This should be said, too, about Woodward’s “reality of evil.” Surely there have been evils in the South’s policies of racial separation. Poor as the South was, in the sixty years after Reconstruction that preceded World War II, much more could have been done, and should have been done, to encourage the Negro people closer to a cultural and economic equality. I have said it countless times, and say it willingly here: If the South had devoted one tenth of the effort toward keeping schools equal that it devoted to keeping them separate, _Brown_ v. _Board of Education_ would not have created so dramatic a crisis. Yes, there have been evils, and very real and poignant and tragic evils, in the South’s treatment of its Negro people.
But I would raise the question if the “evils” have been all on the side of the white South. _All_ of them? The reality that the South has had to cope with most constantly, beyond the realities of defeat and poverty, is the reality of the Southern Negro. Other races of men, caught at the bottom of the ladder, have clambered up. The identical decades that saw Negroes set free in the South saw the Irish set down in New England. “No Irish need apply.” The signs hung outside New England mills as uncompromisingly as the “white only” signs outside an Alabama men’s room. Who would have imagined in, say, 1880, that a Boston Irish Catholic would be President? But the Irish fought their own way up, on merit and ambition and hard work. They _made_ a place at the table. They won acceptance, and they paid their own way.
No such reality has been visible in the South. Instead of ambition (I speak in general terms), we have witnessed indolence; instead of skill, ineptitude; instead of talent, an inability to learn. It is all very well for social theorists to say of Southern Negroes that they are _capable_ of this, and their _potential_ is for that, and if it were not for segregation and second-class citizenship and denial of opportunity, they would have achieved thus and so; but the Southerner, to paraphrase Burke, is not so much interested in determining a point of metaphysics--he is interested in maintaining tranquility. The Southerner may dwell more than others upon the past and brood more intently on the distant future, but in his daily life he has to be concerned with the here and now--in brief, he has to be concerned with reality.