Racism Below Surface : Jim Crow’s Ghost Lurks in New South

It was the third or fourth time that Andy McWilliams had stepped outside the bar to see if the mechanic had arrived to take him to his car, disabled on a back road about 5 miles from town. McWilliams had called for help more than half an hour ago, but there still was no sign of the mechanic.

“Hey, relax and enjoy your beer,” said a friend, a visitor from Atlanta, as McWilliams returned to his seat once again. “The guy knows where to find you, right? Why don’t you just sit tight and let him come in here for you instead of going outside to look for him all the time?”

McWilliams gave his friend a bemused look and then, realizing that the big-city visitor did not quite grasp the situation, bluntly explained: “ ‘Cause he’s a nigger, and he knows better than to step foot in here. This ain’t no redneck bar, but niggers ain’t exactly welcome.”

Vestiges of Past

Old times are not forgotten in Dixie. The “Whites Only” signs have long been retired, “mean” racists are a dying breed and, throughout the region, blacks and whites are sharing their lives in ways that earlier generations of Southerners would find unimaginable. But, for all the dramatic progress in race relations below the Mason-Dixon Line, the South still is plagued by vestiges of its Jim Crow past.

Here in the lush, cotton-growing Delta section of northwestern Mississippi, for example, many planters still refer to their black field hands as “my people” as they once might have said “my niggers” or “my slaves”--as if they still bodily owned them.

Last summer, when a West Coast reporter visiting the town of Sumner remarked on how spruce and prosperous it looked compared to other Delta communities he had seen, a prominent white resident unabashedly boasted: “It’s because we’re 70% white here--and that’s the way we want to keep it. You go over to the next town, where it’s just the reverse, and you’ll see what I mean.”

But the problem of the lingering color line in the South is notconfined to such rural and small-town areas as the Mississippi Delta. It can be found, to varying degrees, throughout the domain of the Old Confederacy.

Atlanta, for instance, has long prided itself as “the city too busy to hate”--a sobriquet it gave itself when other major Southern cities were torn by bitter racial strife during the turbulent era of the civil rights struggles. But, residentially, Atlanta today is split almost in half racially, with 90% of whites living north of downtown and 90% of blacks living to the south, and the city’s public schools, with a 92% black student enrollment, are among the most segregated in the nation.

What is more, on the scale of economic equality that Atlanta boasts about, blacks often fall woefully behind. For example, an investigative series by the Atlanta Journal and Constitution last year disclosed that the city’s major financial institutions are five times more likely to give mortgage and home-improvement loans to whites than to blacks, even though two-thirds of the city’s residents are black.

“In 1989, we’re still confronted with a deep character flaw in the Southern white,” said Steve Suitts, executive director of the Southern Regional Council, an Atlanta-based organization formed in 1944 to foster better race relations in the South. “It is that whites, more than 30 years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine, truly do not believe that race is a burden in society. Even the ‘city too busy to hate’ is not too busy to discriminate.”

Form of Prejudice

Economic discrimination is one of the most persistent forms of anti-black prejudice in the South.

According to a recent report on the “worker climate” in the United States by the Atlanta-based Southern Labor Institute, black workers in New England and in several Midwestern states have shared substantially along with whites in the benefits of economic growth in their localities. But in many Southern states--most notably Alabama, Arkansas and North and South Carolina--blacks still suffer disproportionately from discrimination and poor labor market opportunities, despite the economic expansion in their region.

Those four states--Alabama, Arkansas and the Carolinas--also are among the lowest in terms of the percentage of blacks employed in what traditionally have been better-paying, predominantly white-male occupations--executives, administrators, managers and professionals, the report said.

“All workers still have reasons to find the South a disappointing, poor place to work,” said Ken Johnson, the labor institute’s director. “But blacks, obviously, have even more reasons than whites.”

The economic disadvantage from which blacks suffer is perhaps most pronounced in rural and small-town Dixie.

In a highly publicized 1987 incident in the southern Georgia town of Tifton, for example, a black college student was discharged from her job at a white-owned pharmacy the day after she started work because a co-owner feared that her race would cause him to lose white customers.

The student, Tommie Faye Bateman, was then in her final year at the University of Georgia’s pharmacy college and was considered by her instructors to be an above-average student. She had been assigned to the Cox-Ewing Northside Pharmacy as part of the college’s program placing students in jobs for practical training.

Robert F. Cox, the business partner who dismissed her, said that the university did not inform him beforehand that Bateman was black and that he had overheard several white customers complaining about her presence in the store.

“I have no prejudice at all,” he told a reporter at the time of the incident. But, he added: “We just don’t know how to handle customers complaining. . . . It’s hard for the small independent businesses to survive. You bend to what your customers say.”

John Ewing, Cox’s partner, offered to rehire Bateman, but she chose reassignment to a pharmacy in her hometown of Ashburn, saying: “I never thought I would be denied the right to work . . . not after all these years in the 1980s.”

Emerson Henderson, president of the Tifton chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said he fears that Bateman’s dismissal may have created the impression among black youngsters that “regardless of how hard they work to get ahead, they’re still going to be faced with blatant discrimination.”

As in the North, much of the continuing racism in the South stems from a deep-seated aversion to accepting blacks as social and cultural equals--an aversion reinforced by generations of custom and tradition and, until the abolishment of legalized segregation, by the force of law as well.

In Atlanta, says Lillian Lewis, wife of black Democratic Congressman John Lewis, the social hour is rigidly segregated, being either “black or white--a black dance, a white party, a black ball, a white gala.”

Even in such supposedly enlightened environs as college campuses, with generations of young blacks and whites who did not grow up under Jim Crow, the color line is often strongly drawn.

When black co-eds won the homecoming queen crown for two years in a row at the University of Alabama, for example, the student senate--which is dominated by white fraternities and sororities--reacted by voting to change the rules of the election of campus homecoming queen.

Under the old rules, the homecoming crown was awarded to the candidate who obtained a plurality of the votes cast by the student body. Blacks had an advantage in voting because, even though they make up less than 10% of the student population, they tended to vote in a bloc for a favored black candidate among the 10 finalists selected by a screening committee. Whites, in contrast, were inclined to split their vote among the several white candidates.

Under the new rules, which went into effect last fall, a candidate cannot win with a simple plurality of the votes; she must get a majority--at least 50% plus one vote. If no candidate obtains a majority in the election, a runoff is held between the top two candidates.

“In effect, what this did is to ensure that no black woman would ever win on this campus,” said Lee McCarley, editor of the Crimson White, the student newspaper. “A black made it to the runoff this year, but she was beaten by an Asian-American who is in one of the more affluent white sororities. Once it came down to a runoff, the white fraternity and sorority ‘machine’ bloc simply voted for her. They’re powerful enough to put in anyone that they wish under the new rules.”

The student senate’s action supports studies by University of Alabama sociologist Donal E. Muir showing that white fraternities and sororities are “the real stronghold of prejudice against blacks on this campus.”

Muir’s surveys have found that whites who belong to fraternities and sororities are far less willing than other white students to socialize with blacks and accept them as equals. Only 32% of white fraternity and sorority members are willing to room with a black, compared to slightly more than 50% of white independents, and only 8% of white fraternity and sorority members are willing to date a black, compared to about 60% of white independents.

Part of Power Elite

“What makes this even more of a problem,” Muir explains, “is that the white fraternity and sorority members are the ones who, when they graduate from college, tend to go out into the general community and become part of the white power elite--the leading business people, the bankers, the politicians. So they have an influence far beyond that of their proportionately small numbers.”

Public education, the focus of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954 abolishing the “separate but equal” doctrine, remains another sore spot in the South’s race relations.

Over the last two years in Mississippi, for example, blacks have staged boycotts in about 15 different communities to protest alleged discrimination in public schools, and they have filed lawsuits against more than 20 of the state’s 154 school districts.

Although the grievances vary from district to district, the lawsuits generally include charges of discrimination in hiring and promotion of black teachers and administrators, as well as accusations that black students are unfairly concentrated in classes for slow learners as a result of abuses in standardized testing.

More than half of Mississippi’s 506,000 public school students are black, but only 35% of the 10,104 instructional personnel are black. And, although more than half of the districts have student populations that range from 70% to 100% black, only 22 of the total 165 district superintendents are black, according to figures from the state education department and the state NAACP chapter.

White administrators reject charges of discrimination and cite what they term the progress in Mississippi since the days when blacks were confined to all-black schools with dog-eared textbooks and hand-me-down athletic uniforms discarded by white schools.

But Morris Kinsey, director of the state NAACP’s education committee, argues that white school officials seem intent on “returning to the days of segregation” in schools, thus forcing blacks to seek redress through protests and lawsuits. “Whites think it’s progress if instead of no shoes you have one, but in some cases we don’t even have one shoe,” he said.

In a 1987 incident in rural southeastern Georgia, the black community in Ware County was outraged when a white county school bus driver ordered 10 black students to sit at the back of the bus for a week because they had skipped classes to celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The bus driver claimed that she put the students in the back of the bus only to facilitate loading and unloading of passengers.

Few Convinced

That explanation did not convince many blacks in Ware County, where blacks said that they had long suffered indignities in the predominantly white school district. On one occasion, during a pep rally at the county high school, two cheerleaders reportedly wore blackface and mimicked with exaggerated clumsiness the football players from a predominantly black rival school with whom a game was set that day. In another incident, blacks said, two white county high school students donned sheets and hoods resembling Ku Klux Klan robes for an annual Toga Day event.

The district school board rejected black demands that the bus driver be dismissed but voted to make King’s birthday a school holiday. That may serve to mollify blacks, but it is unlikely to do much else to improve race relations, since Southern whites generally ignore King’s birthday as a “black” holiday anyway.

“One of the most difficult parts of our life in the South is that a lot of whites are living without a sense of history,” said Suitts of the Southern Regional Council. “Anybody who understands the history of the South and thought for a moment would consider what sending blacks to the back of the bus symbolically says.”

But, he added: “That’s the lingering difficulty in moving this region--and the nation--beyond the current stagnated state of race relations. The general view today--you can hear it in every coffee shop in the morning--is: ‘I didn’t create slavery, I didn’t create segregation, I didn’t create racism, so why do these folks want me to do something?’ ”

One of the most disturbing aspects of the South’s continuing racial dilemmas is the persistence of the Ku Klux Klan and its many latter-day offshoots, such as the White Patriots Party and the Mississippi-based Nationalist Movement.

In the mid-1970s, a renewed growth of the klan and the other white supremacist organizations occurred nationwide, but the resurgence of the klan itself peaked earlier in this decade, and membership has dwindled from a high of between 10,000 to 12,000 in 1981 to about 6,000 or 7,000 at present, according to various estimates.

However, although the traditional klan has lost membership, there is strong evidence that membership in other white supremacist organizations has grown, so that the total figure for all white supremacist groups could be as high as 20,000 or more, according to Eva Sears of the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal, which monitors hate group activity in the nation.

More Sophisticated

“What’s even more disturbing is that the white supremacists have learned to be a lot more subtle and sophisticated, and they are concentrating on influencing young people,” she said. “And, for our tastes, they’re doing it much too successfully.”

The klan staged its 55th annual rally last September at its traditional spot near Stone Mountain in suburban Atlanta. The rally was held on land owned by klan leader James R. Venable. Earlier in the year, the Stone Mountain City Council had approved a proposal to name a local ballpark after Venable, a former mayor of the town, but it later repealed the action after incurring a flood of negative publicity.

“The klan has lost force in that a lot of their illegal actions are no longer tolerated the way they used to be,” Sears said. “But they still pose a threat because of their potential to polarize and terrorize communities far beyond what might be expected if you judged from their size alone.”

Another enduring source of racial division in the South is its Confederate heritage. In Montgomery, Ala., the self-styled “Cradle of the Confederacy,” 14 black state legislators were arrested for trespassing on state property last summer when they attempted to scale a chain-link fence and remove the Rebel banner that flies from the dome of the State Capitol.

“When I see that flag, I see the banner of a traitor nation that wanted to hold my forebears in slavery,” said seven-term state Rep. Alvin Holmes of Montgomery, who was among the lawmakers who were arrested.

Noble Cause

But to many white Southerners the “Stars and Bars” is a symbol of what they see as a noble cause and laudable heritage. “I’m glad they zapped those niggers when they tried to take that flag down. It’s not anti-black,” said a white Montgomery bartender.

Clearly, racism remains a salient issue for the South--as, in fact, it does for the nation. Many Southerners--whites as well as blacks--believe that the South is sliding backward in its efforts to achieve a truly biracial society and that neither the North nor the federal government provides the moral imperative they once did for change below the Mason-Dixon Line.

“As long as white Southerners can look at Yonkers or Howard Beach or Chicago, it’s going to be hard to solve the South’s racial problems,” said James Cobb, a University of Alabama historian, referring to Northern localities that have experienced severe racial conflict and violence in recent times.

“Look at the Reconstruction era following the Civil War. Reconstruction plays out when it reaches a point where it tries to push the South to a point beyond where the nation as a whole wants to go.”

However, Cobb said: “We’ll know that the South’s race problem is solved when, as the Southern writer Walker Percy once said, a white Southerner hears about a racial problem in a Northern city and is sad about it instead of gloating.”

Times researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.