Social Changes and Their Effects on Race Relations in the South

Abstract

T HERE has been a disposition, on the part of some observers, to regard the increasing evidences of racial tension in the South and in the country at large as prima facie evidence of the deterioration of race relations. In an earlier article, it was speculated that the racial incidents in themselves were not conclusive, rather that they were symptoms of basic social changes which, in the long run, might well prove wholesome. Recent developments seem to support these speculations. For not only have these developments appeared to be shaping themselves into a new pattern, but many southern leaders are beginning to recognize that the new conditions require new attitudes and techniques and are ready to take action which, a short while ago, seemed remote and unlikely. The usual assumptions back of the popular estimates about the state of race relations have been that where there is quiescence and an undisturbed status quo there are most satisfactory and wholesome race relations. But just such quiescence may be an indication of immobility and social stagnation. The racial as well as various other social tensions that have followed in the wake of the war are a symptom of social changes; and these changes in themselves may be interpreted as the incidental effects of profound forces moving toward a new equilibrium. As might be expected in a time of rapid change, many of these developments are imperfectly understood and regarded as a threat to traditions and customs of central importance. Racial incidents continue to occur, and there is considerable surface display of hostility. Where there is preoccupation with race and relative racial positions in the social system of the region, it is inevitable that many developments which are essentially non-racial in character will be invested with dangerous racial implications. Total war is a cataclysmic national event that shakes and loosens many traditions from their deep moorings, whether these traditions are economic, religious, racial or romantic. The impersonal and direct imperatives of sudden war cannot trace a careful path around the embedded orthodoxies of race any more than can a flood or earthquake. When these racial traditions have been disturbed, when the comfortable patterns of living have been broken or warped, a sense of insecurity is inevitable. New guides to behavior must be worked out, new situations must be met and solved by reference to new or at least altered values. The race problem in such situations becomes more personal, and in becoming more personal it becomes more emotional. The changes that the war brought to the South reached into the lives of its people and brought about several major crises. Although the South is primarily agricultural, it shared richly in the appropriations for cantonments, shipyards, and munitions plants. Industrial production in general was enormously accelerated. A result was the uprooting and migration of hundreds of thousands of workers from relatively isolated and rural areas to the cities and production centers. They carried their personal backgrounds with them into these new situations, and tried, as was natural, to find a basis of adjustment which would enable them to keep the old values so necessary to their sense of personal security. This alone was a personal and an industrial revolution of great significance crowded into a brief period. The major training camps for the ten million or more troops are in the South, and this has brought into new and disturbing contact northern Negroes and northern whites with southern Negroes and southern whites. The demands for manpower have pressed against the customary racial occupational categories; high wages, together with national minimum wage legislation have disturbed another traditional racial differential. The familiar and seemingly indispensable Negro domestic, unprotected by employment legislation and long underpaid by national standards, has disappeared into the new war industries, leaving a trail of dismay and bitter resentment among housewives. Changes have also been taking place in southern agriculture. The country has given up millions of its workers to the city, yet it has been able to 1 See SOCIAL FORCES, 23 (October 1944), pp. 2732.