Northern and southern reactions to the civil rights movement
Young explains what he perceives as the differences between race relations in the South and those in the North. According to Young, northern whites were more reluctant to accept change because they had yet to confront their own racism. Ultimately, Young believes that race relations were slower to change in the North than in the South because the North was segregated geographically, whereas the South was primarily segregated legally. Because southern whites had lived with African Americans in their midst for generations, Young believes that southern whites had a greater sense of guilt about their racism and racial discrimination. As a result, Young argues that many southern whites were quick to support the civil rights movement—support which he believes was essential to the success of the civil rights movement. His views, here, offer an interesting perspective on southern white reactions to changing race relations during the 1950s and 1960s and offers a counterpoint to views that emphasize white racial hostility and visceral opposition to desegregation.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Andrew Young, January 31, 1974. Interview A-0080. 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
- WALTER DE VRIES:
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Don't most of the blacks still need a significant amount of white support
to get elected?
- ANDREW YOUNG:
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Sure.
- WALTER DE VRIES:
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Okay, how do you explain that? Where I come from, up in Ann Arbor,
Dearborn, Detroit, no way could that happen.
- ANDREW YOUNG:
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Well, that's because white people up there haven't realized they are
racists. I mean, they haven't had to confront it. The white person in
the South has lived with it and struggled with it all their lives, and
to come to some intelligent point of view about life, they had to face
up to the fact that their parents had taught them wrong, you know. The
conflict, the burden of guilt, of learning something in church, of
practicing another thing in your private life. In the South, people were
close enough so that just about . . . well, a lot of people in
leadership positions had been cared for by black women, where there was
not just a servant relationship, but where it was somebody that worked
with the family through long years, and they were probably more mother
to the people than their own parents were. And you had a complicated set
of personal relationships in the white community in the South, that made
southern whites very, very guilty about the racial situation. And it
seems to me that Martin Luther King's death was something of a turning
point, of white people suddenly being willing to come around. I think a
lot happened in white America that's never been recorded, in the wake of
the death of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. It was almost as
though . . . I sensed then that whites wanted to help, but didn't know
how. And, of course, that was also the period when blacks began to
express their hostility. And it was even more difficult. But in spite of
all that, the tremendous white turnout for the Poor People's Campaign.
We could not have brought poor people to Washington, had not we had help
from white southerners all along the route. That mule train
leaving Mississippi had help from white southerners in just
about every city we came to. And that was right straight on through
Atlanta. They even went over to Savannah. The Bishop of Savannah. . . I
mean the Roman Catholic Archbishop in Savannah and in Charleston
provided them with food and shelter. I mean, they were not resources in
the black community alone. And with the slightest invitation, the white
community in the South was ready to move toward a new relationship with
blacks. I sense that it could have gone either way. And the news media
were not publicizing people like me. I mean, they were publicizing the
folks that were saying, "Burn." You know, John Lewis
was around, talking non-violence even back then, but nobody was
listening to John. It was the Black Panther types, you know, the
rhetorical revolutionaries, that had the mass media. And that's the
impression most whites had of blacks. At the same time, the Richard
Nixons and the Lester Maddoxes were playing to the fears of this same
white southerner and white American. And nobody was giving them a
vehicle to get out of their racist heritage. And I think when black
politicians came along. . . . And one of the reasons I ran was that it
seemed to me that if I could win in 1970, it would put an end to the
Nixon southern strategy. Because I saw that southern strategy as really
damaging everything that I had been working for. And instead of a New
South, you'd get the old Dixiecrat South in Republican dress, coming
back to the South.
- JACK BASS:
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How do you define that southern strategy?
- WALTER DE VRIES:
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Jack, I want to go back to a former point. He said that the in thing for
young blacks now is politics?
- ANDREW YOUNG:
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Yeah.
- WALTER DE VRIES:
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Okay. In the north, to get elected as a black, you generally have to have
a black constituency. You don't usually go much beyond that.
But what you're saying is down South it's possible to do
that. Maybe this is an over-generalization, but is it more true in the
South than in the north?
- ANDREW YOUNG:
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Oh, very definitely.
- WALTER DE VRIES:
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What does that mean for the future, then, say the next ten. . . .
- ANDREW YOUNG:
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What it means is that the South has got a long jump ahead of the north in
dealing with race.
- WALTER DE VRIES:
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As it's manifested in politics, now?
- ANDREW YOUNG:
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As it's manifested in every way. See, the north was separated
geographically, while the South was separated legally. Now, once the
legal barriers in the South came down, people were fairly comfortable
together. It was amazing to me to see that happen. And we were in Saint
Augustine when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. And the very
same hotel where our waitresses poured hot coffee on us, and where the
manager poured acid on people trying to get in his swimming pool, and, I
mean, just extremely violent reactions. Up to the thirtieth of
June-the second of July Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights
Act of 1964. The fifth of July we went back to that same restaurant, and
those people were just wonderful. I mean, they were apologetic. They
said, "We were just afraid of losing our businesses. We didn't
want to be the only ones to be integrated. But if everybody's got to do
it, we've been ready for it a long time ago. We're so glad the president
signed this law and now we can be through with these troubles."
And so you didn't have that possibility of immediate change in the
north, because people are geographically separated; they don't know each
other. You don't have the stable leadership patterns in the north. I
mean, you had the three generations of Ivan Allens in Atlanta, and three
generations of Martin Luther Kings that have known
each other. And Ivan Allen, Jr, who is the ex-mayor, is a friend of
Martin Luther King, Sr. But Martin's grandfather was a Baptist preacher
who was a good friend of the first Ivan Allen. And there are stable
family ties. There's a stable leadership structure in the South, that
moves things very rapidly, once people make up their minds. You don't
have three generations of black leadership in any northern city.