University of Virginia Library

Southern Tragedy

George Wallace, Lester Maddox and the
Law'n'Order Singers are wailing a different
tune nowadays. It seems that only the blacks
and the radicals are guilty when the gang
starts in to reminiscing about respect for the
laws of the land. If you happen to be a
Southern segregationist, you can decide for
yourself what laws ought to be obeyed and
what laws can be broken with impunity.

Of course, there's little possibility that the
Congress will pass a law making it a federal
crime to cross state lines for the purpose of
counselling others to defy the Supreme Court.
No one from the Justice Department will ever
try to make a case about what George Wallace
was thinking when he crossed a state line and
try to get him put away for those thoughts.
This country doesn't work that way, at least
when it's being run according to the Southern
strategy.

So Wallace, Maddox, Williams and the rest
of the crew will be allowed to write another
chapter in the tragedy that is the modern
South. They have reason on their side. The
quality of Southern education will be hurt
through forced integration. You can't take
previously separated black students and white
students and throw them into the same school
and expect them to blend together harmoniously.
Successful integration requires a
great deal of planning and understanding on
the part of all concerned.

Now the reactionary forces led by the
Deep Southern governors are claiming foul,
saying that the Supreme Court hasn't allowed
them the time they need to effect reasonable
integration plans rather than the artificial and
inefficient guidelines that are being forced
upon them. But it's been fifteen years since
the Supreme Court declared that segregation
must end; fifteen years in which the
government was hardly zealous in enforcing
that decree; fifteen years in which the South
might have been planning and working on
gradual, successful and full integration; and
fifteen years in which people like Governor
Wallace have callously deluded their constituents
into believing that the South could
stand forever astride the path of progress.

This is the tragedy of the South; for
generations, its leaders have failed in their
responsibility to lead. They have instead
reaped the easy political harvest available to
those who would disenfranchise great blocs of
voters and appeal to the basest instincts of the
rest. We find it difficult to believe that the
people of the South were irrevocably
committed to resisting integration in 1954.
They probably preferred segregation, but had
it been made clear by a responsible political
elite that integration was inevitable and could
be lived with, the common Southerner would
have accepted the fact. But the South
produced, instead, an irresponsible band of
leaders who led the region to the impasse it
faces today where none of the options open
to it are particularly palatable.

The odds are that the South will not break
away from this fruitless and masochistic
resistance to integration until the people wake
up and reject the leadership offered by such
men as George Wallace and Lester Maddox.
We can only be thankful that Virginia's
elected leaders are showing enough sense to
avoid associating themselves with the demagogues
of the Deep South.