The Man Next to You

Robert Penn Warren’s Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (Random House, $1.95), which was inspired—if that is the word—by the Supreme Court’s decision in the segregation cases, is not a book of solutions. It endorses no plan either for integrating Negro and white in the schools or for slowing integration or evading it. Mr. Warren is a novelist, a believer in the concrete situation honestly set down. Life, to him, is not a matter for abstraction; it is something to be felt, seen, and listened to. What we get in this book is faces, grimaces, attitudinizing and honest questioning. Mr. Warren does not attempt to shift or to evaluate or to apply Gallup-poll percentaging to what he heard: all he does is to serve as an ear, a recording medium for the shagginess of conversation that is plainly nothing more than musing out loud.

The bulk of Mr. Warren’s book is simply the South talking. “What’s coming?” Mr. Warren kept asking people in Memphis and in New Orleans, in plantation offices in the Delta country and in Negro shacks in the clay hills. The answers varied from downrightness on both sides of the integration question to just plain evasion. “What’s coming?” “The Negro has to be improved before integration….” “The solution will be by absorption, the Negro will disappear…” “Lots of dead niggers round here, that’s what’s coming.” “Do you know how many millions a year the Negroes spend up and down this street? You get the logic of that, don’t you?” “A man can hate an idea, but know it’s right.” “If there could be just one gesture of gracious-ness from the white man….” “I can’t feel the same way about a Negro as a white person. It’s born in me. But I pray I’ll change.” “There’s only one question to ask, and that is what would Christ do.” “It’s human to be split-up.”

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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Robert Penn Warren’s Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (Random House, $1.95), which was inspired—if that is the word—by the Supreme Court’s decision in the segregation cases, is not a book of solutions. It endorses no plan either for integrating Negro and white in the schools or for slowing integration or evading it. Mr. Warren is a novelist, a believer in the concrete situation honestly set down. Life, to him, is not a matter for abstraction; it is something to be felt, seen, and listened to. What we get in this book is faces, grimaces, attitudinizing and honest questioning. Mr. Warren does not attempt to shift or to evaluate or to apply Gallup-poll percentaging to what he heard: all he does is to serve as an ear, a recording medium for the shagginess of conversation that is plainly nothing more than musing out loud.

The bulk of Mr. Warren’s book is simply the South talking. “What’s coming?” Mr. Warren kept asking people in Memphis and in New Orleans, in plantation offices in the Delta country and in Negro shacks in the clay hills. The answers varied from downrightness on both sides of the integration question to just plain evasion. “What’s coming?” “The Negro has to be improved before integration….” “The solution will be by absorption, the Negro will disappear…” “Lots of dead niggers round here, that’s what’s coming.” “Do you know how many millions a year the Negroes spend up and down this street? You get the logic of that, don’t you?” “A man can hate an idea, but know it’s right.” “If there could be just one gesture of gracious-ness from the white man….” “I can’t feel the same way about a Negro as a white person. It’s born in me. But I pray I’ll change.” “There’s only one question to ask, and that is what would Christ do.” “It’s human to be split-up.”