SOURCE: Ellison, Ralph. “If the Twain Shall Meet.” Book Week (8 November 1964): 1, 20, 22-5.

[In the following review of The Southern Mystique, Ellison praises Zinn for providing a constructive blueprint for solving the civil rights crisis in the South.]

Howard Zinn's The Southern Mystique is yet another reminder that American history is caught again in the excruciating process of executing a spiral—that is, in returning at a later point in time to an earlier point in historical space—and the point of maximum tortuosity is once again the South.

It would seem that the basic themes of our history may be repressed in the public mind, but like corpses in mystery dramas, they always turn up, again—and are frequently more troublesome. Yes, and with an added element of mystery. “To hit,” as the hunters say, “is history, to miss is mystery.” For while our history is characterized by a swift and tightly telescoped continuity, our consciousness of history is typically discontinuous. Like quiescent organisms in the blood, our unresolved issues persist, but with our attention turned to other concerns we come to regard the eruption of boils and chancres that mark their presence with our well-known “American innocence.” Naturally, this leaves us vulnerable to superstition, rumor, and the manipulation of political medicine men.

Nevertheless, so imperative are our national commitments that while one group in our historical drama inevitably becomes inactive once the issues that aroused it are repressed, a resuscitation of the old themes will find a quite similar group taking its place on the redecorated stage. Frequently unaware of the earlier performers of its roles—because flawed, as are most Americans, by an ignorance of history—the new group dresses in quite different costumes but speaks in its own accents the old vital lines of freedom.

Thus, the First Reconstruction saw a wave of young whites hurrying South to staff the schools the Freedmen's Bureau was establishing for the emancipated slaves. Enthusiastic, energetic, self-sacrificial, these young teachers are long forgotten, yet they were the true predecessors of the young white Northerners now participating in the sit-ins and voter-registration drives that mark the Second—or resumption of—Reconstruction. Today's young crusaders are predominantly students, but here too, acting in the ranks and as advisers, are teachers like the author of The Southern Mystique.

Presently an associate professor of government at Boston University, Mr. Zinn has been chairman of the history department at Spelman College, a school for Negro women located in Atlanta, Georgia. His book is an account of his experiences as member of an integrated faculty, as resident in a predominantly Negro university community, and as an adviser to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. It attempts to confront the problems arising from the Negro's quest for civil rights—and the white Southerner's agony in accepting change—not with slogans nor with that smug attitude of moral superiority typical of many Northerners' approach to the South, but with a passion to discover a rationale for hope and a theoretical basis for constructive action. Significantly, Mr. Zinn places the burden of insight and sympathy upon the outsider, and thus upon himself.

With such works as The Southern Mystique, Calvin Trillin's An Education in Georgia, and Bernard Taper's Gomillion vs. Lightfoot, the Second Reconstruction is receiving its on-the-spot documentation, as once again young Northerners are bent upon trying to reduce the ethos and mystery of the South, and our involvement in it, to some semblance of human order. Mr. Zinn would give us a human perspective on the present struggle and in this sense his book belongs with such works of the First Reconstruction as The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten and Thomas Wentworth Higginson's Army Life in a Black Regiment. Like these, in reporting a social action it reveals a state of mind.

In achieving change Mr. Zinn would base his actions upon sound thinking. He would not only re-examine our major assumptions concerning man and society; he would also appropriate any new concepts developed by social psychology, Neo-Freudian analysis, and the findings of such specialists in Southern history as C. Van Woodward. Philosophically, he has tried to forge, for himself at least, a fresh concept of man. In the areas of race relations this is a most necessary endeavor, and while I disagree with some of his procedures and conclusions, I am sympathetic with his attempt to do pragmatically what our best critical minds have failed even to recognize as important.

Mr. Zinn's example reminds us that one of the most exciting intellectual phenomenons of recent years has been the stir created among Northern intellectuals by the French Existentialists' theory of engagement. How frequently has the word turned up in their writings! How often have I been asked to sign, and have signed, their petitions decrying injustices in Europe, Asia and the Middle East! Yes, and how sensitive have they been to those who have struggled in the Soviet Union, in Hungary, in Algeria—and well they might, for injustice wears ever the same harsh face wherever it shows itself. And yet, today, one of the most startling disjunctures in our national life has been the failure of many of these intellectuals to involve themselves either by their writings or their activities (except, perhaps, for wearing CORE's equality buttons in their lapels) in our own great national struggle.

One wouldn't suspect that the South has been the center of our national dilemma, both political and moral, for most intellectuals have never seriously confronted the South or its people, few have visited there, and most have drawn their notions about Southerners from novels or from political theorists and sociologists who themselves have never been there. And while in all probability most of these intellectuals reject the values or debasement of values for which the South has stood (even though they admire and often imitate the poets, novelists and critics whom the South has produced), few feel any obligation to obtain first-hand knowledge—not even those who write so, confidently (and there are Negroes among these) about the “meaning” of Negro experience. The events set in motion by the Supreme Court decision of 1954 and accelerated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and which are now transforming not only the South but the entire nation—events that are creating a revolution not only in our race relations but in our political morality—have found them ominously silent.

My complaint isn't simply that they don't know the South or the Negro but that their failures to learn the country leave them at the mercy of politicians, unreliable reporters and rumor-mongers. Nor does it help their posture of intellectual authority. Indeed, many confuse the “Negro revolution” with the so-called “sexual revolution” (really a homo-sexual revolution), and this has led them to praise unbelievably bad art in the mistaken notion that they're helping to extend Negro freedom. No wonder that when the civil rights struggle moves into their own neighborhoods many of them have nothing to fall back upon except the same tired cliches about sexual rivalry, miscegenation and Negro self-hate that have clouded the human realities of the South.

Well, Howard Zinn is no Zen Buddhist; he is a passionate reformer, and his passion lends his book the overtones of symbolic action. In this sense it involves a dual journey, one leg of which took him and his family to live in what, in his own words, “is often thought to be the womb of the South's mystery, the Negro community of the Deep South,” and the other of which led him into that violent and mysterious region evoked in the mind by the work of Margaret Mitchell, Wilbur J. Cash, and William Faulkner—a region cloaked by an “invisible mist” which not only blurred perspective but distorted justice and defied reason. Here The Southern Mystique relates a journey into the unknown, involving an agon of dangerous action, a reversal of purpose leading to a “revolution in perception,” and a return to the North with what Mr. Zinn offers as a life-preserving message—i. e., his book.

For from his base in the Negro community—this “womb,” this sanctuary, this place of growth, rebirth and vision, resting in the “tranquil eye” of the South's hurricane of racial tensions—Mr. Zinn was to discover “those tiny circles of shadow out of sight, where people of several colors meet and touch as human beings …” And now he believes that contact between the races is a key to understanding and change, because contact—“intimate, massive and more than momentary—reshuffles all sensory memories and dissolves the mystique built upon the physical characteristics of the Negro.” One gathers that, for him, contact, in a context of ameliorative action, produces a catharsis that is not only sensory and psychological, but intellectual and moral. Fear is exorcised, the errors springing from prejudice are corrected, and a redefinition of purpose, both personal and social, becomes possible. The assumption here is that social change is sparked by the concern of responsible individuals, and an overtone of individual salvation sounds throughout Mr. Zinn's book. He specifies, however, that interracial contact must be equal—which excludes most of the usual contacts between Negroes and whites, whether North or South. Thus, the coming together of whites and Negroes in the interest of change is change in itself, and therefore, threatening to those who fear the widening of American democracy.

In the “womb” of the Negro community, Mr. Zinn was moved to the passionate purpose of dispelling the mystique which he found cloaking the human realities of the South. After living there for seven intense years, he believes that he has discovered the reality underlying the Southern mystique (racial fear is its core). He sees the white Southerner not as a figure of horror but as an American who exhibits certain national characteristics in an exaggerated form. The South, he writes, “is still the most terrible place in America [but] because it is, it is filled with heroes.” And yet, I must say that his perception (and he is conscious of this) has by no means been completely purified. Not when he can write that “every cliche uttered about the South, every stereotype attached to its people, white and Negro, is true”—even though he adds the qualification that “a thousand other characteristics, complex and subtle, are also true …”

For this, surely, is to concede too much to rhetorical strategy. The cliches and stereotypes attached to the South are no more “true” than those attached to any other region or people. What he means, perhaps, is that they contain an element of truth. Stereotypes are fabricated from fragments of reality, and it is these fragments that give them life, continuity and availability for manipulation. Even this depends upon the psychological predisposition of those who accept them. Here, in fact, is the secret of the stereotypes' tenaciousness. Some people must feel superior on any ground whatsoever, and I'm afraid that for far too many, “whiteness” is the last desperate possibility. Unfortunately, this need has become contagious and now, as should be expected, certain Negroes, who for years have been satisfied to be merely human and stake their changes upon individual attainment, are succumbing to blackness as a value.

As would be expected of a book involved with race and color in the U.S., The Southern Mystique is concerned with seeing and non-seeing, with illusion and reality—but also with intellectual clarity. His own efforts to see clearly and act effectively lead Mr. Zinn to believe that certain key concepts influencing our view of personality tend to inhibit action in the field of civil rights. He is critical of Freudian psychology, for instance, because he feels that a concern with its categories leads to a “pervasive pessimism” about men in society. Agreeing with Sartre's “man is condemned at every instance to invent man,” he suggests that in achieving change in the South the point of departure is not a philosophical investigation of cause. Because “once you acknowledge cause as the core of a problem, you have built something into it that not only baffles people, but, worse, immobilizes them.” (Evidently Mr. Zinn really believes that the Devil appears only at man's bidding.)

He would therefore leave cause to the philosophers and, as an activist, concentrate on results. For after all, he argues; “A physicist may … not know what really lies behind the transformation of matter into energy, but if he has figured out how to release this energy, his achievement is stupendous.” It is true that in many tightly controlled experiments the scientist must still play it by ear, and true again that civilizations have produced great art while leaving unsolved the problem of where babies come from, yet Zinn's argument makes me uneasy if for no other reason than that it evokes the myth of the sorcerer's apprentice. Not only does it blithely put aside the intractable fact that human beings are creatures of memory and spirit, as well as of conscious motivation, but it makes too much mystery of what, in its political aspects, is really a struggle for power, as white and Negro Southerners understand very well.

Nevertheless, Mr. Zinn's rejection of the gradualists' assumption that a change in thinking must precede changes in behavior seems justified by the actual dynamics of recent social changes in the South. Thus, his observation that “first you change the way people behave by legal or extra-legal pressures of various kinds, in order to transform the environment which is the ultimate determinant of the way they think” seems valid not only on the basis of current events but it describes what actually happened to Negroes following the betrayal of Reconstruction. Indeed, Mr. Zinn draws upon the researches of C. Vann Woodward to demonstrate how comparatively recent segregation has been a support of the “Southern way of life.”

In answer to the fear that white Southerners will accept change and then retaliate violently, he considers this no reason to slow the pace of action. Today, he holds, neither change nor its approval depend upon the white Southerner's will but only upon his “quiescence.” For now, he writes, what is called “intelligent white leadership … is really the exercise of influence by some whites to get other whites to follow, however grumblingly, the leadership of Negroes … whose decisions on tactics are the parents of those decisions on law that are made in the courts and announced in the headlines.”

In other words, we've spiraled back to a situation similar to the one that followed the Hayes-Tilden Compromises; and where the violence of sheriff's deputies and night-riders formed the force by which the white leadership then achieved its will, today the Negroes have converted their grievously acquired discipline in absorbing violence non-violently into a force for changing their condition. Perhaps we have made too much of the “moral” nature of the Negroes' struggle because their demands for freedom have always been moral; what is new is that their efforts now have sanction in national law. Thus, they can, if only in extreme instances, call upon the ultimate force of Federal troops—a protection denied them since the end of Reconstruction.

Mr. Zinn points out, however, that except in rare instances change is being achieved in the South through a “mammoth internal convulsion,” and that “in almost all cases where desegregation has occurred, the white South has made its own decision for acceptance.” He explains this by noting a human fact long obscured by the Southern mystique (though not for Southern Negroes who have had to know better): the white Southerner has a “hierarchy of values, in which some things are more important than others, and segregation, while desirable, does not mean as much to him as certain other values [which] he has come to cherish.” Thus, he makes choices “with the guidance of some subconscious order of priorities, in a field of limited possibilities.”

To his awareness of the relationship between the individual's hierarchy of values and Southern change Mr. Zinn adds Kurt Lewin's dictum, derived from the “field theory” of theoretical physics, that “behavior depends neither upon the past nor the future, but on the present field”—a view which, if true, is true only in a highly qualified sense. Nevertheless, it allows Zinn a certain optimism in approaching Southern white behavior “not as the inevitable results of a fixed set of psychological traits, but as the response to a group atmosphere which is susceptible of manipulation.”

Whatever the validity of applying “field theory” to human psychology, one of the strategies of the Negro freedom movement is to exert pressures in the social field that will move whites to make choices favorable to the Negroes' goals. This, actually, is a very old maneuver of Negro strategy, characterized by careful timing and flexibility within what, since the 1870s, has been a fairly rigid field. But theory is theory and practice is what we make it, while the past asserts itself regardless.

If Southern whites (who seem as unfamiliar with “field theory” as with Edmund Wilson's “sea slug” theory of the Civil War) respond to change as they have in the past—that is, often violently—then the Negroes have usually reacted as they did most frequently in their own past, namely, non-violently. Today, however, the absorbing of blows has become a political technique, and thus a value. And a prime source of Negro morale is their knowledge that their forefathers survived so much violence (one of the major supports of the “American way of life,” by the way) during times when the highest court in the land was against them. How, by the way, does one say “Negro American” without at once implying “slave” and, hopefully, “free man and equal and responsible citizen?”

But do not let me quibble here. For I am aware that theory has no necessary correspondence in action, nor means with results. Social change, nevertheless, involves the use of words, and words, even Mr. Zinn's words, are rooted deep in the realities of the past.

Zinn bolsters his argument with Harry Stack Sullivan's observation on the importance of the “significant other” in interpersonal relationships. And he suggests that intellectuals, scholars and, especially, policy makers should be aware that in confronting (or failing to confront) problems of social change they are no mere neutral observers but participants who modify the situation by affecting the field of social forces. In this sense, then, there is no escape; one acts even by not acting—a useful reminder for those who trouble over how to apply the concept of engagement to the current struggle and one wishes to shout, “Hear, Hear!” But his suggestion that an administration that recognizes its own activity as a force affecting white behavior might “map much bolder policies than one basing its moves on the passive situation represented by public opinion polls” seems far too charitable toward the politicians' motives.

For while the myths and mysteries that form the Southern mystique are irrational and even primitive, they are, nevertheless, real even as works of the imagination are “real.” Like all mysteries and their attendant myths, they imply—as Jane Harrison teaches us in Themis, her study of ancient Greek religion—a rite. And rites are actions, the goal of which is the manipulation of power; in primitive religions, magical power; in the South (and in the North), political power.

Further, in our own representative form of government the representatives of the white South (few of whom represent Negroes) are all too often the most dedicated, most magic-befouled manipulators of the mystique that surrounds American race prejudice. Neither Strom Thurmond nor Governors Johnson or Wallace have any intention of surrendering the power issuing from the Southern mystique out of the goodness of their hearts. They will give way only before the manifestation within the South of the broader, more human American myth of equality and freedom for all. Not even the presence in the White House of an even more significant Southern “other” has inhibited the celebrants of the rites of Southern prejudice, and now they have been joined by Senator Goldwater. Race remains an active political force because they make it so, and their techniques of manipulation are traditional.

“The most vicious thing about segregation—more deadly than its immediate denials of certain goods and services is,” in Mr. Zinn's opinion, “its perpetuation of the mystery of racial differences.” I would have thought that the impact of segregation and discrimination upon individual and group alike would be more important. Most Negroes ignore the mystique of race differences, even as they comply with Southern law and custom. For they know through their own experience the superficiality of the evidence upon which the myth of white superiority rests. They also know that they haven't lived all these years as servants to a race of gods. The folk verse—“These white folk think That they so fine, But their dirty linen stinks Just like mine!”—while irreverent and a bit bawdy, is a sharp-nosed, clear-eyed observation of reality. No, it is less the mystique that harms us than the denial of basic freedom. It is not the myth that places dynamite in a Sunday school but terrorists carrying out a ritual of intimidation; for while the word slanders, the practice inflicts death. And if whites can accept change without surrendering their prejudices—and here Mr. Zinn sees quite clearly—so have Negroes existed under that prejudice without accepting its contentions.

I must leave to more qualified critics to assess the broader implications of Mr. Zinn's theoretical approach, but I believe that his effort to see freshly and act constructively is, despite all objections, overwhelmingly important. His speculations have followed courageous action, and he is aware of how urgently the activities of the Negro Freedom Movement demand clarification in theoretical structuring. One source of the problem is our lack of any adequate definition of Negro life and experience, which is far from being as simple as many thinkers assume. And here Mr. Zinn's own urgency blurs his perception.

He believes that man has in his power the means to bring himself and society closer to a more human ideal and his key term is action. His assault upon the viciousness committed in the name of instinct, race and history makes him prefer theories that underplay the influence of the past—ironically a tendency that reformers share with reactionaries and conservatives, who would repress all details of the past that would unmask their mythologies. Thus, Gordon All-port's hypothesis that “motives are contemporary … not bound functionally to historical origins or to early goals, but to present goals only” affords Zinn optimism in the field of action. But action does not imply insight, because the past is clearly present in the motivation of the Negroes with whom Zinn worked in the South. Perhaps in shrugging off the encumbrances of the past, he failed to observe them (or even to identify with them) in sufficient depth.

Zinn suggests that a half generation ago the Southern Negro personality was essentially that of the arch-stereotype of “Sambo” (that craven creation of 19th-century white Southern pseudo-sociology, recently reintroduced into what passes for intellectual discussion by Stanley M. Elkins) but was suddenly transformed by the Supreme Court Decision of 1954 into the “proud Negro demonstrator who appears in exactly those little towns and hamlets … that produced silence and compliance a half generation ago.”

But here he's being taken in—both by Elkins and by his own need to recreate man, or at least Negro man, in terms of the expediencies of the historical moment. Didn't he notice that some of the older sharecroppers who are sheltering and advising the young Northern crusaders would seem to look, talk and, when the occasion requires it, act like this alleged “Sambo”? He is perceptive when he notes that the terrible aspects of Southern life have made for many heroes, but he might also have noted that Southern life is the most dramatic form of life in the U. S., and because it is, it is full of actors. In fact, the Southern mystique has assigned roles to whites as well as to Negroes—only for Negroes the outcome of abandoning the role is frequently tragic, for it leads to terror, pitiful suffering and death.

In concentrating on the mystery of race, Mr. Zinn overlooks the more intriguing mystery of culture (it is interesting how often, for an activist, culture means politics). Still the Southern Negroes who have revealed themselves since 1954 are not products of some act of legal magic—they are the products of a culture, a culture of the Southern states, and of a tradition that, ironically, they share with white Southerners. But with Negroes it developed out of slavery and through their experiences since the Civil War and the First Reconstruction. Thus, when Zinn writes, “There are two things that make a person a ‘Negro’: a physical fact and a social artifice,” he misses the wonderful (and fortunate) circumstance that the Negro American is something more. He is the product of the synthesis of his blood mixture, his social experience, and what he has made of his predicament, i. e., his culture. And his quality of wonder and his heroism alike spring no less from his brutalization than from that culture.

Indeed, those Negroes whom Mr. Zinn has joined in action risk their lives out of a sense of life that has been expressed movingly in the blues but seldom on a more intellectually available level—even though, I believe, it is one of the keys to the meaning of American experience. For if Americans are by no means a tragic people, we might very well be a people whose fundamental attitude toward life is best expressed in the blues. Certainly the Negro American's sense of life has forced him to go beyond the boundaries of the tragic attitude in order to survive. That, too, is the result of his past.

One needn't agree with Mr. Zinn that the initiative in the South is now in Negro hands (there is the matter of antagonistic cooperation to be considered) but many clues to action are to be found in their own dramatic, experience. They've known for a long time, for instance, that you can change the white Southerner's environment without changing his beliefs because such changes have marked the fluctuations of Negro freedom. Negroes also know the counterpart of this fact—namely, that you prepare yourself for desegregation and the opportunities to be released thereby before that freedom actually exists. Indeed, it is in the process of preparation for an elected role that the techniques of freedom are discovered and that freedom itself is released.

The Negro Freedom Party of Mississippi, for instance, arose out of a mock political action, and as a mockery of the fraudulent democracy of the Democratic Party of Mississippi. Its mockery took the form of developing techniques for teaching Negroes denied the right to vote how to form a political party and participate in the elective process. In the beginning it possessed all of the “artificiality” of a ritual, but the events, the “drama” acted out in Atlantic City, saw the transformation of their mockery and play-acting into a significant political gesture that plunged them into the realms of conscious history. Here the old slave proverb “Change the joke and slip the yoke” proved a lasting bit of wisdom. For Negroes, the Supreme Court Decision of 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 induced no sudden transformation of character; it provided the stage upon which they could reveal themselves for what their experiences have made them and for what they have made of their experiences. Here the past and the present come together, making possible a collaboration, across the years, between the old Abolitionists and such contemporary activists as Howard Zinn. Nor should we forget that today Negroes are freeing themselves.

If I seem overly critical of The Southern Mystique, it is by no means out of a lack of respect for its author and what he has attempted to do. His is an act of intellectual responsibility in an area that has been cast outside the range of intellectual scrutiny through our timidity of mind in the face of American cultural diversity. Mr. Zinn has not only plunged boldly into the chaos of Southern change but he has entered that maze-like and barely charted area wherein 20 million Negro Americans impinge upon American society, socially, politically, morally, and therefore, culturally. One needn't agree with Zinn, but one cannot afford not to hear him out. And once we read him—and we must read him with the finest of our attention—we can no longer be careless in our thinking about the Negro Revolution, for he makes it clear that it involves us all.