Virginia in the Late 1950s

The Grounds and the Fury: William Faulkner at the University, 1958

By Ken Ringle (College ’61)

God obviously created William Faulkner to explain the American South. He may have regretted it, because then He needed an army of scholars, critics and teachers to explain William Faulkner.

Those of us who found ourselves on the same campus with him half a century ago in Charlottesville needed at least that much aid. Faulkner himself was not much help at all. It wasn’t for lack of availability. The agreement that made him the University of Virginia’s first writer in residence in 1957 and 1958 specified that he keep regular office hours something like once a week. Those of us hoping to write our own selves into immortality (or at least into the arms of English majors at Sweet Briar) would show up to sit at his feet and study the muse.

Surprisingly, the regulars were a pretty small group, perhaps because the novelist rarely said much. He would lean back in his chair in his tweed sport coat, khakis and a green wool tie with little fox heads on it, then puff on his pipe and make infrequent gnomic pronouncements. We would sit there gaping, wracking our under-booked brains for some question that wouldn’t make us look stupid.

“Mr. Faulkner, in your short story ‘The Bear,’ do you consider the bear a positive nature symbol or a negative nature symbol or a symbol both positive and negative like the white whale in Moby-Dick?”

“Oh,” he’d eventually say in his thin, reedy voice, after puffing on his pipe long enough to raise the suspense: “That’s just a story about a bear.”

I was usually too intimidated to ask anything. Though I was certain I was destined to write the Great American Novel, I was mortified that I found his work unfathomable. How could I write a novel when I couldn’t even read his?

“Mr. Faulkner, how do you start a novel? How do you even know what you want to write about?”

Pause while he stroked his gray mustache.

“M’boy you have to write because you can’t not write. You have to be demon-driven by what’s inside you.” More pipe puffing. What the hell did that mean? It was years before I’d learn.

Stalking him for clues became a passion. Once, on my job shelving books at Alderman Library, I borrowed the key to the room in the stacks where he wrote. He’d just finished The Mansion and I thought the pictures on the wall, the books he used for reference, his general writing environment would give me clues on how to be a writer. I found the answer, but not the one I expected. The room was absolutely bare. There was nothing in it but one of the library’s standard oak tables and a chair, an upright Underwood typewriter and a big stack of writing paper. Nothing else. No books, no pictures or posters on the wall, no jottings, no comfy sweaters, not even a dictionary. It was all in his head. How depressing.

Undeterred, I soldiered on. Faulkner liked to wander around the university grounds and observe things, usually from beneath one of those little green Tyrolean hats with the shaving brush in the hatband. I would run across him regularly near Lambeth Field, where he used to idle at track practice. He showed little interest in the major university sports of football and lacrosse, but would spend hours timing sprinters and hurdlers with two stop watches that never seemed to agree.

I pondered that for clues. Maybe it had something to do with the horses in his books and stories. He rode to hounds with the Farmington Hunt and always rode horses too big for him, which greatly excited Freudians in the English department. But I wasn’t sure what it told me.

He didn’t appear demon-driven whenever I saw him. Just a meditative onlooker, galloping somewhere deep in his imagination.

Not all our encounters were planned. In the winter of 1958, as a photographer for the Cavalier Daily, I was stationed across from the Virginia ABC store on Charlottesville’s Main Street to get a shot of students stocking up for Midwinters weekend. I was framing the line snaking into the door on the right when out of the door on the left came William Faulkner. Wholly dwarfed by his enormous burden of bottle-packed shopping bags.

In those days college drinking was a source of more celebration than hand-wringing, particularly at Virginia, and we merrily ran the picture on the CD’s front page. The English department faculty was horrified. Faulkner was not. “They caught me,” he said with a grin.

The faculty reaction was symptomatic. In those days novelists didn’t hang around campuses much, believing real life a more profitable laboratory for observation. Faulkner was such a prize that obsequious professors all but laid their coats over puddles in his path. The writer himself, who lacked even a high school diploma and was famously disdainful of academics, remained polite but distant, countering scholars’ questions with mischievously opaque replies.

His agreement with the university specified that he was required to give no more than an occasional speech and no classroom lectures at all. But, in addition to keeping office hours, he was to answer questions periodically from both graduate and undergraduate students in a classroom setting. Thus he was regularly led before us like a trained bear to deepen the mystery of just what he meant by the biblical allusions in Light in August or the stained-glass imagery in Go Down, Moses. There was much tape-recording of all this, the results appeared years later in Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph Blotner’s book Faulkner in the University. But Gwynn and Blotner edited out much of the mischief.

Unenlightened by such sessions and despairing of unlocking Faulkner on my own, I sought out a superb young English instructor named John Graham, who was far more passionate about nourishing learning than about nourishing cults of celebrity.

“I’m not surprised you found Faulkner difficult,” he said. ”You probably started off trying to read The Sound and the Fury.” I had. “Everyone does that. It’s his best-known book. But it’s also his most difficult.”

The way to read and appreciate William Faulkner, he said, was to take one of two routes. To just sample his power with language and as a teller of tales, he said, read “Old Man.” It’s a mesmerizing short novel – originally part of The Wild Palms – about the 1927 Mississippi flood and a convict trapped therein with a pregnant woman who, in one of literature’s great Gothic sequences, gives birth in a swamp atop an Indian mound aswarm with cottonmouth water moccasins.

To go further and understand Faulkner’s panoramic sweep of history, he said, one should start with The Unvanquished, a historical novel that’s one of his most accessible. It deals with the earliest years in his saga of the Southern aristocracy. Then read Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, which continue the story of the aristocratic decline and focus on how that affects blacks. Then The Hamlet, which charts the rise of the poor white Snopes clan. Then, he said, you’re steeped in Faulkner’s mythical Yoknapatawpha County and its secrets of blood and history, and ready for all his other books, which weave in and out of the cultural stream he chronicles with such power.

Graham’s insight, which I’ve never seen published anywhere, finally unlocked William Faulkner for me. And as it did, his books became a passion and the writer himself seemed to open up. One day as we talked in his office, he presented me with an insight as valuable today as it was then.

“Mr. Faulkner,” I asked him “In your book As I Lay Dying, most of the characters are socially pretty reprehensible. The only one with any kind of sensitivity or nobility is Addie Bundren, the schoolteacher. Yet you have her marry Anse Bundren, absolutely the most dreadful of the whole lot. How can you justify that?” Faulkner rubbed his mustache and re-lit his pipe, then looked at me a long, long time.

“My boy,” he finally said in his slow drawl. “Haven’t you ever heard the story of the beautiful butterfly? That flitted from flower to flower? And lit at last on a horse turd?”

Despite the courtly charm with which he inevitably responded to those who approached him, Faulkner was normally reserved and, though he basically liked students, he appeared somewhat remote and most held him in awe.

But not all students were so cowed.

One who wasn’t was a fraternity brother of mine named Zeke Waters. Zeke was a jovial good-hearted guy but, like most of us then, did not over-exert himself in the classroom. He was always looking for shortcuts.

One spring evening we were lounging in he sun on the porch of the Beta House next to Beta Bridge before dinner. Zeke was panicked. He was an English major and the next day faced the dreaded senior “comprehensives”, the do-or-die examinations which in those days tested every student facing graduation on the entire body of knowledge absorbed in his major field of study over four years. Zeke was weak on American literature, and was looking for some quick fix to repair the situation. Where could he find it? he asked us. He got a few opinions but mostly shrugs. Then, from the direction of the Rotunda he spotted William Faulkner, walking home to his house up Rugby Road.

“That’s it!” said Zeke. “Faulkner knows all about American literature! He can tell me what I need to know!”

Now, I’m pretty sure Zeke had never read a line of Faulkner’s, but he was the most amiable and approachable of souls, and could make friends with a tree. He loped across Rugby road, greeted Faulkner and soon they disappeared together up the road and over the hill chatting, tall and lanky Zeke with his arm around Faulkner who was a kind of splendidly dapper but miniature man.

An hour or more went by. Zeke did not appear and we Betas went in to dinner without him. Finally, after dinner, Zeke showed up.

How did it go? we all wanted to know. Did Faulkner give you the keys to American literature?

“Well, not exactly,” said Zeke. “He couldn’t have been nicer and we talked about all sorts of things. But I never quite got him around to where I could ask the right question.”

It turned out Faulkner appeared glad to meet Zeke and grateful for the company on his homeward stroll. They chatted about the weather, the football weekend, where Zeke was from and other topics. When they got to Faulkner’s house, he asked Zeke in. He said his wife was away, the housekeeper was fixing dinner but he was going to have a drink first. Would Zeke like one too?

Zeke, like most students, never turned down a drink and soon they were seated companionably in Faulkner’s living room sipping good bourbon. The talk turned to horses, the pictures on the wall, the house – Faulkner liked Charlottesville because his daughter lived there – and so on. Faulkner suggested a second drink. Zeke accepted. There may have been a third.

“I was trying to think how to get him around to the literature question when the housekeeper came in and said dinner was ready,” Zeke said. “Faulkner is just the most courteous man in the world. He asked me to stay to dinner, saying there was plenty to eat. I protested no, I couldn’t do that, I was expected back at the Beta house. But I said I would come in the dining room with him and finish my drink while he ate. I was still trying to work him around to American literature.”

The housekeeper had arranged the small dining room beautifully, Zeke reported, with crystal, wine glasses, a vase of flowers and so on, all set off by a splendid white table cloth. Faulkner sat down and began spooning his soup. Zeke stood against the wall with his glass of bourbon, making conversation, trying desperately to turn the talk to books.

“That’s when it happened,” Zeke said. “For some reason I crossed my legs while I was standing there talking and thinking, and I lost my balance.”

Down he slowly toppled, grabbing desperately for support. He caught the end of the tablecloth. Off came the tablecloth, the vase, the glasses, the flowers, Faulkner’s soup, everything. The sound of crashing crockery and glass, Zeke said, seemed to go on forever.

Faulkner, who had somehow escaped both injury and stains, was unconcerned by the mess. He was worried Zeke might have hurt himself. He picked Zeke up, brushed him off, apologized for the incident and asked once again if Zeke wouldn’t stay and share the rest of the dinner.

“But I decided it was time to leave,” Zeke said. “Because even though I hadn’t had a chance to ask him about literature and even though Faulkner could not have been nicer, that housekeeper was really, REALLY pissed off.”

I can’t remember if Zeke passed his comprehensives.

©2009 Ken Ringle

Ken Ringle retired in 2003 after 33 years as a writer, editor, essayist and critic for The Washington Post. His work has also appeared in The National Geographic, Smithsonian, European Affairs and other publications, and he has been a writer-in-residence himself as a Washington Post Fellow at Duke University.

Faulkner and an Undergraduate

By Gerald L. Cooper (College ’58, M.Ed. Guidance ’69)

Upon graduation from Christchurch School in June 1953, I entered and quickly left Princeton University in September, disenchanted. I attended the College of William and Mary for three semesters happily, and then transferred to the University of Virginia in January 1955, to pursue a major in English. A year or so later I found myself in a small lecture hall, straining to hear a world-renowned writer-in-residence who spoke in an almost inaudible voice using an extraordinary accent. He described a mythical place with an Indian-sounding name: Yoknapatawpha. That reminded me of my own place of origin: the shores of the Rappahannock.

The speaker was William Faulkner, whom I had heard of from another native Mississippian, Robert M. Yarbrough Jr., instructor in senior English at Christchurch. Bob had introduced me to Faulkner’s novels The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying outside of class.

Someone in the audience that day in 1957 at the University of Virginia asked Mr. Faulkner to give his view of promising young American writers. Violating his policy against endorsing writers, he replied that one of the best was from right here in Virginia: “His name is William Styron, and his book is titled Lie Down In Darkness.” Deciphering Faulkner’s low-pitched, Miss’sippi drawl with no amplification from my seat on the back row of the small auditorium in Rouss Hall, I realized he had spoken the name of a graduate of my old school – William Styron, known to his Christchurch classmates as “Sty.” I had attended the graduation of the Class of 1942 at Christchurch, to honor my friend and mentor, Jim Davenport, a member of that class, along with Styron and about fourteen others. By 1957 I had also read Lie Down In Darkness, Styron’s first book, that he published in 1951 and that won the Prix de Rome.

Several daily newspapers reported Faulkner’s public recognition of William Styron, including the Washington Post and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Thereafter I found it more comfortable to mention around the Grounds that I was a graduate of Christchurch. Both the University’s English professors and my fellow students, some of whom were graduates of well-known prep schools like Woodberry Forest, Episcopal High, and Lawrenceville, suddenly sounded respectful of Christchurch, that unpretentious school with the million-dollar view on a bank overlooking the Rappahannock River.

I completed a bachelor’s degree in English at the University of Virginia in December 1957, a year after William Faulkner arrived as writer-in-residence. I had several opportunities to hear Mr. Faulkner discuss his writing between January and December of 1957. Although I was not among the favorites of the English department’s English majors, and therefore not invited to special gatherings with Mr. Faulkner, it was possible nonetheless to find “Old Bill” around the Grounds, occasionally at fraternities. I remember his quiet presence one evening in the Serpentine Club, at the back of the Quadrangle. (I knew the location of every fraternity because one of my part-time jobs was delivering beer kegs to the fraternities from Carroll’s Tea Room.)

In that setting Mr. Faulkner was less reticent than he was in small English seminars or honors classes. His painful shyness in one-to-one settings became well-known in New Cabell Hall, and not many students signed up for those uncomfortable meetings. Perhaps he was under-utilized, as some have suggested.

Even peripheral undergraduate students such as I were aware that factions within the English department – and perhaps among the entire University administration – were in disagreement over the value of Mr. Faulkner’s presence and usefulness on the Grounds. Former professor of English Joseph Blotner has captured much of the color, along with some of the political issues, of that era at the University in his autobiographical work, An Unexpected Life, published in 2005. The chapter titled “The University and Mr. Faulkner” might more accurately be titled “The Faulkner Era at the University of Virginia.”

Despite the politics and controversy, William Faulkner had a remarkable impact in the brief period of his presence in Charlottesville. His time on the Grounds is comparable to the presence of Edgar Allan Poe, who was enrolled for one academic year, beginning February 1, 1826, in just the University’s second session.

The University of Virginia’s first president, Edwin A. Alderman, wrote in 1925 a convincing essay on Edgar Allan Poe’s tenure as a student. He describes how Poe, despite a short stay and a less than exemplary lifestyle, had symbolized the presence of a “world poet” at the University. Alderman concludes that Poe “has contributed an irreducible total of good to the spirit which men breathe [at the University] as well as a wide fame to his alma mater that will outlive all disaster, or change, or ill-fortune.” Alderman defines the effect that a true artistic talent may have upon a community of scholars – even when that presence is brief and controversial.

Blotner and others have reported that President Colgate Darden was lukewarm to Faulkner’s writer-in-residence status because he questioned that the University needed the national attention that Faulkner’s visit would bring. But from my point of view, William Faulkner’s presence on the grounds had the effect of opening a window onto a larger world for UVA students in the late 1950s. It is difficult for students in the 21st century to imagine what a great gulf existed between the Grounds and the larger worlds of government, commerce and especially the arts, before the advent of mass communications. No national media coverage originated in Charlottesville, and even Washington, D.C. offered little or no live theatre, at least until the Kennedy Center opened in 1971. Thus to have a person of international stature in the world of letters – a Nobel laureate – walking the Grounds daily over a period of months and years demonstrated that the University of Virginia had not lost sight of the world-class ambitions of its founder.

I’ve had an enduring interest in the University of Virginia ever since I arrived on the Grounds some fifty-three years ago as a “transfer” from another college. Perhaps that’s why I view the University from a different perspective than does the typical alumnus of any era before the 1970s. I have devoted a chapter in my ebook to the University of today, titled “Leading to Diversity,” highlighting the changes that I see as having occurred under the leadership of President John T. Casteen III.

I am happy to observe that gone are the days of a stereotyped faculty and student body, and of a laissez faire attitude toward diverse students that I experienced when I attended in the 1950s. As Mr. Jefferson the Francophile might have said, Vive la difference!

Gerald L. Cooper divided his 43-year career as an administrator, counselor and teacher among four preparatory schools, two colleges, and finally as executive director of a college access program [501 (c) (3)] that served ten public high schools in Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach. This essay derives from his ebook, On Scholarship – From An Empty Room at Princeton, available in PDF format online at “http://www.talkeetna.com/OnScholarship/index.html” . In it he describes his personal experiences with financial aid: receiving it, granting it, fundraising for it, and finding it for needy students.

President Alderman’s remarks about Poe can be found in “Edgar Allan Poe and the University of Virginia” (The Virginia Quarterly Review, spring 1925), reprinted in We Write for Our Own Time: Selected Essays from the Virginia Quarterly Review (Charlottesville, 2000).

©2010 Gerald L. Cooper

Faulkner and an Undergraduate

By Gerald L. Cooper (College ’58, M.Ed. Guidance ’69)

Upon graduation from Christchurch School in June 1953, I entered and quickly left Princeton University in September, disenchanted. I attended the College of William and Mary for three semesters happily, and then transferred to the University of Virginia in January 1955, to pursue a major in English. A year or so later I found myself in a small lecture hall, straining to hear a world-renowned writer-in-residence who spoke in an almost inaudible voice using an extraordinary accent. He described a mythical place with an Indian-sounding name: Yoknapatawpha. That reminded me of my own place of origin: the shores of the Rappahannock.

The speaker was William Faulkner, whom I had heard of from another native Mississippian, Robert M. Yarbrough Jr., instructor in senior English at Christchurch. Bob had introduced me to Faulkner’s novels The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying outside of class.

Someone in the audience that day in 1957 at the University of Virginia asked Mr. Faulkner to give his view of promising young American writers. Violating his policy against endorsing writers, he replied that one of the best was from right here in Virginia: “His name is William Styron, and his book is titled Lie Down In Darkness.” Deciphering Faulkner’s low-pitched, Miss’sippi drawl with no amplification from my seat on the back row of the small auditorium in Rouss Hall, I realized he had spoken the name of a graduate of my old school – William Styron, known to his Christchurch classmates as “Sty.” I had attended the graduation of the Class of 1942 at Christchurch, to honor my friend and mentor, Jim Davenport, a member of that class, along with Styron and about fourteen others. By 1957 I had also read Lie Down In Darkness, Styron’s first book, that he published in 1951 and that won the Prix de Rome.

Several daily newspapers reported Faulkner’s public recognition of William Styron, including the Washington Post and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Thereafter I found it more comfortable to mention around the Grounds that I was a graduate of Christchurch. Both the University’s English professors and my fellow students, some of whom were graduates of well-known prep schools like Woodberry Forest, Episcopal High, and Lawrenceville, suddenly sounded respectful of Christchurch, that unpretentious school with the million-dollar view on a bank overlooking the Rappahannock River.

I completed a bachelor’s degree in English at the University of Virginia in December 1957, a year after William Faulkner arrived as writer-in-residence. I had several opportunities to hear Mr. Faulkner discuss his writing between January and December of 1957. I was not among the elect of the English department’s English majors, and therefore I was not invited to special gatherings with Mr. Faulkner. It was possible nonetheless to find “Old Bill” around the Grounds, occasionally at fraternities. I remember his quiet presence one evening in the Serpentine Club, at the back of the Quadrangle. (I knew the location of every fraternity because one of my part-time jobs was delivering beer kegs to the fraternities from Carroll’s Tea Room.)

In that setting Mr. Faulkner was less reticent than he was in small English seminars or honors classes. His painful shyness in one-to-one settings became well-known in New Cabell Hall, and not many students signed up for those uncomfortable meetings. Perhaps he was under-utilized, as some have suggested.

Even peripheral undergraduate students such as I were aware that factions within the English department – and perhaps among the entire University administration – were in disagreement over the value of Mr. Faulkner’s presence and usefulness on the Grounds. Former professor of English Joseph Blotner has captured much of the color, along with some of the political issues, of that era at the University in his autobiographical work, An Unexpected Life, published in 2005. The chapter titled “The University and Mr. Faulkner” might more accurately be titled “The Faulkner Era at the University of Virginia.”

Despite the politics and controversy, William Faulkner had a remarkable impact in the brief period of his presence in Charlottesville. His time on the Grounds is comparable to the presence of Edgar Allan Poe, who was enrolled for just one academic year, beginning February 1, 1826, in the second session at the University of Virginia.

The University of Virginia’s first president, Edwin A. Alderman, wrote in 1925 a convincing essay on Edgar Allan Poe’s brief time as a student at the University. He described how Poe, despite a short stay and a less than exemplary lifestyle, had symbolized the presence of a “world poet” at the University. Alderman concluded that Poe “has contributed an irreducible total of good to the spirit which men breathe [at the University] as well as a wide fame to his alma mater that will outlive all disaster, or change, or ill-fortune.” Alderman defined the effect that a true artistic talent may have upon a community of scholars – even when that presence is brief and controversial.

Mr. Faulkner’s arrival on the Grounds signaled the presence of another “world writer” equal in stature to Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Jefferson, who had dominated the University of Virginia’s pantheon of genius for generations. Blotner and others reported that President Colgate Darden was lukewarm to Faulkner’s writer-in-residence status because he questioned that the University needed the national attention that Faulkner’s visit would bring.

I’ve had an enduring interest in the University of Virginia ever since I arrived on the Grounds some fifty-three years ago as a “transfer” from another college. Perhaps that’s why I view the University from a different perspective than does the typical alumnus of any era before the 1970s. I have devoted a chapter in my forthcoming book to the University of today, titled “Leading to Diversity,” highlighting the changes that I see as having occurred under the leadership of President John T. Casteen III.

I am happy to observe that gone are the days of a stereotyped faculty and student body, and of a laissez faire attitude toward diverse students that I experienced when I attended in the 1950s. As I see it today:

John Casteen as president has influenced the entire University of Virginia community to draw on the distinctive attributes of its past – including the genius of its founder, Thomas Jefferson – and also to make changes in its practices for the future, aiming to set standards for measurably higher achievement in the twenty-first century. In the twenty years that he has been president, Casteen has gathered a diverse group of persons to the University’s faculty, administration and student body, and he has nurtured them in their new environment. Apparently the Board of Visitors shares this commitment to diversity.

As Mr. Jefferson the Francophile might have said, Vive la difference!

Gerald L. Cooper divided his 43-year career as an administrator, counselor and teacher among four preparatory schools, two colleges, and finally as executive director of a college access program [501 (c) (3)] that served ten public high schools in Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach. This essay derives from his forthcoming book, On Scholarship – From An Empty Room at Princeton, about his personal experiences with financial aid: receiving it, granting it, fundraising for it, and finding it for needy students.

President Alderman’s remarks about Poe can be found in “Edgar Allan Poe and the University of Virginia” (The Virginia Quarterly Review, spring 1925), reprinted in We Write for Our Own Time: Selected Essays from the Virginia Quarterly Review (Charlottesville, 2000).

©2010 Gerald L. Cooper

The University in the Late Fifties

By Ken Ringle (College ’61)

To Be a Virginian, either by Birth, Marriage, Adoption, or even on one’s Mother’s side, is an Introduction to any State in the Union, a Passport to any Foreign Country, and a Benediction from Above. — “The Virginia Creed,” Anonymous

Elitism is a dirty word in academia today. At the University in the 1950s it was what we were all about. Not that our attitude was particularly justified. Though the law, medical, engineering and architecture schools were first rate, the College of Arts and Sciences was only so-so, many key professorships were held by stuffy old pedants living off past laurels and social ties. Academically the school wasn’t terribly demanding. Some students strung their years in Charlottesville out for nearly a decade.

Never mind. Wahoos defined themselves less by what they were, than by what they were not. We were not a “State U” – the dreaded apparition of proletarian banality occupied by VPI (nobody then called it Virginia Tech) and the V-necked, marching band megaversities of the Southeast and the Big 10.

We were smaller (the entire university, including graduate schools, was only about 6,500 students when I entered in 1957), we were older (1819), and we had both Thomas Jefferson and his architecture. Though we did most of the same stupid things college students have always done and do today, we considered ourselves more sophisticated and more adult. We had an honor code. We wore coats and ties to class. And we had fewer rules: almost the only one was that we were to “conduct ourselves at all times as gentlemen.” We could drink anywhere, even in class. Needless to say the student body was all male, but then so were Harvard, Yale, Princeton and most of the Ivy League colleges. We considered ourselves one of them, at least socially. The student government, fraternities and honor societies were dominated by graduates of Virginia boarding schools like Episcopal High, St. Christophers and Woodberry Forest, but New England schools like Choate and Kent were represented, too. I remember two of my classmates from New England telling me separately that their parents had sent them to Virginia because they had failed to get into Harvard and U.Va. was “the only other socially acceptable school.” What other state university had a polo team?

The late CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt once wrote me a letter at the time describing a U.Va. diploma as “not only scholarly but patrician” – a distinction, he said, “that has always escaped Chapel Hill where I went to school.”

Part of this sense of exclusivity grew out of the self-satisfaction embodied in the only partly tongue-in-cheek Virginia Creed quoted above. In those days many Virginians, particularly old family Richmonders, took it seriously. I remember one of my classmates – otherwise quite a sane and genial fellow – telling me that whenever his family visited Europe and were asked if they were Americans, they replied “No, we’re Virginians.”

Yet if the University was unchallenged as the principal college in the Old Dominion (bumper stickers said simply “THE University”), nearly one-third of the students came, as I did, from out-of-state. This was less to leaven any sense of provincialism in the student body than to help pay the freight. The General Assembly was famously parsimonious in funding education, and out-of-state students paid twice the tuition of in-staters.

Obviously the Commonwealth then was very different. The Washington suburbs which so dominate it today were almost invisible at the University in the 1950s. The Old Dominion was still largely a state of rural counties and small towns. Most of the students, whether in-state or imported, had some sort of tie to the land.

One index of that demographic difference was the firearm. A great many Virginia students in the 1950s – maybe even most – owned firearms and kept them in their rooms. Most of these were shotguns or rifles used for hunting – I had two fraternity brothers who regularly went quail hunting after classes in the fall and I remember seeing a deer carcass hanging by its heels from the porch of the Sigma Pi house – but there were plenty of pistols around as well. These last were used for target shooting, beer can plinking and general hilarity. We still had a few World War II and Korean War veterans in the student body who would pack their service .45s on road trips and regularly shoot out the gate lights at Sweet Briar. A fraternity brother of mine from Savannah, “Crazy Harry” Strahan, disturbed one night by the glare from the light in the showers of the D.U. House next door, pulled out the .357 magnum he kept in his bedside table and shot out the offending bulb. When Dean B.F.D. Runk learned of that the following morning, Harry was instantly expelled from the University. Even such impressive marksmanship was NOT deemed “gentlemanly behavior.” But no rule was enacted to restrict firearms. Because, as amazing as it seems today – after horrors like Columbine and Virginia Tech – I never remember hearing of a single case, before, during or after my years at Virginia – not a single one! – when any student gun was employed – or even displayed – as a weapon. There were the usual number of drunken brawls then as there doubtless are now on party weekends. But using a gun to settle one would never have occurred to anyone. It would have been considered cowardly and unmanly. It was just unthinkable.

Another major difference between the University in the ’50s and the University of today was political. However lethargic today’s students may appear, they are bombarded constantly with news updates and media messages from TV, computers, cell phones, PDAs and the like, none of which, of course, we had. And aside from the usual tiny minority of campus Democrats and Republicans (most of them political science majors and/or budding lawyers), we didn’t have a political clue. We were scarcely a decade from the victory in World War II, Eisenhower, who had led that victory, was president and we were largely content to let him and the other leaders elected by our parents make all governmental decisions without input from us. A few impatient faculty members chided us for such apathy and compared us unfavorably to students in Latin America and Europe who always seemed to be rioting for some cause. But at the University – and in most other American colleges in that era – we were largely unconcerned with politics and public affairs.

That this was true at Virginia seems particularly bizarre now, since the state was then roiling with debate over school desegregation. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board decision had been handed down in 1954, and in 1956 U.S. Sen Harry F. Byrd, whose political machine dominated Virginia, called for “Massive Resistance” to the decision by closing any public school ordered to integrate. One of the first such locality was Charlottesville. But University students were largely oblivious to the political turmoil.

Most of us had been raised with racial segregation and were at least passively in favor of the system. Though few would have denied its legal injustice, its effects appeared largely benign to our socially myopic adolescent eyes. Almost all of us had grown up with blacks, but few of us had ever known any who weren’t servants or laborers or had any education at all. It wasn’t so much that we wanted to continue segregation: we just couldn’t imagine how society would function without it. It was all we’d known. Furthermore, the blacks we saw every day in Charlottesville seemed to accept it without complaint. I had an aunt in Mississippi where I had witnessed casual brutality and a bitter kind of racial hatred that I found as scary as it was repellent. But nothing like that was visible in Charlottesville or, for that matter, in the part of Louisiana where I’d grown up. Racism at the University manifested itself largely in Step’n Fetchit jokes and racial stereotyping. Plus tiresome Confederate flag-wavng at football games when the pep band at least once a half played “Dixie.” The cheering at this was largely pro forma.

Yet the University also was edging very, very quietly toward racial change. Though it was technically supposed to be segregated, we had a half-dozen black students enrolled, most, as I remember, in the professional schools. I don’t think they lived in the dormitories – I don’t remember where they lived – but they ate in the dining halls with us and otherwise moved around the grounds without apparent incident. One faculty wife, Sarah Patton Boyle, wrote about this approvingly for “The Saturday Evening Post” and received some subsequent threats, though not from any students. Her recently republished memoir – “The Desegregated Heart” paints a revealing portrait of this time of racial transition.

Boyle’s writing, together with Faulkner’s, finally helped awaken in me a shamefully-delayed understanding of segregation’s crippling effects. John F. Kennedy’s election as president in 1960 led me and others as well to a political awakening after which the University was never again quite the monument to apathy it had been for most of the 1950s. But when Ed Lovern of Lynchburg and I attempted in 1961 to charter a University chapter of the Virginia Council on Human Relations – an early but hardly revolutionary civil rights group – the student council turned us down and I was accused of Communist sympathies by a fraternity brother from Farmville. It would take the students of the 1960s to make the real difference.

The final and most obvious difference between the University of Faulkner’s day and today’s involved women. Essentially, we had none. Aside from a sprinkling of would-be schoolteachers in the education school, almost the only women on the Grounds were the student nurses who lived in McKim Hall. These were convenient but tended toward understandable resentment when dated only during the week and left behind on party weekends. In general, one had to go Down The Road.

Freshmen girls were bused in occasionally for “mixers” from women’s schools like Sweet Briar (62 miles away), Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (74) and Mary Washington (78) and road trips to these schools were a regular feature both during the week and on weekends. Hollins girls were considered highly desireable but, at 110 miles distant, required a more serious time commitment, particularly during the week. Longwood and Radford girls were visited as merry sports, but not always girls you would bring home to mother.

And that, in some weird way, seemed to be important. In the preppier-than-thou culture in which we operated, most dating was considered at least a quasi-courtship, particularly by the women involved, most of whom were far more interested – it was a sign of the times – in getting married than considering a career. And of course, since the birth control Pill was at least five years in the future, most girls made a fairly serious effort at staying virgin, and an even more serious effort at appearing one.

All the girls colleges had curfews – usually midnight, no boys on dorm – and surreal combinations of rules governing “ladylike” behavior. Randolph-Macon girls were forbidden to drink within 20 miles of the campus. Radford girls were forbidden to wear slacks, etc. Since Virginia in those days prohibited liquor-by-the-drink, the frequent date of choice was “boon docking” with a blanket and a fifth of bourbon at some woodsy place like Amherst Wayside or dancing to a jukebox at some filling station/beer hall like Brants near Lynchburg. If you think that sounds contradictory, you’d be right.

When invited for party weekends at the University, it was understood that girls would pay their own way to and from Charlottesville by bus, train or car as well as paying for their lodging at one of the chaperoned guest houses in town approved by their individual school. Motels were a no-no. Their date would meet all other costs of the weekend. Attire for the weekend was taken VERY seriously by the women, with the usual goal being to look enough like wife material so they COULD be taken home to mother. Such garments were considered so important in Virginia in those days that many big city deparment stores employed student advisorettes – “college boards” – to counsel girls heading off to college on the virtual trousseau of skirts, sweaters, blouses, dresses, overcoats, shoes and boots they would need for the anticipated social whirl accompanying their higher education. The de rigeur female uniform for informal dates consisted of a white blouse with a McMullen collar beneath a crew neck sweater, combined with a plaid kilt held together at the knee by a giant safety pin, knee socks and Weejun loafers. All set off by a circle pin and a scarab bracelet. And maybe a headband. This was a virtual uniform, particularly for Sweet Briar and Hollins girls. Wahoo garb was no less predictable – tweed sport coat, khakis, Oxford cloth button down shirt, rep tie and Weejuns.

As might be expected, the University’s social life involved a lot of drinking. In fact, alcohol and U. Va. have been intertwined since Edgar Allan Poe boozed his way out of the school in 1826. In the 1950s we drank bourbon over ice in the stands at football games, Scotch and soda while bopping to blues bands in sweaty, smoke-filled fraternity houses, gin and juice and bloody marys at Sunday polo games and we drank occasional wine and lots of beer with meals. We also drank an alarming amount while driving hundreds of miles to and from women’s colleges on winding, hilly two-lane roads, and why no student died in a car accident during my four years, God only knows. But one reason may have been that the culture governing drinking then was patently different than that governing it today. Not that students were always moderate in their consumption, far from it. There were always some students intent on wrecking themselves, throwing up, passing out, being obnoxious. It was a rite of passage then as it is today.

But the social ideal in those days was to be “able to hold your liquor” – to be genial and colorful and amusing, but still keep a rein on your self-control. For men it was a sign of machismo. For women it was both a sign of femininity and means of self-defense. Not everybody met the ideal. Women were generally better at it than men, in part because a woman reported to have been drunk and out-of-control would usually be put on “social probation” by her school and restricted to campus or even suspended. But the self-knowledge both acquired in the liquor-washed University of the 1950s had to do with learning one’s capacity and taking responsibility for oneself. That was the real elitism we cultivated on the grounds in those days. Whether that same ethos reigns today in Charlottesville, only those there can say.

©2009 Ken Ringle

Ken Ringle retired in 2003 after 33 years as a writer, editor, essayist and critic for The Washington Post. His work has also appeared in The National Geographic, Smithsonian, European Affairs and other publications, and he has been a writer-in-residence himself as a Washington Post Fellow at Duke University.

The Virginia Spectator Jim Crow Issue (May 1957, vol. 118, no. 8, pp. 2-4)

Up And Down From Slavery

By Pablo & Carlos

DUE to the increasing interest in the inter-racial problem in the South today, we of the SPECTATOR have taken it upon ourselves to scientifically ascertain the position held by the great unwashed in regard to this matter. The first victims of our interrogation were several of the elite social organizations of Mad Bowl and Carr's Hill.

When the question of, "What do you think of integration?" was first posed to the St. Elmos they pleaded that old Fifth Amendment. Furthermore, we were told that the SPECTATOR was overstepping its limits by meddling with matters outside its jurisdiction. Now we do not wish to infer anything, but could it be the St. Elmos practice underground integration?

The St. A. House was next our list, and they were a bit more co-operative. After informing us that charter laws were classified, the "Spooks" told us that they would pledge a negro only if they could bump the Phi Kaps; [Footnote: By the way, the Phi Kap comment was, "How bourgeois can those Spooks in the Hall get?"] but, they were afraid he might refuse the bid. We then asked them what they would think of starting a colored fraternity. Following a few moments of silent meditation they replied, "It would be colorful as hell." (And so it would.)

Next, we put the question to the Phi Psi's, asking them if they would allow a colored person in their modest edifice. To this they replied, "Oh yes, we need a boy, and would gladly put an advertisement in the SPECTATOR for such." "No," we replied, "you have the wrong idea. We mean take on a negro pledge." "Like we said before, we need a boy."

Last on the list came the ATO's, the Phi Delt's and the DKE's. It seems that ATO has a charter by-law which states that one pledging ATO must be a white male Christian. The Phi Delts have a by-law that reads, "Every pledge must be a person acceptable to all the other chapters," . . . if you don't believe us just ask the boys at Amherst. On the other hand, DKE has no by-laws in their national, and they told us, "If he's a good jock, then why the hell not?"

Despairing from the sophistication of "Boozers' Alley," we decided to question some of the leading (or otherwise) individuals who either sweat for or inhabit the "U." First on this list of distinguished gentlemen was the director of admissions, Dr. R. C. Bice. Naturally, we thought he would have a good deal to say regarding the admission of a colored boy to the College of Arts and Science. However he only squelched us, for as long as he can remember, never has a negro applied. Of course there are some negroes in engineering, but then, there is a lot else in engineering as well. Further questioning of Dr. Bice only led to a discussion concerning the consumption of liquor . . . did you know negroes can drink more? Only, they go more for quantity rather than quality. We think it was very clever of Dr. Bice, the way he avoided our interrogation; being a Phd. in psychology sure payed off.

Col. Tash of the Air Force R. O. T. C. unit was our next victim. It seems as though the A. F. R. O. T. C. is responsible to two bosses, WASHINGTON and Dean Runk. Neither, as of yet, has placed any restriction on race or religion, hence there are four colored cadets in the Air Force.

In asking several of the colored people around the grounds what they thought of the situation, we received varied answers. One said, "We is happy the way we is." Another favored integration, but he stated that "Time, and only time, will solve the problem."

Another student, whose name we shall not reveal, took the point of view of State – total segregation.

"After all, it is a State's right to have segregation just as much as it is a State's right to set the laws regarding divorce, liquor and automobiles. Damn Sam, if the federal government is going to be despotic, why don't they take over everything and save the states the expense of running their so-called privileges. At the rate things are going, it probably won't be long before State's rights cease to exist. And as for those who don't like the South, then damnit all, let them move – I can't see that we are paying them to stay here and bitch about our methods."

Well good people, we of the SPECTATOR just like to thank all of you who were involved in our research for your co-operation. Think, Gentlemen, think. Never shirk the great privilege endowed unto us by our forefathers. Amen.

©1957 The University of Virginia

The Virginia Spectator Jim Crow Issue (May 1957, vol. 118, no. 8, p. 17)

Keynote

By J[ames].C.P[lowden]-W[ardlaw, Editor-in-Chief]

In this issue we have collected the viewpoints of persons on both sides of the segregation question which we felt would be of interest, and perhaps benefit, to our readers. Although most of our authors here presented are nationally known, we do not necessarily presume to call them spokesmen for their particular side of the argument. Rather they were chosen because we felt each one represented a particular aspect of either segregationist or integrationist thought. If some points of view are missing, it is because many of the authors whom we solicited for articles refused, for reasons best known to themselves, to contribute to a magazine dealing with this important problem. Nevertheless, we sincerely feel that the articles here presented will be of definite interest to every reader.

The SPECTATOR itself offers neither advice nor solutions to the problem. We are, and most assuredly intend to remain, completely neutral, favoring neither one side nor the other. Nor are we attempting to set ourselves up as the voice of the students of the University of Virginia. Rather we are presenting the opinions of people who are taking an active part in the momentous struggle which faces the people of the South while we ourselves play the role of court jester, spoofing both integrationists and segregationists alike.

It is our aim to supply our readers, especially our own generation, with opinions which they may find useful, if only as negative psychology, in helping them make the important decisions which we feel lie ahead. We have not tried to resolve the problem, for that is not our function, but we have done our best to cast the torch into the cave.

The Virginia Spectator Jim Crow Issue (May 1957, vol. 118, no. 8, pp. 18, 28)

Why I Believe in Integration

By Sarah Patton Boyle

MRS. SARAH PATTON BOYLE is one of the leading integrationists in the South, and has written for many national publications, including The Nation and The Saturday Evening Post defending her views.

"Why do you believe in integration?" I've been asked. "Why do you think we should have it?"

Since these are the questions I'll answer them literally. If I'd been asked what are some of the practical reasons why integration is feasible and desirable, I should write a very different kind of statement. There are many such reasons, but they don't happen to be the reasons why I believe in it.

I believe in integration because of what you might characterize as "wild idealism." I don't wince in admitting this because it is toward wild idealism that all human progress is made. And I don't shrink from being called impractical because all my early life I was called practical until the compliment lost zest for me.

I was brought up to test every idea and plan with the question, "Will it work?" and the philosophy of "noble failure" seemed to me a very impractical philosophy to have. All my early writing consisted of articles telling less practical people how to achieve practical goals, and for them I received very practical checks. Yet, although for this and for ninety-nine percent of what I write today I receive nothing of the sort, I now possess something which all my practical efforts never got me and which is the most practical possession which any one can seek. This is internal certainty: this is inner peace.

I believe in integration because to me it is what the name applies – the opposite of disintegration. It is a drawing together of separating parts of humanity, a unifying, a harmonizing, a making whole, a healing, an infusion of separated people with one life.

("Intermarriage!" I hear the shuddering accusation. "She believes in intermarriage!" In principle, yes, I do, for I believe that to regulate by law human choice in such an intimate area of individual life is tyranny. But it happens to be doubtful that desegregation will increase intermarriage. I know of no Northern communities – and neither do you – where the population has become mulatto because no segregation laws exist there. On the other hand, anthropologists estimate that under segregation approximately 20,000 Negroes who are light enough to pass for white "cross over" every year. Under segregation they became light enough, and because of the pressures of discrimination they cross over. Would you like to decide for yourself whether you will marry a Negro? Or do you prefer hidden taxes?

Amalgamation may even proceed more slowly when external barriers are removed than it is doing now. India is a classic example of the failure in this respect of what was probably the most rigid system of segregation laws in all history. That, you see, is one of the troubles with living for practical goals. Somehow those same goals seem not to be achieved as well when we live for them as they do when we live by ideals.)

I believe in integration because the human spirit is one. Our task on earth, I think, is to achieve complete awareness of this and to co-ordinate our lives in such a way as to give it full expression. This is the basic truth of living. To me the whole movement of history demonstrates it, the evolution of religion proclaims it, and many branches of science seem engaged in discovering and delineating its laws.

Because the human spirit is one, the solution to human conflicts and discords is to seek for common denominators, not for differences between ourselves and fellow men. Common denominators are so easy to find that we can avoid them only by segregating ourselves. And each time we find one we enlarge ourselves.

For you cannot combine yourself with another human being in thought and feeling without becoming inside yourself at least as large as the two of you. This is why falling in love is something more than heightened passion. This is why a family which lives together in understanding and love is sometimes more important to society than an entire nation which is rent with internal conflicts so that its people do not compass each other and make themselves mighty through one another.

Here in the South we have an opportunity for greatness. In other parts of the nation this is true, too, but here in the South the opportunity is hammering at our door. It should be easy for us to open it, for deep within most Southerners, colored and white, there is a yearning toward this greatness. Indeed I think that some of the violence of segregationists arises from a conflict between this yearning and the harsh fear that its satisfaction would bring impractical results. We who have looked since babyhood into the eyes of our colored neighbors know that we are one in spirit with them. You cannot look again and again into the eyes of another human being without discerning this, no matter how often current custom tells you to think of his clothes, his behavior, his language.

We know we are one in spirit with our colored neighbors. And somewhere inside us is the knowledge that this is a great truth which motivates human progress. We know that clothes, behavior, language change from generation to generation – even from decade to decade. But the oneness of the human spirit goes on from age to age.

Some of our colored neighbors – though by no means all – are different from us in other ways than skin color. But is the difference in dress greater than that between the sweeping elegant apparel of our grandmothers and the incredible dungarees and pin curls of our teen-age sirens? And isn't the same thing true of behavior and language? How our conduct and language grates on the ears and hearts of our near ancestors! Such things change too easily for there to be either security or cause for fear in likenesses and differences such as these. Their roots are too shallow.

Indeed, the roots of all differences are shallow. The differences between human beings are like particles of the earth blasted upward in an explosion. Scattered, separated, the spaces between them widen for a time. But soon all curve over and return to one world.

Don't imagine that I have not known the exhilaration of such explosion. How momentarily good it is to feel completely apart; to feel, "I, I, I, – there's no one else like me. And, oh, God, How I thank thee that I'm not as other men!" Yet I was not sorry when I felt the pull of gravity and the curve in my flight – when I felt my ego going down, down, down until I was a part of the earth from which I came.

All at once I was glad – because I wanted to be glad, and not sorry in the inevitable. It was then that I learned that to be glad in the earth is to be found in it, not lost in it. I knew that to be a rebellious part of a whole is to be imprisoned within it, but to be a joyous part of a whole is to include that whole within oneself.

In understanding, in empathy, in love lie the total freedom of the human spirit. For that which we love, that which we compass in empathy, that which we understand is an extension of ourselves, a true part of our being. Let's not be afraid to experience these things in every direction we look, for through them there is no evil which is not redeemed.

I think we should have integration because it is the next rung up the ladder of man's liberation from captivity within his tiny self. It is the next rung up toward the highest that we can conceive in our image of what man might be. It is a good and sturdy rung to clutch in our rather slow climb toward the day when every man is great because – through understanding, empathy and love – he contains the whole being of every other man within himself, and there is no door he cannot enter and no vista he cannot see.

©1957 The University of Virginia

The Virginia Spectator Jim Crow Issue (May 1957, vol. 118, no. 8, pp. 19, 30-33)

Integration in Virginia

By Edwin B. Henderson

EDWIN B. HENDERSON, author of this article, is President of the Virginia State Conference of Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Most Virginians find themselves somewhere between the extremes of two camps on the issue of integration vs. segregation. On the one hand are the segregationists typified by White Citizens Councils, and on the other, those who believe in complete public desegregation. Segregationists believe in a dual citizenship, in restriction of the ballot to exclude most Negroes, and in forced separation of the races in schools, colleges, churches, transportation, employment, public parks and libraries and in all public assemblages. The true segregationist still holds to the lost cause of the Hitlerian fascists whose overt counter-parts in America are the Kaspers, Carters and some brands of southern politicians. Segregationists in the words of Senator James O. Eastland referring to the Supreme Court school desegregation rulings, advise: "You are not required to obey any court which passes out such a ruling. In fact, you are obliged to defy it."* [footnote: From speech by Sen. Eastland, Aug. 5, 1955 at Senatobia, Miss.] Segregationists counsel massive resistance to the Supreme Court edicts, and foster laws and law suits to delay compliance. Their slogan is, "The State Uber Alles," which represents a doctrine that brought on the terrible Civil War.

True integrationists, on the other hand, hold literally to the fundamental principles of democratic government and of religious freedom as those principles have been universally interpreted. They believe all men are equal in the sense of the oneness of humanity despite physical differences. The sources of their philosophy lay in the Bible, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution of the United States.

In and between these two camps will be found a majority of Virginians. Practically all negroes favor complete de-segregation but like the NAACP people, they would be sympathetic to adjustments in some areas where there was honest forthright effort to comply with the Supreme Court. Many thousands of white citizens also suffer guilt complexes of reasons of the conflict between devotion to the ideals and practices of expediency. Some have the courage of their convictions; others keep quiet for fear of social ostracism, or because they fear some of the overt and violent acts of the hoodlum element of the 20th century crusaders for race supremacy.

Some racists justify segregation on the grounds that the laws and customs have lasted so long that they fall within the definition of social mores. This not true, since most of the segregation laws are approximately less than a half century old. Until 1895 in South Carolina there were no statutes requiring Jim Crow travel. The poll tax bill adopted in 1902 by the Virginia Constitutional Convention was intended to eliminate nearly all of the negro voters. It must be remembered there were practically no public schools in the South before 1860. As evidence that common sense and good will can change social usage peacefully when the law speaks, the elimination of Jim Crow signs and practices in train and bus travel hardly caused a ripple here in Virginia.

What, then, have been the causes for so much controversy over the Supreme Court mandate re-segregation in public schools? The real cause is the fear of politicians that with the advent of negro children in schools hitherto for whites only, negroes will sense the differences that have existed under segregation, and will begin to challenge these politicians through a more enlightened use of the ballot. Once segregation is outmoded educated and intelligent Negroes will become competitors in a free society for positions and jobs now held by their inferiors. The politician, the rabid race-baiter and the opportunist, playing on the fears and ignorance of the masses dwell on the great scare, miscegenation, and the sub-scares, increased health hazards, morals contamination, and lowered educational standards. Most of these same arguments have been used from the beginning to object to public schools for the masses from the colonial governor down to some quarters today. For centuries aristocratic Virginians sent their sons and daughters to private schools, schools for the governing classes.

Two major reasons given for opposing "mixed" public schools are the fears of increasing health hazards and of lowering educational standards. Health department statistics do show that negroes bear a large share of certain infectious diseases, but these statistics came from clinics and free hospitals which the poor are obligated to attend. For many years no private physician listed his venereal disease patients by name or race in public records. Many who oppose children attending the same school will employ the mothers or sisters of colored children all day in the closer contacts of the homes as domestics.

Negro children, the products of segregated education, do on tests show less achievement per upper grade than white children. For years negro teachers had larger classes and shorter periods to teach. Only recently have facilities for negroes approximated those for whites. When negro children approaching high school realized that only a few job opportunities outside the veil of segregation would be open to them, does anyone wonder that they would lose motivation for high grade achievement? It may take a few years to overcome the blight of segregation but there are educational methods which can remedy retardation caused by faulty facilities and poor environment for learning by the time Virginia accepts fully the inevitable integration of public schools, negro children will like others be achieving in proportion to their native intelligence quotients.

This trumped up fear of mongrelization of the races as a real danger can be dismissed as a consequence of integrated schools. Millions of Negro-Americans are unrecognizable as negroes by skin color, texture of hair or other features. There are few pure African types in the United States today due to the fact that so-called mongrelization has come about, not through school contacts, but by many of the same people or their ancestors who cry out loudly about the scare crow, miscegenation. Segregation laws have favored miscegenation in that they were meant to protect the white male while affording no protection to the colored female.

We hear much about the breaking down of "good race relations" that presumably existed before the Supreme Court decisions. These "good relations" are the same kind that exist today in colonial nations, in Russia and its satellites between those who rule by power and those who must submit without effective means of protest. Good race relations existed between slave and master before 1865, and a similar deception is fostered by economic dependence today. But even during the period of slavery there were over 800 recorded uprisings and rebellions usually aborted by patrols of a police state. "Good relations" have existed only as surface indications. Negroes have been willing to trust to their supreme faith in God and justice and are seeking their legal and civil rights through process of petition to the courts of law.

The attempt to stifle the protest and aspirations of a beleaguered people by outlawing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is doomed to failure because the only way to destroy it is to destroy all the sacred rights vouchsafed by the constitutions of Virginia and of the United States. The NAACP has been charged with being subversive and revolutionary. Yet its national board of directors include some of the great patriots of America, both white and negro. J. Edgar Hoover, a Southerner, Director of the F.B.I., is on record as in these words, "Equality, freedom, and tolerance are essential in a democratic government. The NAACP has done much to preserve these principals and to perpetuate the desires of our founding fathers." The NAACP has never been listed by the Department of Justice among subversive organizations. Its methods and its objectives are in ever sense truly American. It is possible that here and there under false cover some communist may have joined, just as some may have infiltrated our churches, our government, the Klan and even possibly the FBI.

The laws passed in Virginia and other southern states to hamstring the organizations seeking to bring about brotherhood and tolerance show how easily otherwise intelligent people can be goaded into action that defies reason and common sense. As presently worded these acts negate some of the fundamental principles of our free society. These laws would prevent a citizen of little financial means from seeking to obtain some of his rights through his day in court. Barratry is defined as stirring up litigation although the commonly accepted definition is the stirring up of "groundless" litigation. Laws have been passed that militate against individuals or organizations whose function may be to ameliorate injustices against citizens caused by reason of their "race or color." The requirement that the names of members of such organizations be made public is solely for the purpose of submitting these members to social or economic reprisals, just as the late Senator Glass said the poll tax was intended, to get rid of the Negro vote without "materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate."

One reason demagogues can be effective in the south is because of low scale of education afforded the masses of people. It was for this reason the colonial Governor Berkeley hoped that universal or public education would not come to Virginia for a hundred years. Virginia ranks near the bottom of the ladder in the money allotted by states for public schools. Although much progress has been made in the last few years, illiteracy is still high and is evidenced by the speech and actions of most of those who join the ranks of bigotry. As late as 1837, Governor Campbell of Virginia reported that one-fourth of all white persons applying for marriage licenses in 93 Virginia counties could not sign their names. In 1850, whereas New England state had an illiteracy ratio among the native white population over 20 years of age of only .42 percent, and in the Middle Atlantic States of only 3 percent, Southern states had an illiteracy ratio of 20.3 percent. Under such conditions demagogues and opportunists like Carter and Kasper can incite the more ignorant masses.

Many Virginians seem unconcerned or unaware that great statesmen like Jefferson and Mason warned of tyranny against the Negro. Once, in writing against deprivation of Negro slaves of liberty, he wrote, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that his justice cannot sleep forever." Chancellor Williams in his book, "The Raven," quotes Edgar Allen [sic] Poe, then a student at the University of Virginia, as asking Jefferson, "Are All Men Equal, Did you founding fathers mean just that?" Jefferson was quoted as replying, "Yes, we mean exactly that. All men are created equal. . . . Some men are born deformed. Some with defective minds, some deaf, dumb and blind. Others like the colored people, for example, differ from us in the color of their skins and the texture of their hair, but the doctrines of equality stands steadfast and immovable, for it rests upon the fundamentals of human existence. . .We poke fun at our African slaves, at their ignorance and insist they are an inferior people. OF COURSE THEY ARE. We keep them that way. But I dare you free them and give them equal opportunities. They will rise as high as the white man as surely as God reigns."

This writer has long hoped for the day when the conscience of Virginia would seek to make amends for the years of bad treatment of its Negro citizens who have done so much by their work and in defense of our nation to deserve full citizenship. The only time in more than three score years that I have ever been able to appreciate the full blessings of American citizenship has been when I travelled in a foreign country where race nor color were barriers. I know no other country. My great grandfather was a proud member of Powhatan's dynasty. My mother's father was one of Williamsburg's aristocratic slave holders. My ancestors for hundreds of years were Virginians. My entire life has been subjected to the indignities suffered by every Negro citizen who lives where the practices and laws discriminate against him by reason of the accident of birth. Now that at long last the highest court in the land has declared state imposed discrimination unconstitutional, I and every other liberty loving Negro will continue to fight against segregation even in the face of violence. We shall do this in the faith that sooner or later more southerners will realize how are some of the fears that bigots have imposed upon them. When the South complies with the supreme laws of the land an era of progress will take shape and many of our social and economic problems will be on the way to solution. More important sectionalism will disappear and our nation will become unified and stronger to meet the challenge to democracy by our national enemies. By eliminating these laws that insult people of color in America we will win friends among the non-white races of mankind around the world and add them in the struggle against Godless communism.

©1957 The University of Virginia

The Virginia Spectator Jim Crow Issue (May 1957, vol. 118, no. 8, pp. 19, 29-30)

Letter to the North

By William Faulkner

WILLIAM FAULKNER, winner of the Nobel Prize and one of America's foremost authors, is currently at the University as a Writer-in-Residence, and this article was reprinted by permission of the author. Mr. Faulkner is the moderator in this issue's discussion.

MY family has lived for generations in one same small section of north Mississippi. My great-grandfather held slaves and went to Virginia in command of a Mississippi infantry regiment in 1861. I state this simply as credentials for the sincerity and factualness of what I will try to say.

From the beginning of this present phase of the race problem in the South, I have been on record as opposing the forces in my native country which would keep the condition out of which this present evil and trouble has grown. Now I must go on record as opposing the forces outside the South which would use legal or police compulsion to eradicate that evil overnight. I was against compulsory segregation. I am just as strongly against compulsory integration. Firstly of course from principle. Secondly because I don't believe compulsion will work.

There are more Southerners than I who believe as I do and have taken the same stand I have taken, at the price of contumely and insult from other Southerners which we foresaw and were willing to accept because we believe we are helping our native land which we love, to accept a new condition which it must accept whether it wants to or not. That is, by still being Southerners, yet not being a part of the general majority Southern point of view; by being present yet detached, committed and attainted neither by the Citizens' Council nor NAACP; by being in the middle, being in a position to say to any incipient irrevocability: "Wait, wait now, stop and consider first."

But where will we go, if that middle becomes untenable? If we have to vacate it in order to keep from being trampled? Apart from the legal aspect, apart even from the simple incontrovertible immorality of discrimination by race, there was another simply human quality which drew us to the Negro's side: the simple human instinct to champion the underdog.

But if we, the (comparative) handful of Southerners I have tried to postulate, are compelled by the simple threat of being trampled if we don't get out of the way, to vacate that middle where we could have worked to help the Negro improve his position . . . compelled to move for the reason that no middle any longer exists . . . we will have to make a new choice. And this time the underdog will not be the Negro, since he, will now be a segment of the topdog, and so the underdog will be that white embattled minority who are our blood and kin. These non-Southern forces will now say, "Go then. We don't want you because we won't need you again." My reply to that is, "Are you sure you won't?"

So I would say to the NAACP and all the organizations who would compel immediate and unconditional integration: "Go slow now. Stop now for a time, a moment. You have the power now; you can afford to withhold for a moment the use of it as a force. You have done a good job, you have jolted your opponent off-balance and he is now vulnerable. But stop there for a moment; don't give him the advantage of a chance to cloud the issue by that purely sentimental appeal to that same universal human instinct for automatic sympathy for the underdog simple because he is under."

And I would say this too. The rest of the United States knows next to nothing about the South. The present idea and picture which they hold of a people decadent and even obsolete through inbreeding and illiteracy – the inbreeding a result of the illiteracy and the isolation – as to be a kind of species of juvenile delinquents with a folklore of blood and violence, yet who, like juvenile delinquents, can be controlled by firmness once they are brought to believe that the police mean business, is a baseless and illusory as that one a generation ago of (oh yes, we subscribed to it too) columned poticoes and magnolias. The rest of the United States assumes that this condition in the South is so simple and so uncomplex that it can be changed tomorrow by the simple will of the national majority backed by legal edict. In fact, the North does not even recognize what it has seen in its own newspapers.

I have at hand an editorial from the New York Times of February 10 on the rioting at the University of Alabama because of the admission of Miss Lucy, a Negro. The editorial said: "This is the first time that force and violence have become part of the question." That is not correct. To all Southerners, no matter which side of the question of racial equality they supported, the first implication, and – to the Southerner – even promise, of force and violence was the Supreme Court decision itself. After that, by any standards at all and following as inevitably as night and day, was the case of the three white teen-agers, members of a field trip group from a Mississippi high school (and, as teen-agers do, probably wearing the bright, parti-colored blazers or jackets blazoned across the back with the name of the school) who were stabbed in passing on a Washington street by Negroes they had never seen before and who apparently had never seen them before either; and that of the Till boy and the two Mississippi juries who freed the defendants from both charges; and of the Mississippi garage attendant killed by a white man because, according to the white man, the Negro filled the tank of the white man's car full of gasoline when all the white man wanted was two dollar's worth.

This problem is far beyond a mere legal one. It is even far beyond the moral one it is and still was a hundred years ago in 1860, when many Southerners, including Robert Lee, recognized it as a moral one at the very instant when they in turn elected to champion the underdog because that underdog was blood and kin and home. The Northerner is not even aware yet of what that war really proved. He assumes that it merely proved to the Southerner that he was wrong. It didn't do that because the Southerner already knew he was wrong and accepted that gambit even when he knew it was the fatal one. What that war should have done, but failed to do, was to prove to the North that the South will go to any length, even that fatal and already doomed one, before it will accept alteration of its racial condition by mere force of law or economic threat.

Since I went on record as being opposed to compulsory racial inequality, I have received many letters. A few of them approved. But most of them were in opposition. And a few of these were from Southern Negroes, the only difference being that they were polite and courteous instead of being threats and insults, saying in effect: "Please, Mr. Faulkner, stop talking and be quiet. You are a good man and you think you are helping us. But you are not helping us. You are playing into the hands of the NAACP so that they are using you to make trouble for our race that we don't want. Please hush, you look after your white folks' troubles and let us take care of ours." This one in particular was a long one, from a woman who was writing for and in the name of the pastor and the entire congregation of her church. It went on to say that the Till boy got exactly what he asked for, coming down there with his Chicago ideas, and that all his mother wanted was to make money out of the role of her bereavement. Which sounds exactly like the white people in the South who justified and even defended the crime by declining to find that it was one.

We have had many violent inexcusable personal crimes of race against race in the South, but since 1919 the major examples of communal race tension have been more prevalent in the North, like the Negro family who were refused acceptance in the white residential district in Chicago, and the Korean-American who suffered for the same reason in Anaheim, Calif. Maybe it is because our solidarity is not racial, but instead is the majority white segregationist plus the Negro minority like my correspondent above, who prefer peace to equality. But suppose the line of demarcation should become one of the race; the white minority like myself compelled to join the white segregation majority no matter how much we oppose the principle of inequality; the Negro minority who want peace compelled to join the Negro majority who advocate force, no matter how much the minority wanted only peace.

So the Northerner, the liberal, does not know the South. He can't know it from his distance. He assumes that he is dealing with a simple legal theory and a simple moral idea. He is not. He is dealing with fact: the fact of an emotional condition of such fierce unanimity as to scorn the fact that it is a minority and which will go to any length and against any odds at this moment to justify and, if necessary, defend that condition and its right to it.

So I would say to all the organizations and groups which would force integration on the South by legal process: "Stop now for a moment. You have shown the Southerner what you can do and what you will do if necessary; give him a space in which to get his breath and assimilate that knowledge; to look about and see that (1) Nobody is going to force integration on him from the outside; (2) That he himself faces an obsolescence in his own land which only he can cure; a moral condition which not only must be cured but a physical condition which has got to be cured if he, the white Southerner, is to have any peace, is not to be faced with another legal process or maneuver every year, year after year, for the rest of his life."

[Faulkner's essay originally appeared in Life magazine.]

The Virginia Spectator Jim Crow Issue (May 1957, vol. 118, no. 8, pp. 21. 34-37)

Segregation or Death

By John Kasper

JOHN KASPER has recently gained much publicity as the result of his oratorical exploits in Clinton, Tenn., and elsewhere in the South. Secretary of the Seaboard White Citizens' Councils, this is the first article Mr. Kasper has ever written for publication in a magazine.

OUR movement arises from a deep-seated belief in the diverse natures of animals and plants. This diversity exists through the Creative Power of the Intelligence working in Nature; God, the gods, Divine Providence. Any man is suspect who would suppress a physical or moral fact. Facts are sacred: they are the words of God. Any man who fails to distinguish between this thing and that thing may be called ignorant and lacking in all reverence. Distinctions come from awareness; they come from respect for intelligence and the process of intelligence. Not able to disassociate one thing from another, not able to place things in their proper spheres and categories, such a man has not got a first-class mind; in fact, has not even the rudiments for modern thinking.

There are those who proclaim the "dignity of man" and urge acceptance for the idea that Man is not a part of the animal creation as established by the Supreme Intelligence. Man is a part of the animal creation, the highest and ULTIMATE achievement of the intelligence working in Nature. Man is therefore subject to all the laws, responsibilities, and consequences of Nature and Nature's process. In defiance of the arbitrary decisions of the Almighty, expressed in Nature, men who obscure or obliterate natural distinctions are not only blasphemous of the works of God, they also are condeming themselves and their children to certain doom. The penalty exacted by Nature for ignorng abundant life and continuing generations, carefully delineated along fixed geographical and racial limits, the punishment from Nature, herself, is eventual sterility, physical weakness and sloth, and finally effacement from life's intricate patterns.

Man stands at the head of the animal creation. The rest of the animal and plant kingdoms are subservient to man. Man is the only cosmopolite who can live anywhere, if necessary, even when not intended by the arbitrary geographical distribution of animals and plants established by the Creator. The Creator has endowed Man with an "inner life," a soul, whereby man can rise higher than the next highest animal, or through neglect and corruption, can sink lower than the lowest creatures. This is the moral nature of Man and it belongs exclusively to Man. It is what we call personal character.

Animals have no moral nature as they live only by instinct and are unable to transmit to succeeding generations what they have learned about their natures. We affirm that all movement in history, the historical process, results from race and personal character. acter. In the flow and surge of mankind there is only the inborn natures of men, and the devotion which they give to the inborn nature. War, economic struggle, art, and benevolent thought are only expressions of the inborn nature of man.

The genius of the Greek and Chinese is moderation, proportion, and balance. The African genius is in agriculture. The Hindu is tolerance for every living thing. The Nordic peoples have developed representative government.

Only an imbecile or a liar will deny the validity of race; the separate and distinct races of mankind. Revolutionary communism proclaimed by a Jew, Karl Marx, in 1848 calls for "the brotherhood of man." This same unnatural doctrine proclaims the non-existence of race. Yet, since its beginnings, alert observers have noted the steady progress of communism as an expression of Jewish aspirations and see communism as a subversive doctrine which has served exclusively the Jewish interests, the Jewish race, in a fanatic effort to subvert existing Gentile order everywhere. The proof of this is the abnormally high percentage of Jews who stand in every country as the leadership of world communism, and the nearly 100% Jew involvement in communist espionage directed toward matters relating to atomic fission. While denying race in one breath, the race fanatics are helping themselves to the loot and booty of the thousand year old civilizations of all races and nationalities, to benefit exclusively their own race, the Jewish.

He who denies race also denies the important qualities of individuals as both race and individuality are qualities of the blood, not language, environment, or common living space. Both individuals and race are products of Nature. He who denies race denies the power of intelligence, imagination, and creative power in the individual; perhaps most importantly: individual courage.

The professional blockheads, liars, and reds who state that we who demand legal segregtaion OF ALL RACES in the United States with the sole aim of keeping the Nigra, Puerto Rican, or Mexican in the condition of perpetual servitude, economic slavery, and ignorance, these perjurers are unfit to hold public office of any kind in this country. They are fully aware of the mutual respect of the White and Nigra races in the South. They know full well the facts regarding public schools, public transportation, public recreational facilities for Nigras, all built at the expense of the white American taxpayer.

Yet it is obvious that the destructive work of the Marxist-Jew has had a harmful effect on the Nigra. Today we find large segments of the Nigra population alienated and hostile to the great mass of America, represented by "loyal Americans," and through red-controlled organizations, the Nigra has become hated in many areas of the nation where formerly respected. Today the Nigra is regarded as a subversive, sharply un-American in character. He is felt in many quarters to be a stooge of world-Jewry, blindly led into the vortex of Jewish power, dedicated to overthrowing all existing order.

As nationalists, we consider it our duty to go among the Nigra population and break the grip of the reds on their people until they are organized harmoniously and in a solid line against the race-hating, nation-destroying schemes of the NAACP and the red Sanhedrin. Failing to do this, the Nigra will lose his own identity as a race and his own unique contribution to world culture will be lost. The Nigra will lose out either through the race-mongrelization, or a desperate White population which will rise up and legally expel the Ngra from their midst.

The only defect in segregation a a national policy, a policy of government, is that it does not go far enough. Not only should the Nigras not be taught in the same schools with members of the White races, but they should not even be taught what the White children are taught, at least in cultural matters. The Niggra's origins are African and by denying the Nigra that heritage, by denying the Nigra knowledge of his African sources and background, he exists in this country as a rootess people, easily misunderstood and more easily exploited by devilish Jews and degenerate whites.

More than 50 years have passed and one still has to read Leo Frobenius in his own language? "Because English and American professors are moles." Frobenius, a German, made direct expeditions into Africa (1897-1937) for more than 40 years. He recorded accurately all the different cultural manifestations of DIFFERENT KINDS OF NIGRAS, their habits, ways of making a living, beliefs, arts, religions, etc. He is undoubtedly the greatest cultural anthropologist who ever lived and without knowledge of his work, no book in the Western hemisphere can be related to any other properly. Frobenius' work is the starting point of the Nigra. Every Nigra should be thoroughly familiar with his work.

Otherwise the history of the Nigra begins in 1865 instead of thousands of years ago. The Nigra cannot be expected to absorb and understand the basic attitude of the Anglo-Saxon who has spilled blood for trial by jury, habeus corpus, secret ballot, and representation in government. Nor can the White understand the Nigra without understanding his entire racial background, which at present remains untranslated from the German. Certainly in our present state of knowledge, the White people cannot understand the joy a Nigra experiences in jumping around a campfire all night making weird sounds he calls music.

Nigras must be taught the constitution and NIGRA subjects, Nigra history, Nigra studies, Nigra arts, and Nigra livelihood.

In the Seaboard White Citizens' Councils and as nationalists, we view government as an organic construction which takes unto itself the highest duty of protecting the various racial components which make up the nation, allowing each to develop according to its highest destiny, without at anytime interfering with the unimpeded development of any other. The government also makes and administers law under the Constitution. It does not interfere with the racial composition of the United States, except insofar as to protect the highest, most energetic racial energies from parasites and secondary, less virile racial energies, which would tend to unnaturally alter, even prevent, a wholesome continuous development of the entire nation according to its highest destiny.

The government does not oppress the people! What the government DOES NOT do is oppress the people. It must serve them.

In 168 years of government (The Republic) since ratification of the Constitution, all races have shown ability to live in mutual harmony with each other; all save one: the Jew. The Jewish problem has been with us in more or less aggravated form since the War Between the States and has greatly accelerated since the beginning of the Woodrow Wilson-F. Roosevelt era. A realistic and permanent solution of the Jewish problem will relieve instantly the present crisis over the Nigra, as the Nigra has been agitated into demands "for equality" chiefly through Jewish efforts. This is a complex problem and requires only the most determined energy and incessant will to overcome the present dangers confronting the American nation, particularly within our own borders. It will require only the most forcefully dedicated patriots to redeem our country from the brink of the abyss on which it now stands. Ultimately, we, in our young movement, envision the complete legal disenfranchisement and legal expulsion of the Jew from American national life.

As to the Federal judiciary, we have seen continuous treason from that branch of government since Roosevelt came into power. The 9 swine on the U. S. Supreme Court, the present Attorney-General Brownell, Federal Judge Robert Taylor at Knoxville, Federal Judge Hoffman in Virginia, Federal Judge Rives of Montgomery, Alabama (race-mixing on buses infamy), and more than 75% of the present Federal judiciary should be tried for treason to the American people, for treason to the Constitution of the United States, and for attempted genocide, as this same Court once decreed in Nuremberg. Once convicted they should be "publicly hanged until dead, dead, dead," and drawn and quartered in some prominent public place (in front of the White House) to remind the public of the fate of judicial tyrants, all in the best Anglo-Saxon tradition. History shows that when despots set themselves up and flaunt the people by loving what they hate, or hating what they love, their natures become twisted and they come to a bad end, violent end, because they are acting contrary to Nature. In this struggle, wishful thinking is a decadent vice: it matters not one jot to us if these evil men ultimately meet death in a natural manner, by their own hand, or from an infuriated populace, or a murderous assassin. We believe by being organized we can keep down violence or prevent it altogether. We are now dedicated to regaining our nation by purely political and educational means, as they are the means whereby a powerfully organized enemy nearly slipped the American Constitution away from us. The right aim of law is to prevent coercion either by force or by fraud. This is our battle-cry, and we are absolutely confident we shall restore respect for the Federal judiciary by replacing today's evil members with Americans. We shall see men on the Supreme Court of the United States who feel to their nerve ends the high responsibility of their office to guard the Constitution, and to continue in the spirit of the Founding Fathers, and the American tradition of equal justice under the law.

Our movement is young and growing. We are aimed toward the youth. Our methods are scientific: observation and comparison. We are an attack program. We hold ourselves to be the guardians of order; the promoters of order where now reigns chaos and confusion. We seek to regain local control of local affairs, realizing there can be no local control of local affairs without local control of local purchasing power. We define liberty as a very simple thing, though difficult to come by: the right to choose or refuse one thing at a time, or better: the right to do that which harms not others. We aim to protect positive Christianity. We have peldged our very lives to this mightiest of all tasks: the redemption of the United States from the hands of its enemies. We do not yield the Constitution as our basic instrument of government. We will never yield it. We will not yield segregation as the only known means, proven by all historical evidence for keeping blood-lines pure, races vital, individuals self-respecting, and diverse people living in mutual harmony and understanding.

We will not fail in this struggle, even in death. To those who oppose us, Marxist, usurer, race-mixer, degenerate politician, we pledge eternal vigilance, eternal combativeness, even death!

©1957 The University of Virginia

The Virginia Spectator Jim Crow Issue (May 1957, vol. 118, no. 8, pp. 22, 42-43)

Integration Means Degeneration

By Floyd Fleming

FLOYD FLEMING is currently the Vice-President of the Seaboard White Citizens' Council, located at 3204 M Street, N. W., Washington, D. C.

IN order to reach a sound conclusion on a given situation, it is necessary to have authentic facts on the situation. Therefore, to determine the consequences of intermingling white and colored students in the class rooms, let's take a look at some known facts. Since this article is written by a white man, my objections to integration are based upon the deficiencies of the colored people. In other words, when intermingling, mixing or integrating you first want to know the grade of the animal you are going to mix and then you can ascertain whether the offspring will likely be superior or inferior to the parents. If you say integration will not lead to inter-marriage, then this article will also deal with the question of whether a segregated or an integrated school is better.

A congressional committee recently issued a report based upon its investigation of the public schools in the District of Columbia. That report is entitled "Report of the subcommittee to investigate public school standards and conditions, and juvenile delinquency in the District of Columbia of the Committee on the District of Columbia, House of Representatives, 84th Congress, 2nd Session." (Your congressman will send you a copy upon request.)

That report covers 47 printed pages, so no effort will be made in this article to discuss it in detail. The report, among many other things, in its "Findings and Conclusions" stated:

(2) page 44. The forced integration of the schools in the District of Columbia greatly accelerated the exodus of white residents to the suburban areas of Virginia and Maryland.

(4) page 45. The wide disparity in mental ability to learn and educational achievement between the white and negro students has created a most difficult teaching situation in the integrated schools.

(6) page 45. Discipline problems and delinquency resulting from the integration of the schools have been appalling.

(7) page 45. That sex problems in the predominately integrated schools (some D. C. schools have not been integrated – more about that later) have become a matter of vital concern to the parents. One out of every four negro children born in the District of Columbia is illegitimate. The number of cases of veneral disease among negroes of school age has been found to be astounding and tragic. The negro has demonstrated a sex attitude from the primary to high school grades that has greatly alarmed white parents and is a contributing cause of the exodus of the white residents of the District of Columbia. The integrated schools have found it necessary to curtail greatly, and in many cases eliminate completely social activities formerly considered a vital element in the education of students in the segregated schools.

The aforesaid Committee was composed of six congressmen (Democrats and Republicans) and four recommended "that racially separate public schools be reestablished for the education of white and negro pupils in the District of Columbia, and that such schools be maintained on a completely separate and equal basis." The two congressmen who wrote a minority report stated that the re-establishment of segregated schools (page 48) "obviously cannot be done without a constitutional amendment." The two minority members did not find fault with this recommendation as far as its desirability is concerned, but simply said a constitutional amendment would be necessary to accomplish it. Since the four majority members did not mention the mechanics legally required to accomplish this result, it can be concluded that the report unanimously approved the desirability of reestablishing segregated schools in the District of Columbia.

It should be remembered that the population of the District is approximately 50 per cent white and 50 per cent black, but there are more negro children of school age. This indicates the problems in the South where the white and negro ratios approach the 50-50 basis.

Some more facts and figures are interesting. The "Uniform Crime Reports for the United States" issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice, Vol. XXV No. 2, Annual Report for 1954, lists the following arrest records for the year 1954:

70% arrested for gambling were negroes

63% arrested for murder were negroes

63% arrested for dope violations were negroes

63% arrested for aggravated assaults were negroes

262% [sic] arrested for prostitution and vice were negroes

55% arrested for possession of deadly weapons were negroes

53% arrested for robbery were negroes

43% arrested for all other assaults were negroes

41% arrested for liquor violations were negroes

40% arrested for rape were negroes

35% arrested for receiving stolen property were negroes

33% arrested for burglaries Ñbreaking and entering were negroes

33% arrested for disorderly conduct were negroes

31% arrested for larceny were negroes

29% arrested for suspicion were negroes

28% arrested for offenses against children and family were negroes

2% arrested for all other sex offenses were negroes

Now, remember too that the 1950 U. S. Census showed that negroes constituted less than 10% of our population.

This now gives you some insight into the people you and your children will intermingle with when schools are integrated. The schools, especially in the South, are the focal point for social activity. For instance, when a senior class is about to graduate, different ones give parties and dances for the seniors, to mention one time when social activity is accented. Class parties are often given, PTA dances where the parents meet and mingle. Children enjoy class dances and parties and must attend official school parties and dances. If a negro boy sits in classroom, eats in the cafeteria, and otherwise mingles with your daughter, will he not ask her for a date for the school party? If he is too shy, to ask her for a date to take her, will he not ask her for a dance at the party? You say not right away but maybe years later. Your answer is wrong; here in the District of Columbia these things occurred immediately after integration. If your daughter does not agree, then he likely will make snide remarks such as, "You think you are too good for me," etc. A question here – why is it that parents sit idly by and let their children be placed in this social environment and yet they would not think of inviting negroes in to have lunch or to dance with them?

The point I am making is that in this environment of race mixing there will rapidly come the time (if the trend continues) when it will not be too obnoxious for white and black to marry. It is a known fact that where there is fraternization there follows intermarriage. The recent wars prove that.

Now to come back to why all of the District of Columbia public schools are not integrated. Let's take one, it being the most important because Vice-President Nixon and Vice-President candiate (recently) Kefauver send their children to that school. It is the Horace Mann public elemenary school in "Spring Valley" in the District of Columbia. There are no negro students or teachers in that school. You say "That is because there are no negroes in the area" and that is correct. The reason is that when that sub-division was recorded there were covenants placed on the lots that they could not be sold to negroes or Jews. To protect that covenant against the Supreme Court ruling that such covenants are not enforceable, one other covenant was placed on the lots, namely, that if a person wanted to resell his house and lot, the purchaser must first be approved and the sale be cleared through W. C. & A. N. Miller Development Co., and the real estate company will not approve a negro or a Jew.

In the last presidential campaign, did you see that publicized in the newspapers? Of course not, but if Coleman Andrews or any other prominent segregationist was in such a situation, it would be headlined.

Now, there is another elementary school in the District of Columbia where the enrollment is about 700 white and 12 negro children. There are 32 teachers. Of the 32 teachers, 13 are negroes. There are many other schools having a much higher ratio of negro teachers than negro pupils. Why is it that no negro teachers were assigned to the Horace Mann School? Even a congressional committee, the one making the Report mentioned herein, could not get any answers to that question. The reason no answer could be obtained was that it was covered up by the "high ups." Yet, Nixon and Kefauver pretend (for national political reasons) that they are so pure in their "bleeding hearts" for the "equality of the races." Nixon said in the campaign "my own children attend the integrated schools in the District of Columbia." Was he truthful when he said that? Of course not. Both he and Kefauver are as phony on the race question as a $3.00 bill.

The next move the NAACP will make after it can get breathing time from its fight to integrate the schools, will be to challenge the validity of state statutes which preclude intermarriage between whites and blacks. They want intermarriage, make no mistake about that. That is what integration in the schools leads to and as that comes to pass, the white race becomes a mongrelized race and history records that the breeding is downward instead of upward.

Integration means denegration.

©1957 The University of Virginia

The Virginia Spectator Jim Crow Issue (May 1957, vol. 118, no. 8, pp. 9-10, 33, 37)

Sutee

By Thomas Hawley

A vision of a brown, warm, and desirable female body followed Peter Johnson wherever he went. Even in sleep, the vision would follow him through the night and he would awake to see her on his companion's bunk.

Desire began to formulate in his mind and body. It grew until the screaming of his nerves threw him exhausted on the ground. His fellow soldiers had the same desire but only Peter had the vision. The vision was his. He guarded it continually and never once would mention his vision to companions.

There were few women in India. Few, that is, that were available to comfort the soldiers of the British Army. Under sentence of death, the soldiers were not to molest the native population. The religions of the country and their women would be respected.

Not that it was always true. Quite often at night the men would hear the laughter of a female voice coming from the major's room. They would gather around and discuss the situation.

"Some black bitch," the sargeant said, "the country is full of them – and of the french disease."

Disease, filth, or odor could not stop speculation. Women were the topic of conversation and remained so. Everyone would relate some amorous adventure except Peter Johnson. He had his vision.

Quite often Peter thought about entering the conversation and relating the story of his brown vision. Now, in the barracks, he did not want the scorn and disbelief which would follow his words. Better, Peter decided, to keep it to himself.

This was early. Peter had not taken into account the desire which grew in him, spread from his arms to his legs, and never left his mind. Then, Peter knew. He must possess this vision. She must be his. But how?

Peter had been in India only two weeks when he first saw her. He had walked toward the Hindu colony late one night. It had been a holy day and few of the natives were on the streets.

A single light had shown through a window and Peter had been drawn to the light as a fly is drawn toward the web of a spider. Peter knew he was risking death if caught but a brown image had flinted across the open space. Silently Peter moved himself into a position where he could observe.

A young Hindu wife was washing herself with oil. Moving from one part of the room to another, she had disrobed. Peter felt a hot flush run up his back and spread over his body. He tried to turn away but the fly was in the web.

The spider moved around in a slow sexual dance. The warm curves meshed together until they formed a single spot in Peter's mind and then the spot burst. The image had been planted. It would follow Peter through drills, patrols, night, and until death.

Desire came later. Peter had saturated himself before leaving London. For a time the empty caravans of desire had been filled.

Whenever desire came upon Peter, he would return to the window. Every night the spider would draw the fly closer into her net. When the spider had become aware of the fly, she smiled to herself and continued to spin the net. Then, there was the moment when the spider looked toward the fly and smiled.

It was then that Peter knew the vision could be his. The method was something which must be worked out.

From an occasional question, he learned that her husband was a member of the scouts of the British garrison. If he were killed, Peter thought, then she could be mine. Arrangements could be made for a meeting. Even the window was large enough to crawl through.

But the husband was not killed on patrol. Even after Peter had managed to be assigned to the same unit, he had no chance. The scouts rode far in advance of the regular column. After three weeks of active soldiering in the Sudan, Peter knew that death must come to the husband at home.

Death was necessary to complete the union of Peter and his vision. He knew she wanted him. She had smiled at him, continued to torment him with her body. Yes, she wants me as much as I want her, Peter thought.

One day while watching the scouts return from patrol and leave the barracks, Peter hit upon the answer. Someway, he must get into the house prior to the arrival of the patrol and poison his food. But, there would be a chance that he would detect the glass. Something better, what, what, what?

The sargeant answered the question. Peter was sent to the cook room for a tour of duty. There he saw the cooks place a poison in the corners of the store room for rats. It was a simple matter for him to put a small bottle of the liquid in his pocket. Peter was jubilant. He had the answer.

That night he went to the Hindu colony early. He watched for his chance and slipped in the window. The spider was not there. From another room, Peter heard the chants of the Hindu tongue as the family went through their religious rites.

Peter had poured the remains of the bottle into the strong drink that sat in front of the table. Custom placed the husband of the home in the honored position. The women ate at the feet of their men. There would be no chance for the wife to drink.

It had been simple to slip out of the window into the narrow street and return to the barracks. Peter had gathered the reputation of a "loner" since his arrival. Now, he must be with the rest of the men.

That night Peter dreamed of his vision. The warm curves of her body drew closer and closer until he reached for her. She moved away and he followed. Somewhere in the background the death song of the Hindu was being chanted. It grew louder and louder as the vision faded away. Suddenly Peter awoke.

Other members of the barracks were up. Several were crowded near the door of the barracks. Lights flared from the Hindu colony and the sargaent confirmed Peter's hopes.

"Someone is dead out there," he said, "they always behave in that manner."

Early in the morning, the troops were informed that one of their scouts had died early in the night. Peter smiled to himself. The vision was his. Now, the desire could be killed. The woman was his.

At dusk that night Peter started for the Hindu colony. As he walked into the narrow streets, he saw that a large funeral pyre had been constructed on the outskirts. The wrapped body of a man lay on top and the priests were arranging the wood.

A soldier standing nearby told Peter that they always burned their dead. It was the custom.

From the end of the group came a terrible scream. As the crowd parted Peter saw three male Hindus dragging a woman toward the fire. Peter looked twice and, then, saw the truth. It was her. His vision. His woman. What were they doing?

As Peter watched from another world, they tied her with ropes and placed her on top of the pyre with her dead husband. Horrified, he watched as they tied her arms around her husband and started the fire.

His vision was screaming. Suddenly Peter was screaming at the people.

"Turn her loose you damn fools," he shouted. She's mine, he told himself, this is a nightmare, I'll wake up soon.

As the heat of the fire seeped into the face of Peter he knew his vision was burning. The smell of the flesh broke his trance.

Peter ran forward and started pulling the burning wood from the fire. As he threw the second one into the face of the priest, he was caught from behind by four soldiers and dragged off to the sidelines.

The old sargeant spoke gently to Peter.

"It is 'Sutee.' Quiet lad, it is their custom to burn the wives with the dead husbands."

©1957 The University of Virginia

The Virginia Spectator Jim Crow Issue (May 1957, vol. 118, no. 8, pp. 11, 41-42)

The Workout

By B. B. Schwartz

The warm summer sun was big and orange and sent long shadows racing ahead as they set off for the park. The boy ran ahead and dropped a pass thrown by his father. "Throw me another, this time not so hard," he yelled as he threw the ball back awkwardly. The ball felt good in Tom's hand as he balanced it and sent it spiraling above his son's head. He watched the boy run after the ball and attempt to kick it back. It angled off the small foot and bounced erratically into the street. "Be careful, Tommie. Watch out for cars."

They walked together along the dirt path in the park until they came to a large flat clearing. "Catch me, Daddy," and he was off, his thin legs carrying him swiftly down the field. Behind him his father ran in a steady, reined-in stride. The dew was beginning to form on the damp grass and trailing behind the pair, their footprints traced a tangled path. "You're too fast for me Tommie. Run down to the other end of the field and I'll kick the ball to you and you can kick it back." Tom hefted the ball and slowly stepped forward with the ball held in front of him to get the feel and timing. Then, as his son waited, he backed up and kicked off. The ball fell from his hands, hit his instep at the right spot, and was lifted into the air. Arcing, it fell beyond the boy. "Not so bad," thought Tom, "I haven't lost the old touch. If that black bastard hadn't piled on, I'd have made a great pro player." He watched his son kick the ball a short distance, pick it up and kick it again. After many attempts he was halfway up the field, and he tried to throw it the rest of the way. The ball angled into the bushes and bounced back followed by two boys the size of Tommie. They spurted out chasing the ball and all three boys scrambled to recover it. "Your ball?" "Yeah," said Tommie, "want to play?" The three ran parallel to each other, tossing the ball back and forth and falling on it as it slipped out of their hands. "You kids want to play two hand touch? You two against us," said Tommie's father. "Sure, kick off." The two boys ran backwards to the opposite end of the field, as though they expected the ball to be kicked while they were going to their positions. Tom kicked the ball and they waited under it. The boy that caught the ball hesitated while the other ran ahead as interference. At the middle of the field father and son waited for them. Young Tom ran to the ball carrier, hands outstretched for the tag, and was blocked away by the lead runner. The ball carrier ran straight for Tom Sr., moved to the right, then to the left, then to the right again, and ran straight ahead yelling "touchdown, six points." Tom stood in his tracks, bewildered by the speed and agility of the boy. He laughed and trotted to the other end of the field. "Come on son. They really faked me out on that one." "Ready?" yelled the boy with the ball. "Kick off," yelled Tom. The ball came hopping down the field and Tom slapped his son's bottom and said, "Let's go. Pick up that ball and make a score." No sooner had Tommie picked up the ball than two hands slapped him on the back. He stopped, put the ball down and huddled with his father behind the line of scrimmage. He nodded his head as his father told him, "You center the ball and run out for a pass." Tommie looked through his legs at his father and on the signal pushed the ball backwards and ran ahead. Tom held the ball lightly. He sidestepped the boy rushing him and with poise and care cocked his arm and threw the ball. "Catch it," he shouted. His son stood, arms outstretched, waiting for the ball to arrive. Just as it was on him a flash of arms appeared and the ball was intercepted. Again Tom was faked out and again the yell. . ."touchdown, six points."

The father and son slowly walked to the opposite end of the field. "I'll take care of this one, son," he said. Tom scooped up the ball on its third bounce, lowered his head, and ran straight forward. As he neared the other end of the field, he felt two hands slap at his waist, but he kept on running. "Touchdown," he rasped, "six to twelve." "I got you back here, mister," said one boy standing on the spot. "Only with one hand though," said Tom. "No sir," said the other boy. "I saw him get you with two hands. You must not have felt it." Tom walked toward them slowly. The muscles at the angles of his jaws contracted and relaxed. "Are you two niggers arguing with me?" He stood over them. "I said it was one hand, and one hand it was. Now get to the other end of the field and wait for the kickoff." The two boys looked at each other and one said, "It's late and we have to go home now." "Like hell. Get your black asses down to the other end of the field." They walked slowly to the opposite end of the clearing, and Tom kicked off. One caught the ball, and slowly and together they hesitatingly ran up the field. There was no attempt at speed, evasion or strategy. Tom ran toward them, his jaws set. His two hands slammed the shoulders of the ball carrier, and the boy fell, dropping the ball. Tom snatched the bobbling ball and ran to the goal. "Another touchdown," he cried. "Twelve to twelve." The fallen boy rose slowly and saw that the evening dew had wet his shirt and trousers. "Tell your father that we have to go home now," he said to Tommie. The two boys ran out of the clearing into the brush. Tom trotted back to his son. "Come on, Tommie, let's go home. It's getting late." As they walked out of the park toward home, the streetlights came on. "Why did you get mad at those two kids, daddy?" "I don't know son. I really don't know. Run down, and I'll throw you a pass."

©1957 The University of Virginia

The Virginia Spectator Jim Crow Issue (May 1957, vol. 118, no. 8, pp. 14-15, 43-44)

La Tour Abolie

By John H. Sacks

Stop! – for thy tread is on an Empire's dust!
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

BRRPPP...frpp...fripp...frllp

— Christ. Never win. Losing big now. Stop. Maybe win some back. Fifty dollars. Jesus. Old man'll go nuts.

"That was a nice one."

"Well, they're out."

"Gin."

—Damn. Should have taken that card.

Brrppp...frpp

—If only he'll let me owe. God, where'll I get the money? Have to owe it to him. Won't pay. Gambling debt. Hell, Honor System. Got to pay. My turn.

"Do you want that card or not?"

Yeah."

—Stinks in here. Smoke. Dizzy. Tell him I can't pay that's what; mothers gotta have operation or something. That' it. Lie, lie, lie. Honor System here he's got to believe it. I can get away with it. The Honor System forbids lying, cheating, or stealing. Lying, lying. God he'll never know. Besides, what the hell is honor anyway?

"Hey, you gonna play or dream? Come on, I'm just getting hot."

—Why doesn't he shut his fat mouth? God. I hate him. How'd I ever get sucked into this game anyway?

"Gin! Guess that makes fifty dollars you owe me, Ben. Wanna give me a check for it?

—Got to do it now. Lie.

"Say, look Cray, could I talk to you outside for a minute? O.K.?"

Sure Ben, O.K."

Hey Cray, you leavin' the game?"

"Yeah. I'll be back. It's only seven. We'll play all night.

Th land began to form in Ben's mind. Sure, that was it. He knew he could talk his way out of it. Sure it meant lying, but what the hell. The two of them walked out into the hall.

"Listen," Ben said, "Cray, I went in way over my head. Look, things are terrible at home. You got ot give me a break. I know I shouldn't have gotten into the game. Please, Cray, you've got to let me go."

—That's it. I know I can put it over on the slob. The indecent bastard living off other guys. Christ, I hate the slob.

"Look, let me off the hook. No one will ever know. Listen, my old man's had to cut my allowance, no kiddin'. My mother's due for a serious operation. They think it's cancer. Please. Try to understand."

Dammit Ben, a debt's a debt. If what you say is true. Hell, I ain't a bastard but..."

"It is! It is! O God I swear it is. I'll never play again. Please, Cray, let me off."

Well, O.K. Ben, but don't ever let me catch you playing again."

—There, the slob. Knew I could bring it off. See. It's easy to lie. Nothing to it. God. Feel great. See what time. Only seven-thirty. I know. Go drink a few. Call Polly. Jesus I feel like.

Just then a figure appeared down the hall. Upon seeing Ben it quickened its sneaker-quiet step.

"Ben! Ben! Wait a minute!" Robbie caught up with Ben.

"You and Polly coming over to the house tonight, aren't you? Jimbo'll be there. It'll be a hair."

"Sure, Robbie. Hey, how about Carroll's for a few brews first?."

"Great idea, Ben. C'mon my car's right outside."

Can you wait a minute? I've got to call Polly and tell her what time I'll be by."

shppp...drrp...Shpp...drrp...Brrr...brrr..."Hello?"

"Hello, Polly. This is Ben. Look, you all set for tonight? There's a party at the house. Pick you up about nine-thirty. Now? Seven-thirty? O.K.? Alright."

—This has got to be it. Feel it. Can't figure it out. Love her. Yes. No. Do I? Tonight. Bank night. Hairs. Anything goes. Two months. Been working two months on it. Loves me. I know. What if difficult. I know. Key. Pin. No. Honor. Hell.

"O.K. Robbie, get the roach and let's go."

* * * *

"Yeah?"

"Hey, Richie, lemme have a draft, will you? C'mon, are you gonna work or just get down to some serious drinking?"

"Look, anytime I get a buck I'm taking it, Ben. Hi, Noel." Ben motioned to Robbie and they sat down in a booth.

"Robbie, I'm getting drunk out of my mind. How long've we been here?"

"Bout anhouranahalf. God, Ben, you've already had six. How many more can you drink?" Ben smiled. "An infinite amount."

Robbie looked at his watch. "Ben, I've got to go. Got to pick the beast up half an hour ago. Are you going to be alright? See you at the house. O.K.?"

Alone. Always alone. Bottle my only friend. God that's immature but what the hell.

In the booth across the way some blonde-haired, blue-eyed preppy in his idiotic uniform was discussing his spring vacation plans.

O Hoi te toi. I'm going to Bermuda for vacation. Father's got a house there, you know. Go to Bermuda you idiot. Go to hell for all I care. Window. No. No. No room. Duck. Polo.

Someone put a nickel in the juke-box and bananas were being sold.

—How'm I going to pay for this brew. Money also for tonight. No money in the bank. What'll I do? Do. Jesus this place stinks. Oh hello there Julius Schwartz. Fat louse. Lacrosse. Soccer. Smash. Bad check. No. Bad Check Committee. All those damn straight arrows. Hell yes. Hell with'm all.

"Hey Richie, cash a check for ten for me?"

"Sure."

Ben smiled. "C'mon, have another drink."

"Really, I don't want one," Polly said.

"Are you glad to be here?"

"Oh, God, Ben you know I'm glad to be anywhere you are."

"Damn, things are really beginning to move now, Polly."

Just then big fat Jimbo broke out with one of his raunchy songs.

Damn, that nigger sings. Makes me really want it. Thinks I love her. Polly. Is she getting tight? I am. Hell. I wonder. Say they'll do it for love. I love you. No? Key. Pin.

"Polly, let's shake this party. Richie and a couple of the guys want to have a little blast at his place. C'mon."

"Oh Ben, no. I want to stay. I've got to be in by two. Let's stay."

"Look, this thing's gonna be over in a little while – C'mon."

"Alright, alright. Wait till I get my coat."

* * * *

Christ. Been trying for an hour. Got to sock it. How. Maybe tell her I love her. But I don't. I don't. BIG BEN TELLS ANOTHER LIE. LIE. LIE.

"Oh God, Polly, I love you. I really do. I've never loved anybody like I love you."

Swish. Uunhh. Umph.

Damn dress makes so much noise. I wonder if that did any good. God she's a slob. So damn drunk. Horny too. But what resistance. Got to go through with it. Got to.

"No, don't, Ben. I can't. If only we were...Oh Lord, I can't."

Can't. Hell. What'll I do now. Only one thing left. Pin. Key. No. Can't. Sacred. Pledge on oath. The badge is never to be given to anyone except to one betrothed in marriage. I pledged on my honor. Honor. Honor. What the hell is honor anyway. I will. It'll work. I know.

"Look Polly, we'll get married. I promise you." Ben fumbled in the dark for the pin in his shirt. "Polly, Polly, I want you to have this pin. Wear it! Polly, believe me. I love you so."

"Ben! Ben. Oh, God, Ben I love you. I'd do anything for you..."

* * * *

"Ooh."

Christ, what time is it. Jesus, four o'clock. Oh, God, what a night. Slept till four o'clock Sunday afternoon. Last night. I shouldn't have done it. Suppose something happened. Daaady. No, no, it can't have. Oh the dumb slob. Why? Why'd I do it? Why'd I tell her I love her? Oh, no. She's got my pin too.

Just then there was a knock on the door. It opened and Robbie entered in his torn pink shirt, khaki's, and sneaks.

"Hey sack-head, are you going to sleep all day? Shape up! Where's J. label?"

Ben looked up from the rumpled bed with his bleary eyes and squinted at this new apparition.

"Down at the corner, I guess. Hairs, what a grubby night I had last night. That damn Polly is a real hair, Robbie. Listen, wait'll I get up and we'll get some dinner, O.K.?"

"Right, Ben. Say, you all set for the quiz tomorrow?"

Ben winced. "What quiz?"

"The history quiz tomorrow. Haven't you started studying for it yet?"

Ben put up his hands to his head groaning, "Oooh. No. I'd forgotten about the damn thing. I haven't even cracked a book. How'll I ever cram it in. Damn, it's the last quiz too. The damn grader hates me and I've got an F average. Lord. I'll have to pull an all-nighter. Even then, I don't see how I can do it...unless..."

"Unless what, Ben?"

"Nothing. Forget it!"

* * * *

Dinner now over, Ben and Robbie walked back to the dorms. Once in his room Ben began to frantically pore over what few books and fewer notes he had. Somebody down the hall was telling raunchy jokes. The guy next door kept blowing his nose like he expected fifty-cent pieces to come out of it. Time wore on. It got to be one o'clock. Ben had absolutely no idea of what he was studying.

No way possible to ever learn this stuff. Why'n hell was history ever invented. O Mother of God. What'll I ever do. Fail this quiz and I fail the course. Lord, it would be easy to fake it. Cheat. God, what'm I thinking of. No damnit. Honor system. Still. So easy. Let's see. Write dates and answers on paper. Put'm in my pocket. Then during the quiz I could walk into the head. Pretend I had to go. The one on the first floor. No one ever goes there. I could...Not. No. Still, so easy. Lying, stealing, cheating, I never got caught. Cray. Carroll's. Polly. Easy. No. Easy.

* * * *

"Say, Robbie, where's Ben been for the last three days?"

"I dunno, John, I haven't seen him myself since Sunday. Is that today's C.D. you've got?"

"Yeah."

Robbie took the paper and scanned it, his eyes finally coming to rest on the little black-edged box in the lower right-hand corner. "The Honor Committee regrets to announce..." the notice said. He knew where Ben was.

©1957 The University of Virginia

The Virginia Spectator Jim Crow Issue (May 1957, vol. 118, no. 8, p. 15)

Crassingwick

By James McNally

Crassingwick, alluvial aristocracy's last delta –
Owners of prize animals and horsey daughters –
Repudiates the catalytic honesty of fact
In fustian pride that no Jews are members
And that the only Negroes who attend are servants.
Its members snug in the season's fashions
Pinch out with pink imperious fingers,
Green by green, glass by glass, chat by chat,
The higher human hope of decency and merit,
Nibbling on the terraces of retreated minds
With platitudes from pampered lips
Travesty of the anthems of the race –
Station above honor, creed above man.

Their liberties are not civil,
They want freedom only for themselves.

©1957 The University of Virginia