Surprise at civil rights' slow progress
Heflin is surprised that civil rights progress has been so slow.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Howell Heflin, July 9, 1974. Interview A-0010. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- HOWELL HEFLIN:
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'63. Things were changing nationally. Of course some people say that
those instances helped bring about the legislation. But I would think
that really. . . . My own idea as I look back on it, I'm surprised that
it moved as slowly as it did. If I look forward from '74 to '84, I would
anticipate that by '84 that with kids solving their own problems in
schools. . . that in ten years you ought to have. . . the matter of race
ought to be pretty well gone behind people. And there'll be other issues
that crop up. Really, in looking forward that ten year span, I really, I
think basically, the deliberate speed of the '54 Brown decision for 20
years was pretty deliberate. You would have expected it to move a little
faster. When it came operative. Because everybody immediately looked
upon it as being a period of. . . . I would not have thought that the
Warren court or even the people like in Mississippi or Tom Brady who
called you know and made his famous, what is it, Black Friday speech
against the '54 decision. And all of those thought something was going
to immediately happen. It took. . . . Maybe by doing it in the slowness
that it moved, kept down much more violence than
you might have had otherwise. But looking from '64 to '74 and saying
that if I could go back and record my thoughts then as to what the
future would be, I really thought things would have occurred far
faster.