20/20 Moral Hindsight

         

There is much we can learn from Professor Fite’s work, without joining in his egregious moralizing, just as we can revere “the Georgia Giant” without adopting his generation’s view of racial issues. This is prudence – and morality too. For, Southerners who know their Bible know that we are not required -nor even permitted – to judge our fathers. We are required to honor them.

A Review of: Richard B. Russell, Jr. Senator from Georgia (UNC Press, 1991) by Gilbert C. Fite

“We can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Booker T. Washington, speech to the Atlanta Exposition, 1885

Speaking of the current trend toward all-black dormitories, fraternities, and graduation exercises, Coretta Scott King recently noted that “this new separatism is a bad idea.” The widow of slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King castigated today’s politically correct segregation in the groves of academe as “wrong when it was forced by white people and, I believe, it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.” While most white Southerners today would undoubtedly agree with Mrs. King that black and white Americans “must find a way to live together,” most also, I believe, understand and respect the wishes of their black neighbors for churches, Masonic lodges and other civic, cultural, and fraternal institutions they can call their own. Nor do we automatically attribute black proclivity to social separation to any deep-seated hatred towards or prejudice against whites-despite the well-publicized rantings of some black supremacist politicians and scholars. Even such prominent critics of today’s apartheid as Mrs. King never go so far as to accuse modem black segregationists of racism. Their ideology is criticized but their motives are never questioned.

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