The American Heroes Channel, the History Channel, The Smithsonian Channel and perhaps others offer splendid documentaries on the Allied victories over Germany and Japan in World War II. Sara and I seldom miss one. I've always wondered what feelings churn inside Germans and Japanese who were in that war when they see, for example, the Nazi swastika falling from the roof of the Reichstag and shattering in the closing hours of the Battle for Berlin, the surrender of the entire German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the formal surrender of Japan to Gen. MacArthur on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo harbor and other iconic moments of their total defeat.
I don't have a clue how those former enemies feel, but I know exactly how the mirror opposite feels, because I'm there and I'm it! Those Germans and Japanese are watching images of their nations' evil designs that failed. I'm a Southern white man watching my own just and righteous designs that failed.
And I don't need any "documentaries." The failure of America's fight against racism is more and more the lead story in the news. And it's increasingly painful because we were sure we had it licked. We won Brown vs. Board of Education in the Supreme Court, thereby eliminating the "separate but equal" excuse for segregated schools. We passed the Civil Rights Act. Racism was crumbling before our eyes. And we thought we'd driven the final stake through the poisonous heart of racism by electing a black president.
Apparently, racism has no trouble surviving stakes through the heart. At least back in what we thought were the saddest days of racism in America there were no groups who openly wanted white people dead, beginning with our policemen.
We know where the followers of Martin Luther King stood. We know where the openly racist Southern governors stood. There was another "team" in that fight that's never mentioned. It's the team I belonged to, young white Southerners who thought racism was ridiculous, segregation was absurd, the Ku Klux Klansmen were clowns and discrimination was simply low-class, and we were having none of it.
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We changed the climate that made justice possible. If that climate had remained primitive it's doubtful if Northern "Freedom Riders" would have made it as far south as the Virginia-North Carolina line.
We felt no need to "keep the black back and the brown down," a popular racist "joke" at the time. During all those years when we thought our fight was won, Northerners were amazed to see that race relations were better in the South than in the North. Why should that be a surprise? Down South, even during segregation, blacks and whites were in one another's lives. When the maid came to clean she first had a cup of coffee with her white "Madame" to talk with genuine concern about the upcoming surgery facing the maid's husband. There wasn't much of that up North.
When the law abolished white supremacy, whites and blacks were left with all that acquaintanceship. My generation of white Southerners was proud when our "superior" race relationship was noticed by people from other parts of the country and those from foreign countries.
My generation-mates, mind you, were not the first "good white people" in the South. Our elders moved the needle from implacable hatred and no relationship whatsoever up to blacks and whites being business partners. Business was usually sharing profits from working good "bottom land," and the rules were as follows. The black partner would show up at the "service entrance" of the white landowner's residence. The white partner would welcome his no-longer-slave partner, and they'd sit down and deal over the kitchen table. Afterward the landowner's wife and children might come to the kitchen for a greeting with their family partner, who also took his leave through other than the front door.
That "other than the front door" habit was clung to as the last vestige of a once secure White Supremacy.
And so deeply ingrained was that habit that when the world-acknowledged-and-reknown inventor of "Bee-Bop," Dizzy Gillespie, was given a banquet at the home of the white mayor of his hometown, Cheraw, South Carolina, Dizzy showed up for the party honoring him at the mayor's kitchen door!
Remember Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong? When anybody asked him, "What's new?" he'd get a 500-watt smile and a rasping reply of, "White folks still in the lead!"
There were plenty of high notes we've been celebrating over the past half-century when we thought racism had been thrust to its rest, but "White folks still in the lead!" is not the one that we thought signaled our success.
That one was given to us by Dr. Frank Graham, president of the University of North Carolina, who said, "It takes the black and the white keys of the piano to play the Star-Spangled Banner."
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