Buck Kester believed the South could change for the better
Neale describes Kester's philosophy. He believed that despite the sins it hosted, the South held unique potential for positive change. Her father measured change in the South incrementally, and sympathized with the middle-class whites who bore the brunt of the criticism as the civil rights movement took shape in the 1950s.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Nancy Kester Neale, August 6, 1983. Interview F-0036. 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
- NANCY KESTER NEALE:
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He talked about the neccessity of always trying, no matter how difficult
or how unsuccessful, and he often felt unsuccesful, not in his eyes
neccessarily. But he felt that he had just not made a mark. And when he
got older that is what he wanted. In his younger days he felt that
people had to try, they had to try to make a difference in their world.
They had to try to trust the gap, and this was true for southerners more
than any other group. He thought the south was a very special place in
this world. The south had sinned as much as any other region. He said if
we could make it in that sense as much as any region in any place in its
behavior, but there was more potential in the south for growth and
development and learning than anywhere else. He said once a southener
makes his mind up on race you know where you stand with that person. You
can always count them, because they can't waffle like they
can anywhere else. It goes to the soul of a person. He believed that
very much. And I think all of those people did, men and women. That they
had to try, they had to make a difference. They tried conferences, they
tried small group decentralized efforts, they tried bringing in big
names. I can remember meeting Elanore Roosevelt at a conference when I
was four years old they had in Nashville. They tried a whole variety of
kinds of techniques so that they could shape the circumstances and try
to change things for people. They really did believe that they were
changing things for themselves for the better if they changed it for
other people. It was not sort of like the disinterested kind of notion.
But everybody was helped or hurt by the ways the things were shaped. So
in that sense I see a continuity. And I think Sawsar Chavey's
operation could build on some things that had gone on before probably as
much as the FTSU ism.
- DALLAS BLANCHARD:
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That is the grandchild isn't it? FTSUism?
- NANCY KESTER NEALE:
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Oh yes, I think so. I think that is very clear. A lot of these people
crossed over from different organizations were belonging to all of them
or some of them. And it was a very interesting group to my knowledge
there were about three hundred families, when I
recall numbers. And they talked about wealth and lived in separate
places, but were trying to operate on their small levels through their
pulpits, or their parishes or what ever they were, their charitable, or
women's organizaitons, all those kinds of groups. You could
ride up and see it in the student movement, which was a very powerful
moving thing in the south eventually as you saw in the YWCA effort. The
intergration of Blue Ridge for example was a very interesting kind of
thing. I think that it is all connected. One of the things that my dad
was saying about, I went to that conference in Nashville in 1957 and
Martin Luther King was there and I talked to him. And I was just out of
college at that time. I think I was in the person on stage of
development in that meeting. But the one thing that dad was disappointed
about when Martin Luther King came was that he didn't
understand. He was chastising the middle class white folks who were not
doing more and doing it faster and harder and getting on with it. And I
had some sense that dad was saying Oh brother if you knew what has gone
into getting it this far. And I remember talking about saying that in a
way he thinks that he is only starting from scratch. And so much has
gone into even getting the states where there was even the amount of
blood shed that there was is bad enough. But it would have been much
more severe, which wasn't alright in any case. But it was
just that sense of he just felt sad and regretful that Martin Luther
King didn't see the heritage and how these middle class white
folks had contribute out of their own blood and sweat and tears and
their way. Not as much pain as the blacks suffered but it
can't really compare the kinds of things, because they had to
stand up against the whole society in order to do what they tried to
do.