The Gary American

THE GARY AMERICAN

Another Side of the Story

BY EUGENE GORDON

Arkansas Governor Faubus does his best to look heroic in the photographs. Try as he may, however, he comes out looking no more heroic than the big-game hunter who with a foot on the head of the carcass and a rifle in his grip, domineers the dead lion; or the deepsea fisherman who, happy as an idiot, grins beside a swinging 10-foot barracuda. Governor, hunter, and fisherman strike us as fatuous phonies because we know they were the winners before they started. The King of Beasts is as helpless against a well-aimed Mauser as a rat impaled on a pitchfork; the barracuda on a concrete wharf in tropic sun might as well be a goldfish. And, though Little Rock's seven children may not be likened to living or lifeless beasts, their enemies—Governor, legislature, and mobs—just couldn't lose. Faubus and his white-supremacy supporters were bound to win because the physical bravery and the mental brightness of seven Negro high school students were overwhelmed by the cunning command of battle-ready troops, of a Dixiecrat politician in an automatic legislative Dixiecrat majority, and "Kill-the-niggers;" mobs enflamed by the Faubus, his lawmakers, and his Governor's incendiary actions. In the quiescence of non-white Americans, they acted accordingly. Victorious, now, in both the primary election and his skirmish with the children, the Governor declaims and struts, imagining he's an international personage and a national hero. Records seem to justify the belief that most Americans are infected with faubusitis and are therefore on the side of the man whose name is given to this chronic moral disease. He could cite as evidence the general fact that though crimes against Negroes—lynchings, beatings, rapings of Negro women and girls, peonage, and segregation and discrimination—race social, economic and political characterized "the American way of life" throughout the 95 years since Emancipation, the majority of white Americans are still blind, deaf, mute, frigid and prejudiced toward their non-white fellow citizens. Faubus knows that had this attitude not expressed the American, and not just the Southern, "way of life," the majority long ago would have forced the Federal government to outlaw both the crimes and the criminals. I don't however, condemn this majority of our country's approximately 155 million whites. They can no more live in the United States without imbibing its philosophy of white-race superiority than they can live in an industrial city immune to its grime of smoke soot, cinders and gases. Most of that approximately 155 million work for their livings, just as do most of the approximately 17 million Negroes. This one fact establishes a vast community of white-non white interests. Therein lies immunization against faubusitis. I don't have to condemn these whites; they are self-condemned in their indifferent acceptance of and tacit concurrence in nearly a century of crimes against me. I only warn them to see that our interlocking interests include recognizing faubusitis as the deadly poison it is. My warning must recall that railroad-shop workers in the South still suffer from results of Negro strikebreaking in 1922. Negro mechanics' helpers, semi-skilled and unskilled laborers were excluded from trades unions through connivance of white workers and employers. When white machinists, boilermakers, blacksmiths and other shop specialists struck, the employers "promoted" Negro helpers and laborers. Naturally, the Negroes were happy to get such "good" jobs. White workers and Negro still remember the Negroes' being kicked out as frustrated whites returned to the same (or worse) condition. Isn't it time, therefore that all working whites so-called realize they're helping themselves when they join the Negro's fight for complete integration? The editors of a progressive publication recently called for a modern "Abolition movement" among whites led by "a white person of stature who seek to achieve the singlemindedness of William Lloyd Garrison." Such efforts—whether to palliate their guilt as unwilling but conscious carriers of the faubusitis germ or guilelessly to aid the Negro's struggle would more quickly yield results if the promoters started with themselves, each remembering that he, as a germ-carrier, can help rid America of the germ by first acknowledging his infection. He will then realize that his and the Negroes' interests, intricately intertwined; would be better treated as identical. Let the editor, for instance, conduct a well-planned but limited campaign to show his readers that universal suffrage in the South will mean a shift in the political balance of power beneficial not just to the South but to the whole country: the dixiecrat grip on the Federal government will be broken when the people they misrepresent in and out of Washington can act.