The South of the Mind

American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960–1980

Zachary Lechner, Bryant Simon, Jane Dailey

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780820353906, 9780820353715
• eBook ISBN: 9780820353708
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

With the nation reeling from the cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s era, imaginings of the white South as a place of stability represented a bulwark against unsettling problems, from suburban blandness and empty consumerism to race riots and governmental deceit. A variety of individuals during and after the civil rights era, including writers, journalists, filmmakers, musicians, and politicians, envisioned white southernness as a manly, tradition-loving, communal, authentic - and often rural or small-town - notion that both symbolized a refuge from modern ills and contained the tools for combating them. The South of the Mind tells this story of how many Americans looked to the country’s most maligned region to save them during the 1960s and 1970s.

In this interdisciplinary work, Zachary J. Lechner bridges the fields of southern studies, southern history, and post-World War II American cultural and popular culture history in an effort to discern how conceptions of a tradition-bound, "timeless" South shaped Americans' views of themselves and their society’s political and cultural fragmentations. Wide-ranging chapters detail the iconography of the white South during the civil rights movement; hippies’ fascination with white southern life; the Masculine South of George Wallace, Walking Tall, and Deliverance; the differing southern rock stylings of the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd; and the healing southernness of Jimmy Carter. The South of the Mind emonstrates that we cannot hope to understand recent U.S. history without exploring how people have conceived the South, as well as what those conceptualizations have omitted.

CHAPTER 1

The Many Faces of the South

National Images of White Southernness during the Civil Rights Era, 1960–1971

“Beneath all the bad news that has come out of the South, and that may be expected to emerge for some time longer,” a March 1966 issue of the Nation editorialized, “one can yet see the proof of this proposition.” The proposition was “that of all forms of human ignorance… racial bias has the most superficial roots…. Prejudice does not breed discrimination; discrimination breeds prejudice.”¹

The left-leaning Nation made this comment on the possibility of altering racist thinking in “The Thaw in the South,” an article that detailed the apparent slackening in white southerners’ racial bigotry. The magazine’s evidence for this unfreezing was thin. Drawing on a mere two news items—one story about white students’ increasing acceptance of their black counterparts at the University of Alabama, and another profiling a white man in Schley County, Georgia, who positively related his experience serving as a foreman on an otherwise all-black jury—the piece’s uncredited author concluded that “times change in the Southland, too.”² The discourse utilized by the Nation, what might be termed the Changing South, depicted the white South in the midst of a painful rehabilitation. It left open the possibility that formerly intractable white southerners might be working toward setting aside their peculiar bigotry and achieving racial healing from which the rest of the nation might learn.

By mid-decade, as William G. Carleton noted that same year in an issue of the Yale Review, the South had “many moods.”³ The hopeful Changing South narrative was just one of three prominent discourses that highlighted the evolving and contested import of white southernness in the 1960s. The Changing South emerged as a response to the Vicious South discourse, a common trope in news media coverage of the civil rights movement. It focused on southern racism and cast white southerners as outsiders in the American dream of triumphant liberalism, and as antithetical to ideals of equality. A third discourse, best labeled the Down-Home South, celebrated the family ties, closeness to the land, and unaffectedness of such fictional characters as the Clampetts on The Beverly Hillbillies and residents of The Andy Griffith Show’s fictional small town, Mayberry, North Carolina. These programs delineated such “southern” traits as a refuge from cultural drabness, the supposed decline of traditional values, and rootlessness during the postwar era. While the Vicious South and Changing South suggested that race was integral to any portrayal of white southerners, the Down-Home South evaded contemporary racial troubles in the region and demonstrated that its black-white rift could be easily brushed aside or explained away when popular culture appointed white southerners as arbiters of lost, timeless American virtues.

These differing representations of the white South, even in the midst of its civil rights public relations disaster, granted Americans the opportunity to select the version of their choice at any given time without mandating their acceptance of any one of them completely or exclusively. In the 1960s, for example, American TV viewers tuning in Mondays could (and surely did) watch CBS’s nightly news program (with Walter Cronkite beginning in 1962), where they saw reports on the latest wave of violence against civil rights activists in the South, and later in the evening catch the new episode of the highly rated Andy Griffith Show, a program that filled them with warm and fuzzy feelings for Mayberry’s simple life and close familial connections. The massive success of both programs mitigates against there having been significant distinctions in their respective audiences. Americans who felt compelled to resolve their cognitive dissonance about the South usually needed a way to take race out of the equation; Down-Home South sitcoms did just that.

In the American imagination, the South was either a backward, mean, aggressively racist, foreboding, and yet tough and masculine locale (Vicious South); a region on the mend that reaffirmed a progressive story of American equality (Changing South); or a rural paradise, free of modern, technological, and racial anxieties (Down-Home South). These variants of white southernness would provide the raw materials for later imaginings of southern race relations and culture during the 1960s and 1970s that envisioned white southerners as possessing the tools for escaping the troubles of modern U.S. society.⁴

The Vicious South

The Vicious South discourse carried a dualistic purpose in its treatment of white southerners. On one hand, it closed off the South as a useful model of emulation for the majority of Americans. Certainly for nonsouthern liberals, this narrative reinforced the region as a place apart, the nation’s embarrassing relative. Conversely, reactionary Americans, often supporters of the presidential candidacies of George Wallace, would later look to the whites who populated the Vicious South as paragons of toughness and manliness. National Wallaceites would draw on the symbol of the angry, resisting white southerner as an example for combating the disorder—racial and otherwise—that they wished to eradicate in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But this response could occur only after the news media and popular commentators helped to infuse the American consciousness with the image of a white South seething with anger and ready to commit racial violence.

TOURING THE VICIOUS SOUTH: BLACK LIKE ME AND TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY

In 1959, white southern journalist John Howard Griffin set out on what should have been an impossible task for him: to document how it felt to live as a black man in the South. Under a dermatologist’s supervision, Griffin took Oxsoralen, a drug that caused his skin to darken. He boosted the effect by exposing himself to natural and artificial light and dabbing his face and body with makeup. Once convincingly blackened, he traveled through the Deep South. Black Like Me (1961) presents what he discovered. It is an unsettling portrait of the white South: full of hate and pathologically committed to Jim Crow.

Griffin’s journey through the southland brought him and his northern liberal audience face-to-face with the Vicious South. A constant theme throughout Black Like Me is the dehumanizing impact of southern racial practices on both blacks and whites. To Griffin, the “hate stare” comprised white southern cruelty at its most heinous. Practically everywhere he turned, the journalist faced this look. While waiting for a bus at a Greyhound station in New Orleans, Griffin encountered a respectable-looking white man who gave him the “stare.” “Nothing can describe the withering horror of this,” he wrote. “You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you.”⁵

Griffin thickened his description of white southern racism as he expounded on his adventures hitchhiking one evening from Mississippi to Alabama. White southern men, he found to his surprise, were often willing to give him a ride under the cover of darkness. Soon he realized that the reason had little to do with goodwill. On what seemed like “a dozen rides,” he found his drivers’ interests almost strictly prurient. “All but two,” he remembered, “picked me up the way they would pick up a pornographic photograph or book—except that this was verbal pornography.”⁶ They bombarded and vaguely intimidated Griffin with questions premised on stereotypes of black men’s sexual prowess and animalistic nature. This “ghoulish” dialogue went on incessantly ride after ride. One man tried to bait him into confessing that all black men lusted after white women. Another driver awkwardly noted that “he had never seen a Negro naked.”⁷

Griffin construed the hate stare and sexual perversity as just two offshoots of the blinding hatred that afflicted many white southerners. He may have wished to use his book as a broader condemnation of national racism, but by providing his readers with a fly-on-the-wall account of the daily indignities faced by black southerners, he pegged their white counterparts as uniquely, if not bizarrely, racist. Indeed, he told Time before the book’s publication, “I like to see good in the white man. But after this experience, it’s hard to find it in the Southern white.”⁸ Griffin brought that viewpoint to millions of Americans through his best-selling book, as well as lecture tours and sympathetic advance television appearances with the likes of NBC’s Dave Garroway and CBS’s Mike Wallace.⁹ Critical response to Black Like Me was strong. It enjoyed glowing reviews, which lauded Griffin’s conclusions about the plight of blacks in the South and the brutality of their white tormentors.¹⁰ His book served to popularize the Vicious South discourse and its claim of distinctive, obsessive white southern racism.

Shortly after Griffin began his perilous trek, John Steinbeck also tried to find the South; he uncovered more stories of white malevolence. The popular author had long been an observer of American life and landscapes. He was best known for a series of popular novels, including The Grapes of Wrath (1939), that chronicled the experiences of down-on-their-luck working people in his native California. Travels with Charley (1962) recounts his months-long trip around the United States in a pickup truck with a camper top during 1960. His only companion was his French standard poodle Charley. Steinbeck traveled from Long Island to the Pacific Northwest, down through California and across Texas, before concluding his journey in the Deep South. As his book’s subtitle attests, he went “in search of America.” If he located it anywhere, the reader is left to conclude, it was certainly not in the South. In his survey of the region, with few exceptions, he documented a backward, defiant white population clinging to its racial caste system. The real problem, the writer insinuated, was the rabid, working-class white southerner.

“I faced the South with dread,” Steinbeck announced at the beginning of the book’s southern section. “Here, I knew, were pain and confusion and all the manic results of bewilderment and fear. And the South being a limb of the nation, its pain spreads out to all America.”¹¹ The region’s racial malady, he surmised, infected the rest of the otherwise healthy nation. It was a sickness so severe and peculiar that he could not fully grasp it.

And yet he could not help but look. Setting out for New Orleans, Steinbeck was sucked in by news reports of the “Cheerleaders,” a group of white women he had read about, known for berating black children at a recently integrated local school. “This strange drama,” he recollected, “seemed so improbable that I felt I had to see it. It had the same draw as a five-legged calf or a two-headed foetus at a sideshow, a distortion of normal life we have always found so interesting that we will pay to see it, perhaps to prove to ourselves that we have the proper number of legs or heads.”¹²

In Steinbeck’s prose, the Cheerleaders personify the unhinged futility of defensive white southern racism. His rendering of them in Travels with Charley further underscored the usefulness of the Vicious South in absolving the rest of the nation of its race problem by condemning the apparently abnormal prejudice of the South. Employing a device common in civil rights reporting, Steinbeck contrasted peaceful, defenseless black schoolchildren with sneering, foul-mouthed white racists. For him, the Cheerleaders’ behavior desexed and dehumanized them. He called “their insensate beastliness… heartbreaking.”¹³ One woman’s “voice was the bellow of a bull.”¹⁴ “These were not mothers, not even women,” the writer insisted. “They were crazy actors playing to a crazy audience.”¹⁵ Without stating it explicitly, Steinbeck argued, with liberal indignation, that Jim Crow transformed its white proponents into subhuman creatures.

Steinbeck’s passages on the white South are not completely devoid of subtlety. For instance, after the Cheerleaders sequence, he related a conversation between him and an individual named Monsieur Ci Git. Steinbeck immediately indicated the gentleman’s variance from the unrefined Cheerleaders. “He was a neatly dressed man well along in years,” he recalled, “with a Greco face and fine wind-lifted white hair and a clipped white mustache.”¹⁶ The author was fascinated by this debonair individual who demonstrated a keen understanding of southern race relations and exhibited a glimmer of racial progressivism. “You’re not what the North thinks of as a Southerner,” Steinbeck told him. “Perhaps not,” Ci Git responded. “But I’m not alone.”¹⁷ In the midst of so much dogged white racism, Steinbeck showed the Monsieur as the face of another South, one not invested in the racial hatred of the Cheerleaders. The fact that Ci Git exemplified southern middle-class refinement only lent further credence to the popular notion that white southern racism was most pronounced among the working-class rabble.

Other parts of Travels with Charley supplement this implicit class-based view of southern racism. After the Ci Git episode, Steinbeck described his experience picking up hitchhikers on his way from New Orleans to Jackson, Mississippi. The novelist reported the intense racism of one man who sounded like a cliché of white southern bigotry. When Steinbeck baited him and made it clear that he rejected the status quo of southern race relations, the man labeled him one of the “Commie nigger-lovers,” who, he said, were “trouble-makers [who] come down here and tell us how to live.”¹⁸ In dramatizing this tense moment, Steinbeck reinforced the idea that Americans should fear the working-class white southerner. While scholar Allison Graham has shown that much popular culture during the civil rights era was invested in the rehabilitation of this figure, Steinbeck left readers with little hope that the Vicious South’s snarling, often economically deprived, whites would ever change despite the presence of moderating influences like Monsieur Ci Git.

Almost without fail, the reviews of Steinbeck’s travelogue dwelled on the book’s southern section. Princeton historian Eric F. Goldman, one of the more complimentary critics, praised the book’s racial liberalism. “Here is the most powerful writing in the book,” he wrote in reference to the Cheerleaders episode, “stinging with the cold lash of outraged decency.”¹⁹ Other reviewers detected nothing revelatory in Steinbeck’s exposé of southern racism. “This opportunity for high drama, for great sensitivity exp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Raising the White South
• Chapter 1: The Many Faces of the South
• Chapter 2: “This World from the Standpoint of a Rocking Chair”
• Chapter 3: “When in Doubt, Kick Ass”
• Chapter 4: A Tale of Two Souths
• Chapter 5: “I Respect a Good Southern White Man”
• Epilogue: Playing That Dead Band’s Song
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Southern Rock in the 1970s
• Notes
• Index