“Letter to a Northern
Editor”
William Faulkner
March 5, 1956
My
family has lived for generations in
one same small section of north Mississippi. My great-grandfather held slaves
and went to Virginia in command of a Mississippi infantry regiment in 1861. I
state this simply as credentials for the sincerity and factualness of what I
will try to say.
From
the beginning of this present phase of the race problem in the South, I have
been on record as opposing the forces in my native country which would keep the
condition out of which this present evil and trouble has grown. Now I must go
on record as opposing the forces outside the South which would use legal or
police compulsion to eradicate that evil overnight. I was against compulsory
segregation. I am just as strongly against compulsory integration. Firstly of
course from principle. Secondly because I dont believe it will work.
There
are more Southerners than I who believe as I do and have taken the same stand I
have taken, at the same price of contumely and insult and threat from other
Southerners which we foresaw and were willing to accept because we believed we
were helping our native land which we love to accept a new condition which it
must accept whether it wants to or not. That is, by still being Southerners,
yet not being a part of the general majority Southern point of view; by being
present yet detached, committed and attainted neither by Citizens’ Council nor
NAACP; by being in the middle, being in position to say to any incipient
irrevocability: ‘Wait, wait now, stop and consider first.’
But
where will we go, if that middle becomes untenable? if we have to vacate it in
order to keep from being trampled? Apart from the legal aspect, apart even from
the simple incontrovertible immorality of discrimination by race, there was
another simply human quantity which drew us to the Negro’s side: the simple
human instinct to champion the underdog. But if we, the (comparative) handful
of Southerners I have tried to postulate, are compelled by the simple threat
of being trampled if we dont get out of the way, to vacate that middle where
we could have worked to help the Negro improve his condition—compelled to move
for the reason that no middle any longer exists—we will have to make a new
choice. And this time the underdog will not be the Negro since he, the Negro,
will now be a segment of the topdog, and so the underdog will be that white
embattled minority who are our blood and kin. These non-Southern forces will
now say, ‘Go then. We clont want you because we wont need you again.’ My reply
to that is, ‘Are you sure you wont?’
So
I would say to the NAACP and all the organizations who would compel immediate
and unconditional integration: ‘Go slow now. Stop now for a time, a moment.
You have the power now; you can afford to withhold for a moment the use of it
as a force. You have done a good job, you have jolted your opponent off-balance
and he is now vulnerable. But stop there for a moment; dont give him the
advantage of a chance to cloud the issue by that purely automatic sentimental
appeal to that same universal human instinct for automatic sympathy for the
underdog simply because he is under.’
And
I would say this too. The rest of the United States knows next to nothing about
the South. The present idea and picture which they hold of a people decadent
and even obsolete through inbreeding and illiteracy— the inbreeding a result of
the illiteracy and the isolation so that there is nothing else to do at
night—as to be a kind of species of juvenile delinquents with a folklore of
blood and violence, yet who, like juvenile delinquents, can be controlled by
firmness once they are brought to believe that the police mean business, is as
baseless and illusory as that one a generation ago of (oh yes, we subscribed to
it too) columned porticoes and magnolias. The rest of the United States assumes
that this condition in the South is so simple and so uncomplex that it can be
changed tomorrow by the simple will of the national majority backed by legal
edict. In fact, the North does not even recognise what it has seen in its own
newspapers. I have at hand an editorial from the New York Times of February
ioth on the rioting at the University of Alabama because of the admission as a
student of Miss Lucy, a Negro. The editorial said: ‘This is the first time that
force and violence have become a part of the question.’ That is not correct.
To all Southerners, no matter which side of the question of racial equality
they supported, the first implication, and—to the Southerner— even promise, of
force and violence was the Supreme Court decision itself. After that, by any
standards at all and following as inevitably as night and day, was the case of
the three white teen-agers, members of a field trip group from a Mississippi
high school (and, as teen-agers do, probably wearing the bright parti-colored
blazers or jackets blazoned across the back with the name of the school) who
were stabbed in passing on a Washington street by Negroes they had never seen
before and who apparently had never seen them before either; and that of the
Till boy and the two Mississippi juries which freed the defendants from both
charges; and of the Mississippi garage attendant killed by a white man
because, according to the white man, the Negro filled the tank of the white
man’s car full of gasoline when all the white man wanted was two dollars’
worth.
This
problem is far beyond a mere legal one. It is even far beyond the moral one it
is and still was a hundred years ago in i
86o, when many Southerners, including Robert Lee, recognised it as a moral
one at the very instant when they in their turn elected to champion the
underdog because that underdog was blood and kin and home. The Northerner is
not even aware yet of what that war really proved. He assumes that it merely
proved to the Southerner that he was wrong. It didn’t do that because the
Southerner already knew he was wrong and accepted that gambit even when he
knew it was the fatal one. What that war should have done, but failed to do,
was to prove to the North that the South will go to any length, even that fatal
and already doomed one, before it will accept alteration of its racial
condition by mere force of law or economic threat.
Since
I went on record as being opposed to compulsory racial inequality, I have
received many letters. A few of them approved. But most of them were in opposition.
And a few of these were from southern Negroes, the only difference being that
they were polite and courteous instead of being threats and insults, saying in
effect: ‘Please, Mr Faulkner, stop talking and be quiet. You are a good man and
you think you are helping us. But you are not helping us. You are doing us
harm. You are playing into the hands of the NAACP so that they are using you to
make trouble for our race that we dont want. Please hush, you look after your
white folks’ trouble and let us take care of ours.’ This one in particular was
a long one, from a woman who was writing for and in the name of the pastor and
the entire congregation of her church. It went on to say that the Till boy got
exactly what he asked for, coming down there with his Chicago ideas, and that
all his mother wanted was to make money out of the role of her bereavement.
Which sounds exactly like the white people in the South who justified and even
defended the crime by declining to find that it was one.
We
have had many violent inexcusable personal crimes of race against race in the
South, but since 1919 the major examples of communal race tension have been
more prevalent in the North, like the Negro family who were refused acceptance
in the white residential district in Chicago, and the Korean-American who
suffered for the same reason in Anaheim, Calif. Maybe it is because our
solidarity is not racial, but instead is the majority white segregationist plus
the Negro minority like my correspondent above, who prefer peace to equality.
But suppose the line of demarcation should become one of race: the white
minority like myself compelled to join the white segregation majority no matter
how much we oppose the principle of inequality; the Negro minority who want
peace compelled to join the Negro majority who advocate force, no matter how
much that minority wanted only peace?
So
the Northerner, the liberal, does not know the South. He cant know it from his
distance. He assumes that he is dealing with a simple legal theory and a simple
moral idea. He is not. He is dealing with a fact: the fact of an emotional
condition of such fierce unanimity as to scorn the fact that it is a minority
and which will go to any length and against any odds at this moment to justify
and, if necessary, defend that condition and its right to it.
So
I would say to all the organizations and groups which would force integration
on the South by legal process: ‘Stop now for a moment. You have shown the
Southerner what you can do and what you will do if necessary; give him a space
in which to get his breath and assimilate that knowledge; to look about and see
that (1) nobody is going to force integration on him from the outside; (2) That
he himself faces an obsolescence in his own land which only he can cure; a
moral condition which not only must be cured but a physical condition which
has got to be cured if he, the white Southerner, is to have any peace, is not
to be faced with another legal process or maneuver every year, year after year,
for the rest of his life.’
[Life, March 5, 1956]