The Great Speckled Bird vol. 2, #1 pg. 12

Southern Consciousness

Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all?

You can’t understand it. You would have to be born there.

-William Faulkner, Absalom,  Absalom

On Saturday March 15 the executive committee of the Southern Student Organizing Committee will meet at the Tech YMCA to make decisions about SSOC’s future course. One decision will be whether or not to uphold the decision of SSOC’s staff not to support the “Southwide Mobilization Against the War in Vietnam and for Self-Determination” (Mobe) and its activities planned for April 4-6 in Atlanta. In all likelihood, the decision will be sustained.

That decision of the SSOC staff, made on February 24, has caused a bit of consternation to Mobe’s organizers. For one thing, the Mobe, despite the “South- wide” in its name, is essentially an Atlanta group. Without support from SSOC’s forty-odd organizers spread throughout the South, the Mobe will be hard-pressed to attract many people outside of Atlanta.

And there’s the rub. For the SSOC staff sees little purpose in spending much effort to send people, mostly students, to an action with which it has major disagreements. (SSOC says it does not oppose the march; it just does not support it. This apparently semantical distinction has practical implications: SSOC staffers will probably not encourage participation in the march, but will not go out of their way to discourage participation. Neutrality.)

Those disagreements result from both different organizational and different ideological perspectives. Organizationally, SSOC is southwide, the Mobe is not. The  Mobe, in essence, is a coalition of the Atlanta Workshop in Nonviolence and the Young Socialist Alliance, both small sects which do little organizing. Because a student movement in Atlanta is only beginning to get together, the two sects can still effectively dominate city-wide peace activities. That situation will probably not last for long if the two recent student anti-racism marches are any indication.

Ideologically, the Mobe’s Easter action makes three points: end the war, bring the troops home now, and venerate Martin Luther King, Jr. The Mobe propagates no analysis and is not concerned to point out the connections among various issues. In the absence of an ideology explaining these connections, the Mobe’s call ‘For Self-Determination” seems rather vacuous.

On the other hand, SSOC wishes to utilize Southern Consciousness to build a distinctly Southern movement for radical change. It views the Southern movement as “something farther-reaching, much more exciting and affirmative than opposition to a particular war.” In that context, it calls for the transformation of the “social, political, and economic structures which concentrate the wealth and power of the country in the hands of a relatively few people.”

Southern Consciousness: “We affirm our identity as a people who have a heritage of struggle against the powerful and unresponsive forces which have controlled our region …. Today, with the aid of a few powerful local politicians and businessmen. Northern industry continues to come South to exploit non-union labor and our natural resources …. We are now fighting for control of those institutions and resources which now determine our lives …. We are fighting for self-determination …. We are proud of ourselves, our- land, and our history. We are going to take it back. Liberate the South!” (Quotes above are from “Liberate the South,” an abortive SSOC proposal for a march on April 5.) The rhetoric of Southern Consciousness is also replete with condemnations of Yankee capitalism and Yankee imperialism.

SSOC has seen and still sees its primary emphasis as working with white students—mainly college students but now rapidly reaching into the high schools. Without a large student base it does not see much sense in trying also to organize poor and working class whites. It simply does not yet have the strength to do that. But it does encourage students to support actively-the struggles of poor and working whites. For example,

SSOC was heavily involved in organizing student support for textile workers on strike in North Carolina.

With regard to the Mobe’s Easter march, SSOC saw the critical question as: What is most effective in building the radical movement in the South? SSOC did not think the Mobe’s conglomeration of single issues sufficient. It wanted to project more than antiwar or anti-racist sentiments. It wanted to project a call for self-determination, not only for Vietnamese and for black Americans, but also for white Southerners. It wanted to project a militant Southern Consciousness. And it wanted to identify clearly the enemy—the power elite: Yankee capitalists and the scalawags who collaborate with them.

It was all too much for the Mobe. At the Atlanta- dominated “Southside Planning Conference” on February 15-16,  SSOC’s plans were rejected, though the Mobe did tack a “for Self-Determination” on its title. Various Yankees at the conference were upset by Southern Consciousness. Some pretended to see no difference between SSOC and the Klan. Others, more reasonable, felt unsure about the ambiguity and “reactionary overtones” of Southern Consciousness. And still others did not understand why SSOC puts so much emphasis on white students.

SSOC wanted to have the march on Saturday to attract more out-of-town students. I thought that SSOC might have been more flexible on dates, because it seemed to me that more GI’s could attend on Easter Sunday. GI’s themselves are split on whether or not to participate in public marches before the antiwar movement in the Army has built considerable strength. At any rate, I think SSOC needs to be more sensitive to groups other than students.

Southern Consciousness obviously perplexes some people because of the South’s history of vicious white supremacy.  SSOC sees its task as organizing whites because it very clearly is not going to be able to organize blacks, nor whites & blacks together-not with the growth  of Black Consciousness in the black community. White groups and black groups can coalesce to achieve certain goals; but integration as a strategy is dormant and will probably remain so for quite some time.

More importantly, SSOC projects Southern Consciousness because it is positive, it is something that can be built upon. Nothing substantial can be built upon guilt. White people cannot be organized to make a revolution by constantly telling them that they are guilty of oppressing blacks for 350 years. (An example of grotesque guilt is Lou Decker’s “An Open Letter to My White Brothers and Sisters” in last week’s Bird. A worse example was the burning of a Confederate flag by a University of South Carolina student.) If you are full of guilt and hate for yourself, your land, your people, and your history, you will not be able to fight that which oppresses you. You will be immobilized.

In creating Southern Consciousness, SSOC places a special emphasis upon the battles of Southern working people to be free. It stresses various union struggles and particularly the Populist movement. And it makes explicit that such movements to enjoy success have been and must be anti-racist. SSOC claims the early Tom Watson as its progenitor because , in the course of organizing small farmers to overthrow the Yankee capitalists and scalawags,  he preached the necessity of black-white unity to oppose the common enemy.

Southern Consciousness is based on an impulse that originates in the very depths of the Southern soul, in the intense and profound feelings for the rootedness of a society, no matter how much corrupted and still corrupt, which possesses certain values of deep meaning to human beings. The South possessed a folk culture, wrote David Potter, “long after it succumbed to the onslaught of urban-industrial culture elsewhere. It was an aspect of this culture that the relation between the land and the people remained more direct and more primal in the South than in other parts of the country …. even in the most exploitative economic situations, this culture retained a personalism in the relations of man to man which the industrial culture lacks.”

John Crowe Ransom: “A man can contemplate and explore, respect and love, an object as substantial as a farm or a native province. But he cannot  contemplate  nor explore,  respect nor love,  a mere turnover,  such as an assemblage of ‘natural  resources, ‘ a pile of money,  a volume of produce,  a market, or a credit  system.”

Liberate the South!

 -Steve Wise