The Present Status of Race Relations in the South

T HERE is fairly widespread agreement that race relations in the South have deteriorated in character since the beginning of the war. This, of course, is popular agreement based upon the assumption that quiescence and absence of racial tensions are a major, if not exclusive, index to the most wholesome race relations. The thesis of this paper is that the emotional disturbances of the present period, involving racial issues, are symptoms of accelerated social changes, and that these changes are wholesome, even if their temporary racial effects are bad. Where there is preoccupation with race and relative racial positions in the social system of the region, it is inevitable that many factors which are essentially non-racial in character will be invested with dangerous racial implications, and it is equally likely that many underlying elements responsible for the new stress on race will be overlooked. Total war is a cataclysmic national event that shakes and loosens many traditions form 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. Several major crises induced by the war should be noted here as a background for understanding what is happening to race relations. There was, as is everywhere evident, a prompt necessity for accelerating mechanical production in the South, as in the rest of the Nation. Although the South is primarily agricultural it shared richly in the appropriations for cantonments, shipyards, munitions plants, and these were located in or near the cities. A result was the uprooting and migration of hundreds of thousands of workers to the industrial production centers. They carried their personal backgrounds with them and sought, as would be natural, to find a new basis of community, witnout risking the personal security incident to losing the values of these backgrounds. 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 there is more current mobility than this country has ever before experienced. The demands for manpower have pressed hard again the old established racial occupational cleavages; the high wages, together with the national minimum wage legislation, have disturbed another traditional racial differential. New occupations have been created without racial definition. The familiar Negro domestic, unprotected by employment legislation, and long underpaid according to national standards, has disappeared into the new war industries, leaving a trail of dismay and bitter resentment among housewives. New economic and military hierarchies have intruded into the social system. There has been an inescapable penetration of more and more ational regulation into the region in the form of soldiers' family allowances, civilian defense measures, army regulations. These objective changes have been moving hand in hand with changes in southern agriculture. The country has yielded millions of its population to the city and, at the same time increased its production with fewer hands, thereby closing the door to the return of may of the emigres. AMore important still, these changes have been accompanied by a necessary emphasis upon the American creed of democracy as the ideological support of the total war effort. This campaign for democracy and the rights of the common man the world over has had unique effects in the sourthern region where the principle has encountered historical difficulties when applied *Read before the eighth annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta, Georgia, March 31, 1944.