Southern Liberty – The Ugly Side

by poputonian

Earlier I referenced the book Liberty and Freedom in which the author, David Hackett Fischer, differentiates the meanings of the words liberty and freedom. He first describes a simplistic , libertarian definition wherein each word implies “a power of choice, an ability to exercise one’s will.” This definition, if acted out, lends advantage to people of privilege and means. As I indicated before, however, Fischer goes how to describe other ways in which the original meanings of liberty and freedom were distinct from one another:

“Liberty … meant unbounded, unrestricted, and released from restraint … to loosen a set of bonds … the condition of being independent, separate, and distinct … not ruled by another’s will … some degree of separation and independence.”
…
“Freedom has another origin … which meant dear or beloved … someone who was joined to a tribe of free people by ties of kinship and rights of belonging.”
…
“In that respect, the original meanings of freedom and liberty were not merely different but opposed. Liberty meant separation. Freedom implied connection.”

Fischer goes on to lay down what I think is a very sharp demarkation between responsible Americans on the one hand, and unfeeling libertarians and libertines, the President included, on the other:

“It is interesting (and urgently important for us to understand in the modern world) that these ancient traditions of liberty and freedom both entailed obligations and responsibilities. But they did so differently. The gift of [liberty] brought with it an obligation to act in a wise and responsible way–not as a libertine. A person with liberty was responsible for his own acts.”

“A person who was born to freedom in an ancient tribe had a sacred obligation to serve and support the folk, and to keep the customs of a free people, and to respect the rights of others on pain of banishment. In modern America too many people have forgotten this side of our inheritance. They think of liberty as license without responsibility, and freedom as entitlement without obligation. To think this in the modern world is to remember only half of these ancient traditions.”

All of the above was included in Fischer’s introduction. Six-hundred pages and many essays later he penned the following composition. Long time readers of Hullabaloo will recognize its theme as one contained in more than a few of Digby’s previous posts:

Massive Resistance
White Citizens Councils and Visions of Southern Liberty

States Rights and Southern Liberty
Impeach Earl Warren.
—-Southern Bumper Sticker

In the deep south, many whites turned strongly against civil rights. The result was a fierce collision between two social movements. Once again, as so often before in America, each side passionately believed that it was the true defender of liberty and freedom. The conservative reaction began to grow immediately after the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision in 1954. It kept on growing through the late 1950s and accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s. Moderate politicians fell silent. Even Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy kept very quiet and failed to give the country the leadership it needed in a critical moment. Eisenhower reluctantly enforced integration decisions but told his friends that the appointment of Earl Warren as chief justice was the greatest mistake of his career. Kennedy was appalled by the violence of the white southerners against the first Freedom Riders in 1961 and sent six hundred federal marshals to Alabama after southern leaders refused to restore order. But he also tried to shut down the Freedom Marches and sent a peremptory order to his civil rights advisor, Harris Wofford. “Call it off!” President Kennedy demanded. “Stop them! Get your friends off those buses.” Kennedy felt that the Freedom Rides were “embarrassing” before his Summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. In another episode, African diplomats on the road between Washington and New York complained of Jim Crow in restaurants along Maryland highways. President Kennedy replied, “Tell them to fly!”

With those attitudes in the Oval Office during the presidencies of Eisenhower and Kennedy, and with open encouragement for massive resistance from southern governors such as Orval Faubus in Arkansas, Ross Barnett in Mississippi, and George Wallace in Alabama, smoldering pockets of southern racism suddenly burst into flame. White supremacy organizations multiplied below the Mason-Dixon line. The Ku Klux Klan became active again. These groups turned to terror and violence as a tool for crippling the civil rights movement. Arsonists burned black churches and Jewish synagogues. Assassins murdered civil rights leaders. Bombs killed and maimed black children in schools and homes. This violence was done with strong support from some wealthy and powerful people throughout the southern states.

The ideology of the southern conservative movement was cast in libertarian terms: liberty from the hated federal government and especially the Supreme Court; liberty from “outside agitators and “ni**er equality”; liberty for “states’ rights” and “southern rights.” Its rhetoric reached back to the iconography of southern independence in the Civil War. So also did its symbols. A modern revision of the old Confederate battle flag became the leading emblem of white supremacy and massive resistance. It claimed a kinship with Robert E. Lee, but this was not the old four-square “stainless banner” that had been carried with honor by the Army of Northern Virginia in the Civil War. This was something different, a twentieth-century polyester Jim Crow flag with rectangular proportions that were ironically closer to the Stars and Stripes than to the old Confederate battle flags. The southern flag of massive resistance was a new image, invented for a second civil war and quickly adopted by racist movements in many parts of the world.

The iconography of massive resistance was complex. An example appeared in a photograph by Cecil Williams of a run-down rural gas station at Sandy Run in Calhoun County, South Carolina. It served whites only; in some parts of the Deep South even gas pumps were segregated by race. The windows of the battered building bore many images: a devotional portrait of Jesus, a modern Jim Crow flag of massive resistance, angry bumper stickers for white supremacist candidates, and defiant racist slogans.

In the twentieth century, these symbols inspired a new civil war within the South. On one side were very angry southern whites who used extreme violence as an instrument of repression. The beatings and bombings and murders were mostly the work of downtrodden poor whites whose only claim to distinction was that they were not black. They were funded and protected by southern leaders of wealth and power.

On the other side were southern blacks and white liberals who chose the weapons of nonviolence during the 1950s and early 1960s, at a heavy cost but with ultimate success. These contending groups were very different in many ways, but the two warring southern movements for civil rights and white supremacy shared a common heritage. Both were were strongly Christian and evangelical and quoted the same Bible. Both had deep roots in American history and shared a strong sense of rights and entitlements. Both were very southern in speech and manner. But in other ways, the contrast could not have been more complete. Here was a collision of rage against reason, hatred against love, brutality against humanity, force against nonviolence. It was also a conflict of separation against integration, hierarchy against equality, and liberty against freedom.

Katrina’s roots.