Created Equal

As the concentration of slaves grew greater in those parts of America where the use of them was practical, one of the impractical manifestations became apparent. The Spartans, who were outnumbered by their Helots, were always in danger from revolt; in the American South the problems of control became apparent just as soon as the numbers of Negroes made them capable of any kind of resistance. There is no way to keep a man from resenting slavery; the best a slave-owning community can do is to make resistance seem hopeless. One way of doing this is to brainwash the slave from childhood with the conviction that he is inferior, stupid, weak, and irresponsible. A second method is to catch resistance in the bud and to punish it mercilessly; a third, to break up families and friends so that no possible tribal association can gather or establish itself; and fourth, and perhaps most important, to keep education, with its inevitable questioning and communication, from the slaves at all costs. All these methods were used, and still there were slave revolts, some of them of very serious proportions.

Students of brainwashing agree that it does not reach deeply into consciousness and that its effects disappear unless the pressure is maintained. The slave owner who by work, attitude, and action constantly maintained "I am not afraid of you Negroes because you are inferior, spiritually and mentally, to me" was like a man shouting that he is not afraid of the dark, unaware that he would not mention it if he were not afraid. In the South this fear of the Negro went deeper and deeper into the white population, and was kept deep by constant reiteration of their inferiority. But it is one of the paradoxes of slavery that, by its very nature, the slave becomes stronger than his master. He is there to do the hard, the strenuous, the dangerous, and unpleasant work instead of the master. Furthermore, a slave soon loses his value as property if he is crippled, weak, or sick; not only is he useless to his master, he is valueless to resale. The Negroes captured in Africa and transported under appalling conditions to the coast caused considerable losses to the traders, for the weak died, the weak died of pure heartbreak and hopelessness. Then they were subjected to the many diseases of new climates and countries, and only those Negroes who developed immunities survived. Then, those who were not clever enough to conceal their feelings and to bide their time were destroyed; and finally, a diet of course, natural foods in small quantities and a diet low in sugars and fats did for them what any doctor counsels for his weak and flabby patients. Meanwhile, a complete lack of medical care sent the slaves to herbs and soothing teas as well as to the powerful and psychiatric safety of religion. Lastly, being always in the presence of an active and overwhelmingly armed enemy gave the Negroes a community of spirit and a reliance on one another which whites have only vaguely felt in wartime when they have been under siege.

In the antebellum South, it was generally known that the Negroes were, by and large, physically strong and virile, and that, as with most physically strong people, they were sexually potent and active. This made for one more stage in the tower of fear; it was generally considered that Negroes were just that way--strong and sexy--and the fact that this strong, resistant breed had been developed by selection never occurred to the Southern whites.

It was not kindness or ethics or delicacy of feeling that kept slavery out of the Northern states in the nineteenth century; it was economics. There were some slaves in the cities and on the large farm holdings, and many of the ships that brought their dreadful cargoes of misery from the Gold Coast to the slave blocks of the South were owned, captained, and navigated by New Englanders. But the small farms of New England, poor and rocky and tiny, would not support slaves. It is easy to be uncompromisingly against an evil one does not need and cannot enjoy or profit by. But how did the Yankee abolitionists come by the idea that slavery was evil? Perhaps the Puritan strain so deeply set by the Pilgrim Fathers in the souls of their descendants could not tolerate the idea of warm climates and lush crops and the storied ease, the comfort and luxury of the great plantations of the South. The Pilgrims had hated such things in the Church and the crown in England, and they distrusted it in America; and if slavery were the foundation of such a way of life, slavery was evil, even sinful. It followed that slaves must be innocent and good. In the South many slave owners were beginning to doubt the value of the institution, and a number of the more intelligent landowners were beginning to slowly get rid of their slaves, either by sale or by emancipation. Then the power of Northern disapproval struck the South. All slave owners were evil, brutal men. Well, they weren't, and they knew they weren't. So it came about that the Southerners had to defend slavery in order to defend themselves.

By this time the question of slavery in the popular mind was no longer a matter for reason and analysis; it had become purely emotional. The American, Northern or Southern, before the war walked a jiggling tightrope. Consider, for example, my own great-grandfather. He was a Yankee from Leominster, Massachusetts, and his name was Dickson (when his family had come to Leominster in the middle of the seventeenth century it was spelled Dixon). He was a man of a large family and even larger ideas. About 1840, he picked up his wife and children, put them in a sailing ship, and departed for the Holy Land. He was a farmer and a Christian; his purpose was to convert the Jews to Christianity, but he had devised a method Jesus had not thought of: he intended to teach the Jews agriculture. Once he had his toe in the door he would gradually move Christianity in on them. It was a fairly pragmatic piece of reasoning. If the first part worked, his clients, the Jews, would be open to the second step.

Israel was at that time a Turkish province; agriculture, even the most enlightened kind of 1840 agriculture, requires labor. There was only one kind of labor--slaves. And Mr. Dickson was a convinced and unchangeable anti-slavery man. You can almost feel his clever, practical, honest Yankee mind studying the problem, perhaps as he had studied the checkerboard in a Leominster general store. He worked it out, too. He did not buy slaves; he made life contracts for some men to work his farm, the laborers signing the contracts themselves, proving their free will--though of course their owners got the money. It absolved my great-grandfather from the sin of slave owning. If his people ran away, he could have them apprehended by the Turkish police, not for escaping, but for breach of contract.

Antebellum American Negroes, if they could have known their double image, would have been very confused. To the Yankee, informed by sermons, pictures, prejudice, travelers' tales, and novels, the Negro was a mistreated, brutalized, overworked, and starved creature, sometimes a hero, sometimes a saint, but never, by any chance, a man like other men. To the Southerner, informed by his fears, his prejudices, and the necessity for maintaining discipline, the Negro was a lazy, stupid animal, who was always dangerous, clever, tricky, thievish, and lecherous.

We know very little about what the Negroes thought of their masters. They shared their thoughts and feelings only with one another and communicated with their masters with a studied, practical politeness. I do not mean to say there were no loyalties or loves or kindnesses between white and black. There were, but not of the texture of the feeling for their own kind, and this withdrawn separateness, driven deep into generations, still exists. A friend of mine, a Southerner, said recently, "I can never talk to a Negro. I want to, but I just don't know what to talk about to him."

In the years leading up to 1861 the North and South growled and argued, compromised and were split again, muttered and grumbled toward war. New territories were layering and thrusting themselves, preparing to be states; and the border extended westward with quarreling over whether the new states should be slave or free. This was just a way of deciding on one kind of economy or another. Slavery had little to do with it except to give the differs an emotional platform. And the slaves, except as vehicles for that emotion, had nothing whatever to do with it.

In the dreadful war that ensued, the slaves were never taken into consideration; and after years of destruction and death, when the great Proclamation of Emancipation was issued it was timed and announced, not as an instrument of freedom, but as a military measure designed to confuse and dismay the already tottering South. We do not know what Lincoln would have done or could have done to smooth the way of transition had he lived on. What did happen was dreadful. Millions of slaves, blinking and helpless, emerged into the blinding light of freedom, and they were no more fitted and prepared for it than a man would be who after a lifetime spent in prison was forced into the complication, the uncertainty, and the responsibility of the outside world. If time could have been allowed for training, for transition; if the South had been able to understand that the change was necessary and inevitable and had put it into motion locally and slowly, the story might have been different. But emancipation was forced on the South and the white Southerner found himself surrounded by a vengeful, savage, and untrained enemy. He no longer had any responsibility for the Negro. He had only to consider self-defense and the protection of his family and his neighbors.

Southern Americans have throughout our history shown a gift for the military. They fought the Civil War with incredible bravery and ingenuity, and held out with pure spirit against the overwhelming Northern superiority in numbers, equipment, and supplies. When they were finally defeated and the slaves were freed against their will, they reacted as a military nation will when it is beaten, surrounded, occupied, and infiltrated. They invented a new kind of guerilla warfare and went right on fighting. Their secret and close-knit orders were designed to keep a constant pressure of terror on the bewildered and angry Negroes. Preserving "law and order" meant keeping a tight and ferocious reign on the Negroes through the armed strength of law-enforcement officers of the whites' own choosing, and at the same time making the laws to be enforced--particularly those laws which denied the blacks access to the making or changing of laws. And Southern representatives to the Northern government developed techniques of minority control through the infiltration of legislative committees, while their brilliant use of the filibuster closed off nearly every avenue of investigation and change.

The efforts of the Southerners were vastly successful; the amendments to the Constitution guaranteeing the Negroes their freedom and their right to participate in government were completely annulled by local custom, law, and law-enforcement officers, so that for nearly one-hundred years Negroes, who often outnumbered the whites, were neither enfranchised or free. Schools, neighborhoods, professions, and white facilities were closed against them. Infractions of the law drew one kind of punishment for Negroes and another for whites, while any organization designed for the self-protection of the Negro was mercilessly broken up and scattered by the law when possible, and by secret terror tactics when the law did not suffice. For slavery there were substituted the servitudes of debt, of need, of ignorance, and the constant reminder of inferiority. It is true that Negroes were free to go away if they wished to and could; and many did, only to find that the North, which had fought for their emancipation, would not accept them save on the same terms as the South applied.

During Reconstruction, when many Negroes were elected to the state legislatures in the South, they voted for things they had never had; and among these was education. In the few short years of Negro participation in the Reconstruction of the South more school laws were written than at nay time before or since; and when the black legislators were kicked out of office and disenfranchised by the growing power of the whites, these laws were removed from the books. Such was the rage of whites that the very word "school" seems to have come under a ban, and many Southern schools, which had once been very fine, slipped into a shadow from which they have not yet emerged. It's a crazy thing; the whites denied themselves candy for fear someone else might get some!

When the war was over, my Great-Aunt Carrie, a tiny woman of whalebone and steel, daughter of that same Dickson who had gone to Palestine to convert the Jews to Christianity, this wee woman carrying a little satchel of contributions from her neighbors in Leominster, Massachusetts, went South and opened a school for Negro children. She was as tough as her father had been. No sooner had she opened her school and assembled a class of pickaninnies than the Ku Klux Klan burned it down; she opened another and kept the children in at night, and the white-robed horsemen fired through the walls while the children and Great-Aunt Carrie lay on the floor. With the little black kids helping her, she raised a sandbag defense inside the building, and cooked grits in the school fireplace to feed herself and her charges. Her spirit never gave out, but her money did; and the grits ran out too--for, while Negroes crept near late at night bringing what food they could scrape together, the Klan soon closed that gap, and finally, weak from starvation and weighing less than her smallest charge, Aunt Carrie capitulated and retreated with her flag flying. It must be admitted that the Southern gentlemen did not disarm her; she marched away carrying her weapons--a Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, and McGuffey's First Reader.

Now, a hundred years later, American Negroes are surging toward the equality we promised them and did not give them in 1867, and that surge was started by four things, three of which Aunt Carrie was allowed to take away: religion, art, and learning. The fourth thing she did not have, but the Negroes have it now: economic importance and impact. Negro leaders for the most part are educated, literate, thoughtful, and experienced men. The thrust of the movement, based on religion, has almost the discipline and force of religion itself. And Negroes now have access to the wealth and to the ability to distribute it; businessmen all over the country have finally come to see that what is bad for Negroes is eventually bad for business, and so for America.

In the constant pressure of the Negro causes, some thoughtless people ask, "What are they after? What do they want?" It's very simple. They want exactly the same things other Americans want--peace, comfort, security, and love. The human wants everything he can conceive of and, as through education and understanding his concepts grows [sic] broader, he will want more and different things--perhaps even better things.

There is no question that the Negroes will get their equality--at law; not as soon as they should, but sooner than pessimists believe. But legal equality is only the smallest part of being equal. It is one of the less attractive of human traits that everyone wants to look down on someone, to be better than someone else; and, since this is symptomatic of insecurity, humans in general do not seem to be very secure. The hurt in the Negro and the deep-seated suspicion of the white is matched only by the fear and suspicion of the white toward the Negro; and while there remains any vestige of such feeling, true equality cannot be achieved.

Some years ago, a very intelligent Negro man worked for me in New York. One afternoon through the window I saw this man coming home from the store. As he rounded the corner, a drunk, fat white woman came barreling out of a saloon, slipped on the icy pavement, and fell. Instantly, the man turned at right angles and crossed the street, keeping as far away from the woman as he could. When he came into the house, I said, "I saw that. Why did you do it?"

"Oh, that. Well, I guess I thought if I went to help her she was so drunk and mad she might start yelling 'rape.'"

"That was a pretty quick reaction," I said.

Maybe," he said; "but I've been practicing to be a Negro a long time."

I have written at such length about this problem because any attempt to describe the America of today must take into account the issue of racial equality, around which much of our thinking and our present-day attitudes turn. We will not have overcome the trauma that slavery has left on our society, North and South, until we cannot remember whether the man we just spoke to in the street was Negro or white.

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