of sensuality,” and could not, “in the generality, be taken as models of how to live.” By contrast, African Americans possessed a more humane set of “standards,” along with “other sources of vitality” that whites would do well to adopt. “The only way” that America could advance, argued Baldwin, was if whites agreed to “become black” and “to become part of that suffering and dancing country that [they] now watch wistfully from the heights of [their] lonely power.”1
It was a startling assertion, not least because it challenged the prevailing view that African Americans wanted desperately to integrate into mainstream, white American society. This was the position taken by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1950, and it was adopted by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954, in a landmark ruling styled Brown v. Board of Education, that declared integration the solution to America’s racial “dilemma.”2
Baldwin objected.
And he was not alone. In an early version of his novel Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner referred to the plantation owned by his main character, Thomas Sutpen, as a “burning house,” a vainglorious ruin forged out of equal parts ambition and oppression, a symbol not simply of the Old South but perhaps America itself. Although Baldwin would criticize Faulkner’s defense of southern moderates in 1956, both authors agreed that there were serious problems with mainstream American society, and that integration into that society was not necessarily a categorical good. Others joined, including Robert Penn Warren, who sat down with Baldwin in 1964 to discuss the implications of integration for the region. He took Baldwin’s point that whites and blacks possessed different cultural traditions and that federally mandated integration aimed for a world where “everything is exactly alike and everybody is exactly alike,” a monocultural dystopia that eliminated diversity and ordered whites and blacks into the same burning house.3
This yielded a paradox. How could racial justice be served without racial integration? And had the southern system of segregation fostered perceptions and/or manifestations of racial difference that were somehow worth preserving? Had the Jim Crow South, in other words, fostered diversity? Such questions occupied a cadre of prominent intellectuals, mainly writers, in the 1950s and 1960s, all of whom possessed close ties to the eleven former Confederate states. They included Robert Penn Warren, James Baldwin, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, and Alice Walker.4 This book recovers their exchanges and, in so doing, provides a dramatic rereading of Jim Crow’s career. Although most historians emphasize Jim Crow as a system characterized by racial humiliation, violence, and terror, which it certainly was, many of the authors featured in this book added nuance to that story by balancing southern violence with southern art and suggesting that the segregated South, terrifying as it was, also proved fertile soil for artistic innovation and cultural production, a region that had escaped the homogenizing effects of northern industrialism and mass culture, and whose very system of racial segregation had fostered cultural development.5 For such voices—white and black—ending segregation was less important than providing opportunities and jobs from within a framework that also respected racial traditions, racial identities, and loosely defined notions of racial culture. Such debates constituted an important, if counterintuitive chorus to the epic saga of civil rights at the time, which focused on desegregating public accommodations and schools.6
Why remember this now? The critiques of integration mounted by the writers in this book invite us to reconsider the Supreme Court’s landmark decision integrating southern schools in 1954, suggesting that it may have hinged on a false assumption. Hailed as one of the Court’s greatest opinions, Brown v. Board of Education cited a sociological study that declared black traditions, institutions, and culture “pathological,” an indictment that left Baldwin, Ellison, and Hurston outraged.7 “I regard the U.S. Supreme Court as insulting rather than honoring my race,” noted Hurston, balking at the presumption that African Americans wanted to junk their history for the opportunity to rub shoulders with whites.8 Ellison agreed, noting that there was much of great “value” and “richness” to black cultural traditions, even as there were deep problems with mainstream white society. “Lynching and Hollywood, faddism and radio advertising are products of the ‘higher’ [white] culture,” argued Ellison. “Why, if my culture is pathological, must I exchange it for these?”9
Ellison’s question raised a point that warrants debate, even today. As black journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates noted in his acclaimed 2015 book Between the World and Me, the “heritage” of white America may be one of such “enslavement,” “rape,” and “crime” that the “dream” of integration is itself undesirable. “I would not have you live like them,” Coates enjoined his son in the book, for whites live in a state of “ignorance” that blacks, by their very “vulnerability,” do not, a tragic condition that nevertheless places African Americans “closer to the meaning of life.” Quite intentionally, Coates modeled his work after one of Baldwin’s 1962 essays, leaving one to wonder whether white America remains a burning house, and whether the integration of blacks into mainstream white society may be less of a priority, even today, than the construction of a radical critique of that society, one that is “closer to the meaning of life,” even if that means foregoing liberal, integrationist efforts at reform.10
Several writers featured in this book tended to think yes, even whites. For example, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, and Robert Penn Warren all believed that the push for racial integration stood in tension with the preservation of diversity, or “pluralism,” for integration implied that everyone would be made the same (same wealth, same culture, even the same ideas). Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Alice Walker agreed, maintaining that the pains African Americans had been forced to endure under Jim Crow’s harsh, violent regime had actually made African Americans morally and spiritually superior, not inferior, to their violent, racist white peers.
This leads to a final reason for focusing on critiques of integration in the 1950s and 1960s now. As this book demonstrates, the worldview articulated by southern writers at that time helps to explain much about America today. For example, Brown’s emphasis on integration is generally viewed as a precursor to our current interest in diversity and to the Supreme Court’s elevation of diversity as a constitutional ideal. However, the architect of that ideal was a Supreme Court justice from Virginia named Lewis F. Powell, Jr., who happened to frame diversity in the same way that many of the southern writers in this book did, as a bulwark against big government, a preservative of local particularity, and a guarantor of cultural innovation and growth. In case after case, Powell invoked pluralism as a rationale for tolerating lingering inequality—not equality—in the United States, a move that historians have overlooked, and that this book terms “southern pluralism.” Once we place Powell’s opinions in the context of southern letters at the time, we begin to see a legal landscape very different from the one charted in Brown, a constitutional legacy that prizes diversity over equality, that celebrates black perspectives but shies from big-state solutions to social problems, and that links diversity not to affirmative action but to other goals, including institutional freedom and pluralism, both more permanent than the Court’s current emphasis on racial equality, which it has capped at twenty-five years.11
Powell’s opinions are woven into this book, as are the opinions of another Supreme Court justice who hailed from the South: Clarence Thomas. Born in Pin Point, Georgia, in 1948, Thomas grew up reading Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, agreeing with them that there was nothing inherently inferior about black institutions. And he, like Zora Neale Hurston, came to believe that Brown’s emphasis on segregation and psychological harm was misplaced, a dismissal of black achievement and an endorsement of white supremacy that prompted him to endorse a form of southern pluralism even more radical than that espoused by Lewis Powell.12
Using literature to shed light on a forgotten strand of southern thought, this book provides a radically new perspective on the struggle for civil rights by showing how southern intellectuals invoked the values of diversity and pluralism to critique integration. It concentrates on a prominent but also discrete cast of characters, mainly writers, who interacted in compelling, sometimes surprising ways, and in so doing asks fresh questions. How, for example, did cosmopolitan southerners—not violent extremists like George Wallace—but intellectuals and writers like Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor explain Jim Crow? Why did they insist on writing novels, short stories, poems, and memoirs that skirted emphatic support for civil rights and softened, instead, the story of segregation, downplaying its violence and extolling its tendency to encourage pluralism, two cultures—one white and one black—each with its own institutions, traditions, even identities? Why did they celebrate these identities, even arguing that they were threatened by the Supreme Court’s order to desegregate southern schools in Brown v. Board of Education? And how did prominent black writers like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston participate in this debate, at times disputing but also, more often than one might expect, agreeing with their white counterparts? Was Brown’s insistence on assimilation a form of cultural imperialism? Was there a link between defending segregation and promoting diversity? Was integration really a burning house?13