Minneapolis Spokesman

CALLS SOUTH TOTALITARIAN:
Lillian Smith Criticizes Southern Liberals Silence On Civil Rights Issue

NEW YORK CITY—In a letter appearing in the N. Y. Times of April 4, Lillian Smith, noted southern writer, severely criticized both southern and northern liberals for their silence on the question of civil rights since President Truman's message to congress.
Miss Smith, writing from her home in Clayton, Ga., charges that the southern daily press has refused to print letters by her in which she defends human rights as enunciated by the President's Commission on Civil Rights. The entire letter is reprinted here:

To the Editor of The New York Times:
As a Southern woman, I am deeply shocked that our liberals are putting up no real fight for human rights in the South. It is, of course, the same battle we are losing all over the world. Each day more ground is lost. In Czechoslovakia—now in Italy we may soon be hearing the same old story. Caution, vacillation, no real program, no strong affirmations of human freedom—these are poor weapons to use against real enemies.
For weeks the front pages of our newspapers have been full of demagogic race fear, Yankee hate, affirmations of the "great belief" of White Supremacy, while Southern liberalism maintains its old grim silence. Not one Southerner has taken a strong stand in a Southern newspaper against segregation; not one has affirmed the proud fact that we Southerners are also Americans; not one has said that human rights today are not only the nation's but the whole world's business, and its first business. Even those of us who want to speak out are not permitted to. I cannot be heard in Georgia even in the letter columns. If there are honorable exceptions to this solid silence, I do not know them.
It is hard to understand such timidity at a time like this, unless we remember that Georgia, U. S. A., still has a lot in common with Georgia, U.S.S.R. Totalitarianism is an old thing to use down home. We know what it feels like. The unquestioned authority of White Supremacy, the tight political set-up of one party, nourished on poverty and ignorance, solidified the South into a monolithic state years ago.
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Lillian Smith
Criticizes Liberals
For Silence

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into a totalitarian regime under which we were living when communism was still Russian cellar talk and Hitler had not even been born.

Tricks Used
To keep us that way, our political demagogues used and still use the same tricks Stalin uses today: an external enemy to hate (the damn Yankee), an internal enemy to fear (the Negro), an iron curtain which was first forged out of the reluctance of the democratic few to take an open stand against such powerful forces. During those bitter decades liberalism was driven completely underground. Caution was a necessity, temporizing was virtue. This was the only way men could work for human rights under a system that exacted such heavy penalties from its "deviationists" as did Southern tradition.

Thus it came about that men took pride in thinking democratic thoughts and as much pride in never voicing them or putting them into acts. To speak out in those bitter years was truly the dangerous act of a fool (though a great fool); to speak out today is a mildly dangerous act of great wisdom. But it is hard for Southern liberals to believe it. Caution has become a cherished habit; conscience has been split off so long from words and acts that it is not easy to fill up the chasm between them. Into that chasm fell the energy of Southern liberalism and its integrity. We just don't love human freedom enough to take real risks for it.

It is incredible that demagogic oratory could hypnotize not only the poor and ignorant but our liberals into believing that the only way we can work out problems of racial segregation is to set up an even worse regional segregation which, like Russian denial of freedom of speech, book-banning, national isolationism, is so dangerous a withdrawal from the realities of the world we live in.

Half-Open Door
I believe it stems from two reasons. One has to do with our iron curtain, which is importantly different from Russia's because ours has a door in it. The Constitution of the United States guarantees that we Southerners cannot be cut off completely from the rest of the world. That makes a big difference to us and to the demagogues. Here at this half-open door the Dixie politicians have gathered for eighty-five years, trying to shut it, trying never to let it open wider. By veto, they have kept it half shut; by oratory, they have persuaded us that stepping across its threshold is taboo. Even the liberals half believe that there is something in this talk, for it has been a stiff indoctrination given us since babyhood.

Added to this vague uncertainty about the validity of human rights versus state rights, is the belief of the Southern liberal that "everybody is prejudiced but me." We live in a kind of schizoid world due to our self-imposed censorship. It is easy to be convinced because we hear nothing to the contrary-that most Southerners (except ourselves of course) are so loyal to White Supremacy, so prejudiced against their fellow-Americans, that the only way they can be persuaded to move an inch toward racial democracy is by throwing them the N-word, as a bone for their hate to gnaw on. It is a vast, though unintentional, libel against the whole South.

Our Southern papers and radio sustain this fiction. We are caught in a trap that we have contrived ourselves and now at this critical time for the future of the whole world, we are wriggling around like frightened little mice. We remember our psychotic 15 per cent, and our long, long Tobacco Roads, and say, "We can't change the folks overnight." No, we can't, but we can change liberals overnight. We must change liberals overnight, in the South, North, and all over the world if we want to save human freedom. It is our only chance now. It is only the liberal now who can win against the demagogue, whether Fascist or Communist.

We must remember that demagogues fatten on the poor man's vote and his loneliness, that they use the psychotic to do their dirty work, but they exist because we liberals let them exist. It is our caution, our lack of energy, our moral impotence and our awful unconscious snobbery that make demagoguery unafraid of liberalism.

Look at them today in the South: fanning hate, giving the green light to violence by their almost traitorous incitements against their own national government, while the liberals stand by silently. Silence is a poor way of changing people. It is a poor way of making people fall in love with an idea.

"Education" Received
In parts of our South, our people have never heard talk of human rights and the dignity of man: they do not even dream that there are fellow-Southerners who would question segregation. But they hear, in every county, almost every day, on radio and in newspaper, the doctrines of Yankee-baiting and White Supremacy: and they hear their "wisest" liberals repeating the old lesson "Whatever is done has to be done by us alone and has to be done under the segregation system." This is the "education" our people are receiving; this is exactly what the demagogues mean too when they say Southerners must change by education, not legislation.

Only the liberals, South and North, can counteract these doctrines. A concerted effort made by newspaper, radio and pulpit, could break the back of demagoguery in a year simply by giving Southerners something else to believe and making them fall in love with their new beliefs. Our long-range rural programs must be put in effect, of course, but it will take ten years to change our Tobacco Roads, even with hard work. We don't have ten years now. Things cannot go on as they are in Dixie. The Communists know it and they are not waiting for liberals to think it over just as they are not waiting in other parts of the world. It is a tragic fact, but true, that people long used to one authority find it easy to accept another. The Solid South founded on the authority of White Supremacy, held firm by one party and a hatred of "those enemies outside," might not find it too hard to accept the authority and one-party system of the Solid Soviets.

Already the Wallace Party is gathering up many of our young idealistic Southerners while their elders are still saying "This isn't the right time," and the demagogues are still screaming about "our enemies in the North." It is the same old drama being played on stages all over the world today: liberalism squeezed to death between the Right and Left reactionaries.

LILLIAN SMITH
Clayton, Ga., March 22, 1948