[bright music] - [Narrator] The following program is from NET, the National Educational Television Network.
[gentle music] - The legend of the antebellum South, elegant neo-Grecian mansions, coquettish belles under the magnolias, dancing with young men, gallant and reckless, ready to duel for a ladies honor.
The kindly master ruling his kingdom with justice and humanity and served by his faithful contented darkies.
My name is Ossie Davis.
I was born in Cargill, Georgia.
The South and the southern way of life has always been an enigma, "A kind of Sphinx on the American land," one writer said.
White people speak of their way of life with pride and affection, but one white man from Maryland, H.L.
Mencken wrote, "Fundamentalism, Ku Klux-ery, revivals, lynchings, hog water politics, these are the things that always occur to a Northerner when he thinks of the South."
What is the Southern way of life?
Is it based on the myth or the reality of the past?
Did it ebb its life away at Shiloh and Gettysburg or does it still live for the 43 million whites and 11 million Negroes who live there today?
"I love the South," a man said in 1958.
"I don't choose to live anywhere else.
There's land there where a man can raise cattle.
That's what I'm gonna do some day.
There are lakes where man can sink a hook and fight the bass.
There's room there where my children can play and grow and get to be good citizens."
Medgar Evers, a Negro, said that.
Our program in the "History of the Negro People" series deals with the life of the Negro in the South, in the past and the present.
"The past is never dead," William Faulkner wrote.
"It is not even past."
This is Oxford, Mississippi.
Where the past is preserved in granite monuments that record a tragic and glorious history.
But in Oxford, the past lives beyond the images etched in stone.
It survives in the memories and in the myths of its people.
Yet Oxford is an ambitious community, facing the promise and the problems of the 20th century.
Perhaps Oxford can best be described by its Mayor.
- Oxford consist of some fine people both colored and white.
It's a town of about 6,000 people.
People that like to tend to their own business and they like to try to help, in every way possible in the civic affairs, in the church affairs, and try to build a better community.
Oxford is, in my opinion, is one of the finest, little communities to raise a family.
We've been used to more or less a segregated life.
This is something that our colored people here are adjusted to, they are happy and they're well satisfied.
A lot of them depend largely upon the white and I would like to say this, that the white people here depend largely on them for help and so on.
And they will go to their aid.
That's what the colored people like, they like someone that will, if they get in trouble, a sickness, a church should burn or something, the white people here step in and they help them out and the colored people appreciate.
[bright music] - [Ossie] There are 1,600 Negroes in Oxford.
Mostly unskilled and there are few jobs except as janitors, cafeteria, and yard workers.
In the Negro quarter, large families live in two and three rooms.
As in most Southern communities, Negro women are the main support of the family, working as maids, wash women and nurses.
73% of Oxford's Negroes receive some form of welfare relief.
At the Mary Buie Museum, Oxford's most celebrated citizen, William Faulkner is memorialized.
Mary Roland is the custodian of the museum.
As Faulkner described so vividly, she shares with most white Southerners, a sense of intimacy with their Negroes.
- For the fact that we have a good set of Negroes here and they don't want to be disturbed.
They really are.
I have one that I just love.
She nursed my children for about six years and I wouldn't have her want for a thing if I found out that that she needed something.
And I'm quite amused when my daughter from Arlington, Virginia came down.
She was one of the children that Missy had nursed and I got my son to drive us out to see Missy and she had also nursed him.
And his little boy was in the car with us.
And when Missy came out she said, "Look at my children."
And she put her arm right around William's shoulder and the little boy just looked up at her, you know, he didn't know what to make of it.
And I said, "Listen, Billy, she was a mother to him for a little while.
I tell you she helped nurse him."
And so that the association we had with them and I presume they're still some good ones around.
Of course there are some getting some ideas and that's all right.
That's progress.
But we got some mighty good darkies here.
- [Ossie] Progress in the South has always been measured by the darkie and by cotton.
First there was tobacco, rice and indigo to be worked.
But by the end of the 18th century, there was a severe depression.
Slavery seem doomed.
Then in 1793 the invention of the cotton gin.
Cotton could now be mass produced and an economic boom was in the making.
Black hands and black backs were needed again to support the land.
Who else could work so hard, so long, and so cheaply.
But there were dangers in the system.
Slaves could run away or fight or kill.
And so black codes were established that declared slaves were not persons but property.
These chattels could not leave the plantation without authorization.
They could not visit the homes of whites or free Negroes.
And for those who had the courage or the foolishness to defy the code, there was the whipping post, branding, prison or death.
As the country moved toward war, white men had established a moral system to meet their needs.
At the heart of it was a belief in the Negroes natural inferiority.
Slavery was declared not only an economic but a social good.
South Carolina's governor said, "In all social systems, there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life.
Such a class you must have or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization and refinement."
[dramatic music] And the North destroyed all this.
All the gentility and pride and honor, that white Southerners called a way of life.
More than 600,000 died in the war, one quarter of a million Southerners.
[dramatic music] Black men also fought and died.
Of 186,000 Negroes who enlisted in the Union Army, 38,000 died.
The South lay devastated.
"Hell has laid her egg," said a Georgian visiting Atlanta.
"Right here, it hatched. "
"Galveston," a reporter said, "Was a city of dogs and desolation.
Utterly God forsaken."
- After the Civil War, everybody in this country, in the Mississippi Delta was bankrupt.
All the chattel was gone, the cotton, and whatever cotton had been ginned was stored, was burned.
And this country was destitute.
And of course the slaves, the freed Negroes, were just as destitute as the land owner and they were both in a pretty difficult situation.
- [Ossie] 4 million Negroes were free, free under the Federal Reconstruction Acts for the first time, to own their own homes.
Free to go to school, free to vote and hold public office.
The first mixed jury in the South was impaneled for the trial of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
Half of the jurors were Negroes.
Before 1901, 22 Negroes were elected to Congress.
There were two Negro senators from Mississippi, 33-year-old Blanche K. Bruce was one.
John Mercer Langston, a Negro abolitionist who became a representative from Virginia.
B. S. Penchback, acting Governor of Louisiana.
Their was graft and corruption, but during this time Negroes were influential in passing bills for free public schools, abolished property qualifications for voting, and ended use of the whipping post and branding iron.
Today these laws still exist for everyone but the Negro.
- I think the thing that Reconstruction did was not as important as the fact that the slave was now free and a place had to be found for him.
And the number, the sheer number, you see, of these untrained people, well it was a tremendous problem.
- [Ossie] A tremendous problem that has always haunted the South, jobs for Negroes.
Negroes were often stronger, more capable for the work required.
"A laborless, landless and homeless class," Lincoln called them, "Caught in a hazy realm between bondage and freedom."
But in 1866, Union General Hatchett said, "At issue in the South is not what shall be done with the Negro, but what shall be done with the whites."
They were the victims of poverty and poor land, of malaria and hook worm, about whom the Negro used to sing, "You can't make a living on sandy land.
I'd rather be a nigger than a poor white man."
And to these whites, there was horror at the specter of black supremacy, blacks winning control and competing for what had been exclusively theirs, lands, homes and jobs.
[bright music] "Birth of a Nation," a movie classic produced in 1915, dramatize what had now become the prevalent white attitude, the fear of incompetent, criminal and savage Negroes who with federal bayonets, ravaged an innocent South.
[dramatic music] And so, to save the South, the Ku Klux Klan organized in 1865 on horseback with guns, sword and the cross, they terrorized Negroes and their sympathizers with violence, arson and murder.
Today, though their techniques have progressed to air-conditioned limousines, they're still active, still dedicated to their faith that Jesus Christ was not a Jew.
That the Pope of Rome is Anti-Christ and the Negro is a beast who must be suppressed.
- To describe that bunch, I'd have to use a whole lot stronger than I am permitted to use being a minister of the gospel.
Amen.
They go into the auditorium of the gymnasium for the after football game dance.
Then comes along one of the nigger football players and they all go pile in their together, like you are here tonight, just like a bunch of bow-eyed thieves and bunch of hogs turned loosed in a lot together.
They go out there and get to rubbing around to smellin' that vanilla flavorin'.
[crowd shouting] Could you conceive so highly of your faired skinned daughter, her dancing partner being tapped on the shoulder by some burnt haired, liver lipped, goat smelling ape faced nigger?
[crowd shouting] Can you conceive such a thing?
Are you going to do something about it?
- [Ossie] Reverend W. N. Redmond, as most Southern Negroes, has been an eye witness to the vigilante system of Negro control.
At 14, he remembers the punishment of a Negro father and son who had killed a white man's dog.
- They took him and put him in jail and they beat him.
And then they got together on a Saturday and they tied him with barbed wire, hand and feet and put barbed wire around the neck, and put the father on one side of the bumper and the Negro, and the son on the other side of the bumper.
They drug them all over the town and after that they were drug through the neighborhood, the Negro neighborhood, they were told that this is the way we were gonna keep the Negro in its place.
And they took gas, gasoline and they poured it on them and they burned them up.
- [Ossie] Freedom and truth for former slaves required new definitions.
Sharif Boyce Bratton comments.
- I feel that the Negro here in Lafayette County, Mississippi has freedom.
All the freedom he wants.
He not tied by any laws, man-made laws made by Congress or any other law making body.
He has all the freedom that he want.
The Negro is not deprived of any freedom here in Mississippi.
- [Ossie] Jim Crow it was called.
Beginning in 1870, signs went up all over the South separating the races and taking away the Negroes newly won rights.
Negroes and whites were separated on trains and buses.
Negroes were barred from white hotels, restaurants, barbershops, and theaters.
- I've also, also heard a number of times that the colored and the white were not equal in the law.
That's true.
The colored gets the break and the white man doesn't.
For instance, two men, one white and one colored, breaks into a store here.
In all probability the colored man would get a very light sentence and the white man would get a heavy sentence.
That's not equality under the law, but it goes back to the thing that I said to start with, that the white man of the South feels like it's actually his job to look after his colored citizens, the colored citizens and they are not held accountable to the same stringent letter of the law that the white man is.
- "Let no amalgamation of races should be allowed."
In other words, they did not permit intermarriage.
It was made death to maim or kill a horse or cow or a slave.
- [Ossie] By 1885, separate schools were the new order at white and Negro schools, children using the same text book, learned the traditions of the past and absorbed the values of the present.
In their History of Mississippi textbook, they read of life on a Mississippi plantation.
The Master and the mistress taught the Negroes truthfulness and honesty as the taught their own children by not tempting them and by trusting them.
With Negro slaves it seemed impossible for one of them to do a thing without the assistance one or two others.
Of course some kind of occupation had to be devised to keep them employed a part of the time.
But it was very laborious to find easy work for a large body of lazy and inefficient people.
[people singing] And in their churches too, white Southerners sang and prayed to a God that to them decreed segregation.
- Well certainly, I believe in segregation.
I have stated that I have believed in it, I believe in it now, and always will believe in segregation first because God teaches it, I think it's God's plan that the races be segregated.
We find a lot of scripture on it.
And for reasons that I've just mentioned that I feel that their standards is not up to the white standards.
I'm not gonna force somebody to go to church with me.
And that's what they are trying to do to the colored race.
That's what the outsiders are trying to do.
They trying to come down here and force 'em to go to our church.
- I build a house.
I have a right to live in that house.
You don't have a right to come in a move in with me.
I build a church.
It may be its a house of the Lord, but yet I maintain that if I build it, I have a right to say who will and who will not come in.
Remember it's come in by invitation only.
- [Ossie] By invitation only became the right of Negroes also as they found ways to live as free men in the South.
- Seek the salvation of our kindred and acquaintance, to walk circumspectly.
If you just, somebody know it.
And if you're just in your dealing, it'll soon be that folks will take your word.
But if you unjust in your dealing, won't be nobody believe nothing you say.
See what I mean.
♪ He said, my brother ♪ - [Ossie] In 1895, Booker T. Washington declared, "In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."
By the end of the century segregation was complete.
The new South arose out of the ashes of the old and the good nigger was the one who once again, knew his place.
[upbeat music] - But as a rule, they are a very happy people.
A large percent of them do not worry because they know they gonna be taken care of.
I've had a number of them to remark to me that, well they know Mr. Brown and Mr. Jones, Mr. Smith gonna take care of us.
They know that.
They know they not going hungry.
And they not gonna need for clothes as long as they do work and do halfway right, they know that gonna be taken care of, so they have no worries.
- White folks was so good to me til when I got sick and disabled to work, they just come in, bring me something to eat, clothe and everything, fed me, clothe me and I had a house full of children and they fed my children.
Yes, sir.
Been working all of my life, and the white folk raised me.
Mister, I tell you the truth, I don't know what in world I'd do without white folk.
Now that's the truth.
And misters, I'm just a white folks nigger.
I'm a nigger and all my's childrens are niggers.
And all this community in here of Mississippi recognize, appreciate it and work for the white folks.
- He's not, the Negro is not a part of my family.
As a result, I don't like to have him sit and eat with me.
As a result, I don't like to have him belong to a club that I may belong to.
I don't elect- - [Ossie] For Judge O'Barr, as for most Southern whites, out of the past has come a philosophy he calls the Southern way of life.
The Negro and his place is at the heart of it.
- This is the way it has been.
It's the history of the South it's because we've been brought up like this, we have been taught like this and we teach our children like this and they'll teach their children like that.
I think it is a matter that has been history all down through the years and will remain history.
- I guess it's just plain born in us, instilled in us, that in spite of the fact that you have great respect for some Negro individuals, respect them as people and not just as a servant, there is some physical revulsion I think, that the skin is dark.
And I guess it's just something that we are so familiar with, it's just impossible really to overcome.
- [Ossie] For 11 million Negroes in the South there is also a southern way of life, but rarely have they been asked for their interpretation.
- Well, the white man feels this, that if the Negro get equal education then he will be out of his reach for him to do the job that he heretofore have done for him and he figured that he was gonna have to pay the Negro equal salary that he would have to pay the other boy, which actually, it's not the skin of the Negro that the white man dreads, it's the Negro is going to demand the dollar that the white man demands.
- The Southern way of life for the Negro woman means that she is addressed all the time by her first name or she's called auntie or she called girl by the other race.
And the southern way of life often means that our children wear some of the things that have been given by others.
Now a lot of times, these are good things and they are highly appreciated.
And the southern way of life means that you can purchase food from a side entrance or a back entrance or you can get someone to fix something for you to carry out.
The southern way of life means that that you are to say, yes ma'am and yes sir, no ma'am and no sir.
Sometimes that's expected even down to the teenagers.
- In order to segregate the Negro, we essentially must segregate ourselves you see.
You cannot enslave, if you want to use that word, or hold down or discriminate against someone else without in turn having the same thing happen to yourself.
The changes that will happen as they go along will release us, free us if you will so that we can have a much broader perspective on human responsibility and human dignity and human rights.
Whereas before we thought in terms of white only, we will be able to think in terms of all men.
- We live in hope.
We have faith to believe that the good thing that we hope for as human beings, and as God's children will finally come to pass.
So that's a part of my Christian life here in the free of life here in the South.
♪ Oh touch me, Lord ♪ ♪ Touch me, touch me, Lord ♪ - [Ossie] As we moved into the 20th century, for the older generation of Negroes, there was often only patience and faith in a better future.
But in the middle of the 20th century, for the younger Negroes something else was stirring, something that would change the South and the southern way of life.
Something that was a long time a-comin' and was too explosive to contain.
Touch me, touch me, Lord.
I want to be whole.
♪ I want to be whole ♪ ♪ You know where I go ♪ ♪ And you know where I belong ♪ ♪ So touch me, touch me ♪ ♪ Cleanse me through and through ♪ ♪ Oh, touch me, Lord ♪ ♪ Touch me, touch me, Lord ♪ ♪ Oh, touch me, Lord ♪ ♪ Touch me, touch me, Lord ♪ ♪ Well, you just turn the light from heaven on my soul ♪ ♪ Well if you find anything that shouldn't be ♪ ♪ Take it out and strengthen me ♪ ♪ I want to be right ♪ ♪ I want to be saved ♪ ♪ I want to be whole ♪ [bright music] - [Narrator] This is NET, the National Educational Television Network.