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Books and CommentarySilencing Voices for Racial Change During the 1950’sNational magazine editors published those urging moderation and the status quo.By Carol PolsgroveNot long after the 1954 Brown v.Board of Education decisionopened the door to racialchange in America, Georgia authorLillian Smith received what seemed toher a peculiar request. The AntiochReview, a little literary magazine, hadsent along to her a piece the editorproposed to run and asked if she wouldrespond to it. The article, by a NewYork-born, white Alabama professor,was little more than an exercise incontempt.“[M]ost Alabama Negroes,” NormanA. Brittin wrote, “live in crowded hutsand shanties, they are ignorant, theyare dirty, they are frequently drunkenand immoral, their reading matter istrashy or nonexistent, their speech isan ungrammatical patois.” The articlethen went downhill: “By and large,Alabama Negroes are still primitives.”Smith, one of several whitesoutherners invited to respond to theseviews in the same issue, was appalled.This was the stuff of demagoguery.Publishing it only encouraged it. Refusingthe invitation, she asked theeditors, “What has happened to theintellectual life of Antioch?”Whatever had happened at theAntioch Review had happened at othermagazines. In a November 1956 AtlanticMonthly article (identified by aneditorial note as “the fundamental casefor the white South”), Herbert RavenelSass maintained that the United Stateswas “overwhelmingly a pure white nation”and ought to stay that way. Desegregationof the schools would inevitablylead to “widespread racialamalgamation.” To balance the article,the Atlantic published the words ofwhite historian Oscar Handlin who,curiously, accepted Sass’s premise—the undesirability of social mixing. Buthe argued that school desegregationwould not necessarily lead to it.In January 1956, Harper’s, generallya liberal magazine, ran an article inwhich a South Carolina newspapereditor, Thomas R. Waring, attributedan array of faults to African Americans—venerealdisease, illegitimacy,crime, intellectual backwardness.Harper’s prefaced the article with adisclaimer: The editors did not agreewith Waring, but published the essay inthe interest of “dialogue.”In a book titled “The Cold Rebellion:The South’s Oligarchy in Revolt,”published just a few years later in 1962,African-American journalist Lewis W.Jones would offer Waring’s words asan example of the many such articlesthat placed African Americans “in anunfavorable light” at this bend of theroad. At least, he said, Harper’s editors“had taken pains to point out theauthor’s errors of fact and logic. Mosteditors do not undertake to commenton the half-truths and innuendo withwhich these articles are often crowded.”At a time when national magazinesmight well have been leading the wayto change, they instead opened theirpages to those who resisted it. Whensouthern white novelist WilliamFaulkner wanted to ask the North to“go slow” in pressing desegregation onthe South, he turned to Life, and Liferan his plea in the spring of 1956. Butwhen Lillian Smith cabled Life andasked for space to respond, the magazineturned her down.It is not hard to see why Life put itspages at Faulkner’s disposal. He was,after all, a Nobel Prize winner, highlyrespected by the literary establishment.At the same time, Lillian Smith, too,had a right to be heard. Not as gifted anovelist as Faulkner, she had neverthelesswritten two bestselling books aboutrace in the South, “Strange Fruit” and“Killers of the Dream.” Both books hadreached a wide audience.Yet Smith, clear about her own supportfor desegregation, watched whileFaulkner and southern newspaper editorsRalph McGill and Hodding Carter,Jr., published their cautious views inmagazines with circulations in the millions.Before the Brown decision, neitherMcGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution,nor Carter, editor of a smallerpaper in Greenville, Mississippi, hadfavored desegregation outright. Althoughthey had spoken againstsegregation’s worst abuses, they hadnot spoken against segregation itself.Now, since change must come, theyspoke for change, but in good time.They, cautious and cautioning, and notLillian Smith, were speaking for thewhite South in the big magazines.Novelist Robert Penn Warren joinedtheir moderate voices in a 1956 Lifearticle that then appeared as a book,Nieman Reports / Fall 2001 99