The assumptions that were held valid in my boyhood were all wrong. So much has been said about them that I mention them reluctantly, but their strength is attested by the fact that many, many still trust them. And not merely Southern whites, and the misinformed, and the ignorant; nor whites alone, but blacks. Hodding Carter, novelist and Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, no doubt deserves his reputation as a Southern liberal, but only a few months ago he wrote of “a common insistence upon white political domination in the South,” which is “as unbreakable as anything woven by the mind of man,” and declared himself unalterably committed to race segregation on the ground of preserving the white race’s “ethnic integrity.” Somewhat earlier, the Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture had said, “The yellow people, the brown people and the blacks”—not even bothering to add “people”—“are mentally unfit for directors in our form of government.” And in 1951 Kerr Scott, the Governor of North Carolina (“most liberal state in the South”) echoed the Georgian. Asked by a Negro reporter why his inaugural promise had been fulfilled only to the extent of making one Negro appointment, the Governor snapped, “If I were you I’d never have asked that question. I have given you [people] more than you can handle.... That’s why I tell you you should never have asked that question.” So the old assumptions hold: the assumption of the Negro’s inherent inferiority; of tragic social and cultural consequences if segregation is broken down on any but the most superficial levels; of Negroes preferring segregation, and many more. They were taken on in the first place as rationalizations by means of which the white man tried, as Gunnar Myrdal says, “to build a bridge of reason” between his acclaimed equalitarian creed and his countervailing deed. Because of this guilt-ridden adoption, they were the more avidly loved. They were also the more furiously drummed into the general consciousness where, reverberating like thunder in a valley, they have rolled out the tune to which white people and Negroes have danced since 1900—the Negroes because they must. It is a static but a curiously hectic dance. We gyrate through its complicated patterns with responses as conditioned and involuntary as reflexes. In spite of all the fervent clapping and shouting, our reactions to the race problem are not really emotional and intellectual, but muscular. I cannot now, as long ago I could, believe in the moral and intellectual conviction of the demagogues, of men like Richard Russell and James Byrnes and Strom Thurmond; for I cannot believe that the findings of modern science are so cabined and confined, even in South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi, as to have escaped the knowledge of these educated men. The older demagogues had this to excuse them; they were ignorant. The younger ones are knowing puppeteers, cynically manipulating the strings of the past.