—An Afterword
The average critic of the South simply does not believe you when you say that the South understands itself to be fighting a battle for states’ rights. There are lots of reasons why it is so widely assumed that the Southern position is hypocritical. The reason most often cited is the notorious Southern appetite for federal patronage, not to say federal condescension, when what comes out of Washington is not rules having to do with segregation, but bills providing for free schools, free dams, free army posts, free pork barrel bills, free depressed areas, and free advice, from the government printers, on everything from beehives to juvenile delinquency. For such an army of professional mendicants all of a sudden to plead their independence is—the critic continues—unpersuasive. What is behind it all, they say, is a genuine hatred and fear of the Negro race, by the white man.
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