WHITE WRITERS, BLACK RIGHTS: FRAMING THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN SOUTHERN LITERATURE by KAMILLE BOSTICK (Under the Direction of Hugh Ruppersburg) ABSTRACT In writing about the South, authors created a variety of works that examined or portrayed the social, historic, and cultural aspects of the region. Although many dealt pointedly with race relations, it is rarely a point of study to see how those writers responded in their texts to the rising tension and inevitable confrontations between blacks and whites that took place during the Civil Rights Movement. With so much change happening in their own “backyards,” Southern writers would have had interesting insight into the reasons and ramifications of the movement’s success. Considering the works of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, in particular, this thesis looks at how two of the South’s most celebrated and culturally astute writers framed the quest for black rights in the mid-twentieth century. INDEX WORDS: William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Civil Rights Movement, Intruder in the Dust, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” Southern literature, Black rights WHITE WRITERS, BLACK RIGHTS: FRAMING THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN SOUTHERN LITERATURE by KAMILLE BOSTICK B.A., University of South Carolina, 2003 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS ATHENS, GEORGIA 2008 © 2008 Kamille Bostick All Rights Reserved WHITE WRITERS, BLACK RIGHTS: FRAMING THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN SOUTHERN LITERATURE by KAMILLE BOSTICK Major Professor: Hugh Ruppersburg Committee: Barbara McCaskill R. Baxter Miller Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2008 DEDICATION For the activists, thinkers, and ordinary citizens who made the sacrifices that made the Movement which made all of this possible for me. This thesis bears you in mind. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Special appreciation is extended to Hugh Ruppersburg who diligently and patiently read the early drafts of this thesis. Thanks for asking the necessary questions to make it complete while offering advice to make it clear. Thanks to Barbara McCaskill, as well, who urged me to research a topic that combined all of my interests. I am grateful for the opportunity given to me this year to submerge myself in re-discovering the Civil Rights Movement. My gratitude also extends to R. Baxter Miller for his encouragement to tie up the loose ends and explicitly say what was already in my head. I am indebted to each of these scholars and advisors. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................................v PREFACE........................................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 Coins and Collective Memory .......................................................................................5 2 Penny for a Nickel: White Privilege in the Face of Black Rights ..............................40 CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................................73 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................................76 vi 1 PREFACE Standing at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered one of the most powerful speeches of the American Civil Rights Movement and of American history. Addressing the crowd of 250,000 social activists and ordinary citizens gathered in the capitol for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Dr. King began his famous “I Have A Dream” speech with a message rooted in metaphors combining economics with equality, debt with the duty to mobilize, and payment with progress. Dr. King summed up the march’s and movement’s purposes early in his speech, saying: In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, Black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. […] We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. (535-536) History has shown that Dr. King’s words that day awoke a nation and eloquently managed to delineate and contextualize a movement already in the making. Speaking of a debt that was at once historical and figurative, Dr. King’s words drew upon the idea that black Americans were owed something by the nation at large because of their heritage of slavery and oppression. His 2 speech doesn’t, however, say those debts are strictly monetary. Rather King suggests that the “integrated check is fiducial both morally and financially,” according to rhetorician Mark Vail, whose essay “The ‘Integrative’ Rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have A Dream’ Speech” examines the famed oration (68). Cashable at the figurative “bank of justice” for amounts written on the accounts of the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, there is no legal tender that can be drawn out for payment. However, by bringing in the idea that America has a debt of freedom and security as well as a promise of equality to its black citizens, there is also the implication of the financial debts owed as well. At the end of the Civil War, the plan was for reparations—a literal forty acres and a mule. That literal debt was never paid to every black American, and up until Dr. King spoke, neither had the figurative promises of the black man’s (and woman’s) equality been delivered. Following his use of the promissory note/check metaphor, Dr. King adds that activists for social change were not just in Washington, D.C., but in the Mississippi Delta, the midlands of South Carolina, the red hills of Georgia, and every other “village and hamlet” in the South. Their goal: to “remind America of the fierce urgency of now” (536). To King, 1963 was the moment the debts needed to be settled. For those agitating and advocating for social change, 1963 was the time to cash in on the centuries’ worth of promises made and owed regarding social rights. In his speech, King tied the movement to balances due and, as Vail suggests, manages to inform everyone that “the divinely ordained issue of social justice comes to represent economic justice” as well (64). Curiously, as stirring as Dr. King’s speech was, it was not the first text (nor the last) to put the Civil Rights Movement and the move for social justice in the framework of a debt unsettled. Lively as his metaphors were, Dr. King followed others who suggested that the 3 movement was a means to procure proper payment; it was an activism to settle accounts and a call that would use the great American metaphor of capitalism and finance to convey that message. In their most overt dealings with the race issue in their texts, Southern writers explored these connections. In the novel Intruder in the Dust (1948), author William Faulkner constructs a tale about a young white man and the lessons of race he’s taught by his attempt to “pay” an older black man for his hospitality. On the surface, the story appears to be about black-white power relations and one young man’s coming of age, but to look at the metaphor extended in the story by Faulkner’s symbolism and use of coinage is to see indebtedness directly linked to the call for equal rights and activism for black Southerners. Similarly, in her more explicit piece about the “mess” the Civil Rights Movement was causing in the South, Flannery O’Connor employs coinage and debt imagery to comment on the advances of black rights. In her short story “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1961), O’Connor’s white protagonist is struck down by a black woman whose son she offered a penny and whom she has just shared an integrated bus with. The violent assault on the white character in the face of money, the power and the past it symbolized, creates a daring exploration of white guilt/privilege and juxtaposes debt, payment and equality in a context of the movement itself. There is plenty that can be said, and has been said, about how white writers construct race, race relations, and black-white interactions particularly on Southern soil. There has been less said on how those white writers take on the black rights movement in particular. As scholars consider how the stories of the Civil Rights Movement have been constructed and disseminated, often with the result that they have been oversimplified or removed from context, it is valuable to reconsider how the texts that would have introduced, explored and grappled with the movement attempted to frame it for greater debate. Particularly interesting is how the writers of the