The Southern Case for School Segregation — John Shaqi
The Southern Case for School SegregationKilpatrick, James Jackson
History
The Southern Case for School Segregation
Kilpatrick, James Jackson
African Americans -- Segregation; Segregation -- Southern States
And until quite recently, as the census records show, the
agricultural society was our prevailing society. Moreover, the 1960
census figures on urbanization, within the context of the South, can
be highly misleading. A great part of this statistically “urban”
population lives in towns so small that the towns are spiritually
and economically a part of the rural countryside around them. There
were in 1960 only seventy metropolitan areas of more than 50,000
population in the thirteen States, and twenty of these were in
Texas. In Mississippi, Jackson has edged past 100,000, but no other
city in the State is even close to that mark. Outside of Fort Smith
and Little Rock, Arkansas is a State of small towns. This is even
truer of North Carolina; fewer than one-fourth of the State’s four
and a half million residents live in the six principal cities (the
largest is Charlotte, with a metropolitan population of 272,000).
The others are scattered through scores of towns and villages.
Georgia is statistically “urban” now, but urban attitudes are largely
concentrated in Atlanta, and perhaps four other cities. Beyond
Charleston, Columbia, and perhaps Greenville, South Carolina is
almost as countrified today as it was in the time of Calhoun.
The slowness of life in the country, where diversions are few and
the reasons for haste almost nil, tends to breed men who are highly
resistant to change. They know, as well as they know anything, that
change and progress are not necessarily to be equated; and for all
the tub-thumping that goes on in local chambers of commerce, many
a Southerner is not so sure he is in favor of progress anyhow. The
Northern Neck of Virginia, for one example, has a positive antipathy
to altering anything.
The conservatism that is identified with the South, as W. J.
Cash remarked in his great work, _The Mind of the South_, runs
continuously with the past. It embraces also a strong sense of
community, of _place_, of local institutions and families and
classes. Primogeniture vanished with the American Revolution, but its
vestigial spirit may be observed at every hand; whole generations
of Randolphs have been lawyers, and whole generations of Tuckers
have been doctors and ministers. The South is a land not only of
“Juniors,” but of “IIIs” and even “IVs.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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