Jackson Advocate

Person To Person

An overcrowded bus carrying Negro children to school slipped off a muddy road and overturned in a pond near Tifton, in south-central Georgia. Two passing white men and some of the older Negro boys rescued all but nine of the 86 trapped occupants. Whites and Negroes of the crowd that gathered worked together in resuscitating and caring for the survivors.

Why was the bus so overcrowded? One should not jump to conclusions without knowing whether the buses for white children have been inadequate too. Paucity in school funds would not necessarily denote racial discrimination. Many Negro schools now are well supported.

One unfamiliar with the American South but familiar with accounts of crowd behavior at places and moments of emotional tension might express surprise that in rural Georgia white men would work frantically to save Negro children. Nothing could so ignore southern social history and so misread the present southern race problem as to assume they would not.

Admittedly, those two white men might the next day join in barring those same Negro children from enrolling in an all-white school. But no one would likely stay his hand from rescuing them from danger. There is a long-current saying, as true as it is famous, that the Northerner loves the Negro as a race but fears him as a person; the Southerner fears the Negro as a race but loves him as a person.

James McBride Dabbs, plantation owner, South Carolina born and bred, in his poetic and deeply perceptive book "The Southern Heritage," says that what history and memories "tell us in the South is that people are people, white and colored together."

It is these thousands of bridges of person-to-person regard that the South today continues to cross. Ultimately it will find new accommodation between the races consistent with a changing world. -The Christian Science Monitor.