(Ed note: This is the fourth in a series of excerpts from Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation by J. Chester Johnson. Follow these links for parts one, two, and three.)
As I followed my own nose through numerous peregrinations with Little Car, I let myself wander over some of the South’s, the white South’s traits. For instance, the physicality of the South and its racism had walked hand in hand through history. The rest of America had granted to the South the close connection that has existed between these two unmistakable features. This muscularity of the South has been prominently displayed in white Southern literature through characters like Popeye in Faulkner’s Sanctuary or in James Dickey’s poetry and in his popular novel, Deliverance. The rest of the country often looked askance upon the South for its obsession with physicality, a quality many white Southerners felt comfortable exhibiting for all to see, ranging from racial beatings to football as a violent religion or to beauty pageants as an obverse reflection of the region’s devotion to muscularity.
I ascribe the reason for this avowed bedevilment with the physical to the land, the soil of the South. Both Southern blacks and whites have articulated their own special attachments to the land there. One can, of course, say the love of land has been primordial, displayed over an endless array of cultures and places since the beginning of time, but it was mostly a different combination in the South at play. To the white Southern landowner, the land and black labor were joined; they were inseparable, and to work the land was, historically speaking, to work the blacks. Violence itself became part of the economic enterprise for many white planters – not for all, but for far too many. Also associated with this nexus between the land and the economics of physicality for the white Southern agrarian was the procreation by birth of slave assets, often through the white owners’ own seed. So, a culture evolved out of Southern agrarian economics tying physicality, if not violent physicality, to the land. Part of the Southern damaged heritage claimed a comfort with physicality that other parts of the country did not experience nor absorb to a corresponding degree.
Violence sanctioned by and incorporated into an economic system takes on an authority and cultural acceptance for leisure, pleasure, and social contract purposes. The apparatus in support of the positive function of violence, as historically viewed by many white Southerners, meant the South would feel more aligned with physicality, even for casual expressions. This historic proclivity toward violence was employed for multiple generations to control blacks. So, why wouldn’t violence again be applied during the Civil Rights Movement to attempt to do the same? Subtle and not-so-subtle threats of violence, spoken and unspoken, came at blacks generally and black activists more particularly during the Civil Rights Movement, stressing death and harm if African-Americans didn’t stay in their accustomed place with visions of past brutalities permeating even random discussions about race. The Civil Rights Movement acknowledged that white Southern males simply wouldn’t give up the use of violent threats, for why wouldn’t white Southerners think their use could work again? The tactics needed to be a little different and applied a little differently – more public displays for a broader audience but at least as frightening.
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