Voices in Our Blood (19 page)
The Soul's Cry
Nashville, September 13, 1957
John Kasper was cleaning the bars of the city jail yesterday. It was just the latest of the waiting rooms in which he tarries, this permanent vagrant, between his wanderings across the face of the South between the gutter and the sewer. John Kasper lives nowhere except in the backs of old cars with a pile of leaflets as his pillow.
But, if John Kasper is of the air, the Reverend Fred Stroud is of the earth. Fred Stroudâ“Call me Brother Stroud; that's what my people call me”âis pastor of the Bible Presbyterian Church. He is twenty-four years out of Georgia's Columbia Theological Seminary; he is twenty years out of the Southern Presbyterian Church, which he declared “officially apostate” in 1938, and seceded, carrying some 400 members of his congregation with him.
Fred Stroud is chaplain of the ragged, temporarily routed army which went into the streets here Monday to fight integration of Nashville's schools. He roamed from school to school that day, a short, lantern-jawed man carrying a sign proclaiming: “God is the author of segregation: Sixth Corinthians.”
Fred Stroud is immobilized now. Mayor Ben West has moved to enjoin him from preaching in the streets. He sat yesterday in his study looking out over the shabby streets of “this receding neighborhood” he holds as a fortress of the fundamental creed. He looks at an indifferent city, a city of people who are unlike him because they do not really care. His verse in the Bible is the verse of the truly committed, the verse in Revelations which saysâbe thou hot or cold; if thou art lukewarm I will spew you out of my mouth. It is, I confess, my verse too.
“I wouldn't say John Kasper is a failure,” he told one caller yesterday. “Not everybody who gets in jail is a failure. Just keep looking up, boy. That's all I know to do, just keep looking up. The Lord will take care of us; he always has.”
He hung up, and told his two visitors of “my soul's cry for Nashville.
“John Kasper found me here and I will be here if he has to leave. I have been standing alone here since 1938 against all the modernist preachers.” He riffled the Bible: “There's not one word of compromise in this. Christ set his face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem.”
He waved his hand in the direction of the comfortable churches across the river. “They preach the false philosophy that it is un-Christian to fight. They're teaching the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of all mankind. But, unless a man has been born again, he cannot claim to be a child of God.
“Christ hated mixing. God has always been a segrationist.”
One of his visitors asked Brother Stroud what he had thought of his flock boiling in the streets last Monday.
“It just shows a sincerity,” he said. “They have convictions. They don't want to be pushed around.”
Is John Kasper saved, the visitor wondered?
“Of course, John knows no more about theology than you do. He went to Columbia. But he tells me now that he is a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Fred Stroud is a wandering holy man, an eater of locusts. He preaches in the market and in the streets.
It is odd what forms of witness God chooses for his ministers. While Fred Stroud stalked the streets on Tuesday, Robert Kelly, rector of a Negro Methodist Church, visited the homes of the parents who had enrolled their children and were, most of them, afraid to go back.
“I told them,” Robert Kelly said yesterday, “that, if they were afraid to go and take them in, that I would take them in.” Fred Stroud is not alone among the committed.
But, if this is Armageddon, one of Fred Stroud's visitors asked, are you not lonely and weary among the few who battle for the Lord in this city of neutrals?
The light of the message came to Fred Stroud's eyes under their jutting, tangled brows:
“What do you know about Armageddon?” he said. “Are you saved?”
The visitor said that he was not. “Boy,” said Mr. Stroud, “can you face the lake of fire?”
It was time for the sinner to flee the tender of grace. “Before you go,” said Fred Stroud, “could we stop for a moment for prayer?”
He put one hand on his New York visitor's hand, and another on the shoulder of William Emerson, of
Newsweek,
a Georgian of charming mien and traditional outlook.
“Oh, Lord,” cried Fred Stroud on his knees, “watch over this good boy from Georgia and save this poor boy from New York. He is alone and suffering; come to him, save him, and perhaps he will grow up to preach Thy gospel.”
Then, “Oh, Lord,” he cried, alone with his vision, “You know that I don't hate anyone. I just feel sorry for ole Ben West, I just feel sorry for these niggers.”
In my job we travel, wayfarers as rootless asâif less vandalic thanâJohn Kasper, and our moments of reward are our moments of engagement. They are moments when tragedy and comedy are all mixed up, and God and the devil contend like scorpions in a bottle inside the soul of a man before us. Oh, Lord, Fred Stroud cries, You know I don't hate anybody. Fred Stroud has sacrificed life and comfort, and he does yet not know inside himself whether God or the devil sends him into the streets, and makes him happy when a mob chases a Negro away from a school.
What I have said about him probably makes very little sense. He is my brother. We are bound together, he and Emerson and I, through all eternity by that horrible, desperate prayer.
American Segregation and the World Crisis
The Segregation Decisions,
November 10, 1955
W
ILLIAM
F
AULKNER
For the moment and for the sake of the argument, let's say that, a white Southerner and maybe even any white American, I too curse the day when the first Negro was brought against his will to this country and sold into slavery. Because that doesn't matter now. To live anywhere in the world of
A.D.
1955 and be against equality because of race or color, is like living in Alaska and being against snow.
Inside the last two years I have seen (a little of some, a good deal of others) Japan, the Philippines, Siam, India, Egypt, Italy, West Germany, England and Iceland. Of these countries, the only one I would say definitely will not be communist ten years from now, is England. And if these other countries do not remain free, then England will no longer endure as a free nation. And if all the rest of the world becomes communist, it will be the end of America too as we know it; we will be strangled into extinction by simple economic blockade since there will be no one anywhere anymore to sell our products to; we are already seeing that now in the problem of our cotton.
And the only reason all these countries are not communist already, is America, not just because of our material power, but because of the idea of individual human freedom and liberty and equality on which our nation was founded, and which our founding fathers postulated the name of America to mean. These countries are still free of communism simply because of thatâthat belief in individual liberty and equality and freedomâthat one belief powerful enough to stalemate the idea of communism. We have no other weapon to fight communism with but this, since in diplomacy we are children to communist diplomats, and in production we will always lag behind them since under monolithic government all production can go to the aggrandizement of the State. But then, we don't need anything else, since that ideaâthat simple belief of man that he can be freeâis the strongest force on earth; all we need to do is, use it.
Because it is glib and simple, we like to think of the world situation today as a precarious and explosive balance of two irreconcilable ideologies confronting each other; which precarious balance, once it totters, will drag the whole world into the abyss along with it. That's not so. Only one of the forces is an ideology, an idea. Because the second force is the simple fact of Man: the simple belief of individual man that he can and should and will be free. And if we who so far are still free, want to continue to be free, all of us who are still free had better confederate, and confederate fast, with all others who still have a choice to be freeâconfederate not as black people nor white people nor pink nor blue nor green people, but as people who still are free with all other people who still are free; confederate together and stick together too, if we want a world or even a part of a world in which individual man can be free, to continue to endure.
And we had better take in with us as many as we can get of the nonwhite peoples of the earth who are not completely free yet but who want to be and intend to be, before that other force which is opposed to individual freedom, befools and gets them. Time was when the nonwhite was content toâanyway, didâaccept his instinct for freedom as an unrealizable dream. But not any more; the white man himself taught him different with that phase of hisâthe white man'sâown culture which took the form of colonial expansion and exploitation based and morally condoned on the premise of inequality not because of individual incompetence, but of mass race or color. As a result of which, in only ten years, we have watched the nonwhite peoples expel, by bloody violence when necessary, the white man from all of the middle east and Asia which he once dominated. And into that vacuum has already begun to move that other and inimical power which people who believe in freedom are at war withâthat power which says to the nonwhite man: “We don't offer you freedom because there is no such thing as freedom; your white overlords whom you just threw out have already proved that to you. But we offer you equality: at least equality in slavedom; if you are to be slaves, at least you can be slaves to your own color and race and religion.”
We, the western white man who does believe that there exists an individual freedom above and beyond this mere equality of slavedom, must teach the nonwhite peoples this while there is yet a little time left. We, America, who are the strongest force opposing communism and monolithicism, must teach all other peoples, white and nonwhite, slave or (for a little while yet) still free. We, America, have the best chance to do this because we can do it here, at home, without needing to send costly freedom expeditions into alien and inimical places already convinced that there is no such thing as freedom and liberty and equality and peace for all people, or we would practice it at home.
The best chance and the easiest job, because our nonwhite minority is already on our side; we don't need to sell them on America and freedom because they are already sold; even when ignorant from inferior or no education, even despite the record and history of inequality, they still believe in our concepts of freedom and democracy.
That is what America has done for them in only three hundred years. Not
to
them:
for
them, because to our shame we have made little effort so far to teach them to be Americans, let alone to use their capacities to make of ourselves a stronger and more unified America:âthe people who only three hundred years ago were eating rotten elephant and hippo meat in African rain-forests, who lived beside one of the biggest bodies of inland water on earth and never thought of a sail, who yearly had to move by whole villages and tribes from famine and pestilence and human enemies without once thinking of a wheel, yet in only three hundred years in America produced Ralph Bunche and George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington, who have yet to produce a Fuchs or Rosenberg or Gold or Greenglass or Burgess or McLean or Hiss, and for every prominent communist or fellow-traveler like Robeson, there are a thousand white ones.
I am not convinced that the Negro wants integration in the sense that some of us claim to fear he does. I believe he is American enough to repudiate and deny by simple American instinct any stricture or regulation forbidding us to do something which in our opinion would be harmless if we did it, and which we probably would not want to do anyway. I think that what he wants is equality, and I believe that he too knows there is no such thing as equality
per se,
but only equality
to:
equal right and opportunity to make the best one can of one's life within one's capacity and capability, without fear of injustice or oppression or threat of violence. If we had given him this equal right to opportunity ninety or fifty or even ten years ago, there would have been no Supreme Court decision about how we run our schools.
It is our white man's shame that in our present southern economy, the Negro must not have economic equality; our double shame that we fear that giving him more social equality will jeopardize his present economic status; our triple shame that even then, to justify ourselves, we must becloud the issue with the purity of white blood; what a commentary that the one remaining place on earth where the white man can flee and have his blood protected and defended by law, is AfricaâAfrica: the source and origin of the people whose presence in America will have driven the white man to flee from defilement.
Soon now all of usânot just Southerners nor even just Americans, but all people who are still free and want to remain soâare going to have to make a choice. We will have to choose not between color nor race nor religion nor between East and West either, but simply between being slaves and being free. And we will have to choose completely and for good; the time is already past now when we can choose a little of each, a little of both. We can choose a state of slavedom, and if we are powerful enough to be among the top two or three or ten, we can have a certain amount of licenseâuntil someone more powerful rises and has us machine-gunned against a cellar wall. But we cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it; our freedom must be buttressed by a homogeny equally and unchallengeably free, no matter what color they are, so that all the other inimical forces everywhereâsystems political or religious or racial or nationalâwill not just respect us because we practice freedom, they will fear us because we do.
*Â *Â *
[
Editor's noteâ
On December 1, Mr. Faulkner extended views expressed in his Memphis paper with the following statement]:
The question is no longer of white against black. It is no longer whether or not white blood shall remain pure, it is whether or not white people shall remain free.
We accept insult and contumely and the risk of violence because we will not sit quietly by and see our native land, the South, not just Mississippi but all the South, wreck and ruin itself twice in less than a hundred years, over the Negro question.
We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say, “Why didn't someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?”