The Left's Silent South

Abstract

Danville, Virginia, contrary to much of the advertising proclaiming a New South, seems to have died decades ago. With only the Dan River Textile Mill in town, most young people have for generations left town seeking employment elsewhere. Yet in 1963, the Freedom bug, or whatever one might call the quasi-apocalyptic stirrings that fueled the courage of southern blacks, hit Danville. Black people, primarily the young, without any real sense of those forces that had conspired to deny them opportunities took to the streets. Black ministers, who had heretofore been willing to maintain their intraethnic elite status through an acquiescence clothed in a fundamentalist attire, both instigated and followed the groundswell. From such traditional bastions of Negro servitude as Liberty Hill, Shiloh and Bethal Baptist Churches, and through such unlikely figures as Bishop Campbell of Bibleway Church, International, the masses came forth, not as revolutionaries nor as heroes, but stirred by simple visions of what is right. High school and junior high school students, marginally employed dropouts, gas station attendants, janitors, and domestic servants, providing strength for each other merely by being present, marched that mile or so 261