A Place in the Sun

TITLE:  A Place in the Sun

AUTHORS: Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely

SOURCE: Neither Black Nor White, published by Rinehart in 1957

PERMISSION TO USE granted.

In 1956, Wilma Dykeman and her husband James Stokely investigated the Southern people’s varied responses to the Supreme Court’s 1955 order to desegregate public schools. They drove from Charleston to Houston, Oklahoma City to Washington, D.C., and interviewed scores of Blacks and Whites from all walks of life. What they found was that “the South” is many Souths, and that civil rights is not a Southern problem – civil rights is a national and global problem.

Neither Black Nor White was chosen by Eric Sevareid, Lewis Gannett, and William L. Shirer for the 1958 Sidney Hillman Award for the year’s best book in the field of race relations, civil rights, or world peace. Historian Bruce Catton called it “the best study of the present-day South that I have yet read.”

At the end of Neither Black Nor White, Dykeman and Stokely stepped back from specific themes such as politics, economy, and religion to take a wider perspective on the issues at hand. Their words, reprinted below, are extraordinary for their treatment of the year 1619 as a watershed three times over, for their naming “the colored billions” of the world and “the colored peoples in this land,” for their lament over the wasting of “such a variety of living things,” and for their recognition of immigration as a lightning rod for white supremacists throughout the United States.

A Place in the Sun:

Seeking their own particular place in the sun, the Vikings and Phoenicians traveled the uncharted waters of the ancient world; nomads trekked across deserts and founded cities and left new deserts in their wake; Romans built an empire and Englishmen established colonies around the world; and settlers immigrated to a new land called America. With these first arrivals came the seeds of the nation’s highest achievements and deepest dilemmas. For example, the single year of 1619 brought the infant colony at Jamestown three such pregnant innovations: the arrival of English girls who would become wives of the settlers, introduction of the first Negroes into Virginia, and a meeting of the House of Burgesses which was the first representative legislative assembly in the New World.

Seeking their place in the sun, the people of the world, the colored billions who have looked in the ugly face of famine too often, and walked with poverty and devastation and ignorance too long, now stir. Their stirring is a slight shiver, a distant rumble, an infant challenge. Here, in the richest, freest land on earth, it echoes faintly – but it will not be dismissed. And the colored peoples in this land seek to walk the last and hardest mile toward full realization of their democracy.

A young Negro reporter from Minnesota, born and reared in the South, returns from travels across America and to some of the teeming countries of the Far East, and talks with a group of young Negroes on their college campus in the South. You watch the attentive faces of these boys and girls and see the growing determination in their faces as Carl Rowan links their own desire for equality of justice and opportunity to the growing hunger in all parts of the world for dignity.

“Man everywhere is at war with what he’s always been at war with: ignorance. Also arrogance and laziness and sheer stupidity. But the thing that’s stirring the hearts of people in Mandalay is essentially the same thing that’s stirring the hearts of people in Montgomery, Alabama.”

That gallant South, which has placed such a glory in pride, should be the most able to appreciate this craving on the part of the humiliated for a measure of pride. That instinctive South, which has proved there are battles men will fight regardless of the odds or cost, should understand most clearly this dedicated instinct on the part of the deprived for a better life. That South, which has suffered war on its own fields and years of misunderstanding and generations of want, should be most committed to the fulfillment of these needs everywhere. And that fertile South, which has nourished and seen wasted such a variety of living things, should most passionately recognize the reverence for life which is a universal supplication. As there are several Souths, their legacy to the present includes several traditions. If, in this crucial time of choice, the majority of the region will turn to its oldest, its finest its most fundamental tradition – which, indeed, it helped write into the very bulwark of the nation: the tradition of human worth and every individual’s rights – then the South may become the real frontier for a renewed vision of democracy.

From the backward pull may come the forward thrust that will help determine a world policy in the age of the atom….That forward thrust, that “triumph of self-government,” will not, cannot come, without a great deal of work and a rare use of intelligence. The cunning of the little foxes must be undercut by shrewd implementation of ideals. The loudness of negativism and prejudice must be canceled out by the clarity of constructive action. In a moment when logic seems to be playing hide-and-seek, emotions seem also to have run amuck and grown more calloused. It has been well said that what the situation demands is a combination of soft hearts and hard heads. Affirmation is necessary, particularly among those who live in the South and must daily confront the small problems and help implement the large promises of the place and people around them. But that affirmation must be grounded in reality, in thorough knowledge of the strength of its antagonists, in basic appraisal of what is present and what is possible.

We in the South do not need any more Pilates to wash their hands of our stubbornness and travail and turn to less thorny problems, as occurred in 1876 at the end of Reconstruction; instead, black and white, we need pilots, many of them, from within and without the South, who will extend a grip of friendship and reason in a time of doubt and dismay.

Journeying up and down and through these thirteen states, you see the steel cobweb of electric power lines crisscrossing the face of the South, releasing it from bondage as surely as the Fourteenth Amendment did in the past. You observe the outstretched antennae of the television aerials on plantation houses and ranch-style subdivisions and tar-papered shacks, binding the South to the rest of the union more surely than the post-bellum oath of allegiance ever did. The South and the nation are one today, as they have always been. When, at the turn of the century, this nation took up “the white man’s burden,” it laid down some of its right to indignation at the South for “the Negro problem.” Both believed in the white man’s supremacy. Where abolition had been the source of the Southern Bourbon’s aversion, immigration became the fountainhead of the Boston Brahmin’s aversion. That, today, is why both the nation and the South have the right, indeed the responsibility, to point to flaws in each other, and yet each must work to eliminate its own wrongs, beginning where it is, moving along – and along – and along.