A Southerner's Plea

THE SOUTHERN HERITAGE (273 pp.)--James McBride Dabbs--Knopf ($4).

No one is apt to talk more sense to the South on the subject of race relations than the South's own moderates. One of them, South Carolina's James McBride Dabbs, a 62-year-old scholar, essayist and Presbyterian elder, makes a forthright appeal to reason in this first book. Amid echoes of the ominous thunderclap of the Faubus election victory in Arkansas, Author Dabbs speaks in a deceptively small voice, but arraigns himself no less harshly than his neighbors.

Every Southerner, he feels, must share the guilt of collective injustice done the Negro from the days of slavery through the era of segregation. He admits that he himself bore this burden of guilt lightly till his wife's untimely death in 1933, an event that seemed so personally unfair that it shocked him into a generalized awareness of injustices. It did not make him a blind believer in reform. He quotes with tacit approval an uncle who said: "Ideals are a sin. We should love God."

Sense of Place. In probing the South's ideals or the lack of them, Author Dabbs finds much to praise and does so with a refreshing absence of Southern rhetoric. He loves the South's piety toward the land ("Foot by foot, we have fought across it"), its sense of the past, its respect for manners, its familistic loyalties. He shares the Southern gentleman's strong sense of place. Through his own plantation windows at Mayesville, S.C., Author Dabbs looks "down the avenue along which I hurried as a boy and down which I have seen my children and grandchildren walking with their dogs running beside them." Dabbs admits to being honestly "confused" as to whether the South's "way of life" depends on segregation. He doubts it. What he is clear about is that segregation is morally wrong and simply does not make good sense in the modern South and the modern world.

One by one, Author Dabbs riddles the stock arguments of the segregationists. Is it "instinctive" for whites and Negroes to keep apart? Then why, asks Dabbs, are "Jim Crow" laws necessary at all? Are Negroes sexually laxer than whites? Asks Dabbs: "What classes of Negroes, what classes of whites? . . . There are grounds for believing that the Negroes of the upper middle class are even more middle-class than the whites, more insistent upon American standards." Is the Negro "inferior" by nature? Argues Dabbs: "The present scientific view is that no significant differences have been established . . . The inferior position of the Negro in the South is due either to God or to us; and as it's doubtful democratic and Christian doctrine for us to admit the responsibility, we are happy to pass it on to God."

The Wall Crumbles. In shoring up segregation, Author Dabbs suggests, the South is committing itself to another lost cause--that "of keeping a changeless social order in a changing world." Even while the South frets, fumes and fights its delaying actions, the wall of segregation is crumbling, Author Dabbs believes, under the assault of four powerful forces: 1) the law, 2) industrialization (the machine "knows nothing about the Negro's place"), 3) the democratic spirit, 4) the Christian tradition.

The facts of 20th century life will not permit the South the luxury of simulating secession. The international role of the U.S. as the champion of free peoples in an increasingly color-conscious world makes a "colonial" pattern of race relations at home too embarrassing. Author Dabbs's plea is for the South to wake from its 90-year dream of nullifying the logical consequences of emancipation. It is a gracious, dignified and humanitarian appeal compared to the harsh voice of events that may soon follow it.

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