School Desegregation and New Industry: The Southern Community Leaders' Viewpoint

The attitudes of eighty white leaders in five Southern communities were studied to see whether desire for new industry was related to moderation on the school desegregation issue. Practically all leaders express (1) desire for new industry, (2) sentiment in favor of segregation, but (3) opposition to extreme measures for preserving segregation (e.g., school closing and violence). The degree of moderation beyond opposition to extremism is not correlated with variations in the degree of favorableness to new industry. A n impressive quantity of journalisticl and social science writing has been devoted to comment on the interrelatedness of the South's race relations and industrial progress in the region. It has been stated, on the one hand, that industrialization results in a breakdown in longstanding traditions which have prevented Negroes from attaining equal status.2 On the other hand, evidence is given to indicate that traditional race relations and recent racial controversy are factors which have impeded the rate of industrialization.3 For a convincing example of the possible effects of race matters on industry recruitment, we need look only at the much-publicized interruption in Little Rock's industrial progress that was suffered after the desegregation controversy there in 1957 and 1958. Whereas the city had averaged five major new plants per year from 1950 to 1957, the industrial development director reported no major additions in the four years after trouble broke out.4 We are concerned here with one aspect of southern community life-the role of reputational leaders-as it reflects (or fails to reflect) this interplay of race relations and industrialization. Specifically, the major question asked was this: Does awareness of an incompatibility between tradition,al racial patterns and industrial progress cause new-industry-minded community leaders to be more moderate on racial questions? Our focus has been on school desegregation attitudes particularly because of the apparent special interest many industries have in the maintenance of good public schools in the cities where they locate. Our initial hypothesis was that those leaders most in favor of new industry (as indicated both in word and deed) would be most receptive to school desegregation. Five southern cities were visited-three in the Upper South and two in the Deep Southand a total of 80 persons with leadership reputations were interviewed for this study. Each of the cities has a population of about 50,000, * Revision of a paper read at the twenty-fifth annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Louisville, Kentucky, April 1962. The writer wishes to acknowledge with gratitude the cooperation of the many community leaders who served as subjects in this research. He also appreciates the helpful suggestions and criticisms of Professors Thomas Pettigrew, Gordon Allport, and Stanton lWheeler-all of Harvard University, where a fuller report of this study was submitted as a doctoral dissertation-and William Gamson of the University of Michigan. 1 An excellent summary of newspaper reports on the subject is provided in the pamphlet, The High Cost of Contflict (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, 1961). 2 Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner, Deep Souith, An A4nthropological Stutdy of Caste and Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941) ; Henry Allen Bullock, "Urbanism and Race Relations," in Rupert B. Vance and Nicholas J. Damerath, editors, The Urban Souith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954) ; and Morton Rubin, Plantation Coiuniity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951). 3 William Nicholls has perhaps presented this position most definitively in his recent book, Soitthern Tradition anid Regionlal Progress (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960). 4 See "Business in Dixie: Many Southerners Say Racial Tension Slows Area's Economic Gains," in UWall Street Joutrnal (May 26, 1961), p. 1. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 04:53:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms SCHOOL DESEGREGATION AND NEWV INDUSTRY 385 and the proportion of Negroes in each is between 20 and 40 percent. All of the cities had been free of any direct pressures for school integration up to the time of the study in the fall of 1960. Selection of leaders was made by the "snowball technique."5 The technique went as follows: A few informants in specified local positions (such as the city clerk and city editor of the newspaper) were first asked to name a list of "top community leaders." Persons named most often as "leaders" by the initial informants became the first members of the leadership sample. "Vhen interviewed, they were also asked to name "top leaders," and in this way, the list of reputational leaders grew. The goal was to include the leading vote-getters in the sample. In this study, 90 percent of the top 39 vote-getters and 80 percent of the top 71 were ultimately interviewed. There were no outright refusals to be questioned, and of the many leaders contacted, in only seven cases was an interview not arranged. Illness accounted for two of these cases; the leader's going out of town, for another; leaving only four with the excuse of "no time available." And even this excuse seemed plausible for three of these men. It had been expected that leaders would show marked differences in their attitudes about new industry, depending on how much they stood to gain from increased industrialization. But, like Mother, Flag, and Country, new industry-at least as a generality-was almost universally favored by the leaders interviewed. Only two of the 80 respondents stated outright opposition to recruitment of new industry for their communities at the present time. Differences were noted, h-owever, in the degree and type of effort considered necessary for new industry reeruitment. Several indices were devised to measure these differences.6 These indices were then combined into a composite measure which became the basic indicator of new industry involvement for the purposes of studying this variable's relationslhip to desegregation attitudes. This composite index was called "Favorableness to New Industry," or "FNI."Y Since the cities differed in the immediacy of of their need for new industry,-the position of an individual leader relative to others in his community-rather than his absolute stand on new industry-was used to classify the leader. Similarly categorized leaders from each city were then pooled, so that we end up with three groups of leaders, classed as "most favorable," "moderately favorable," or "least favorable"