The South is still the most terrible place in America. Because it is, it is filled with heroes. (p. 5)
Despite all the talk of resistance, the Southern white does not really want to sacrifice very much to keep his segregated society. The politician will not sacrifice political power, nor the businessman money, nor the professional man social approval. The ordinary citizen of the South does not want to go to jail to defend segregation. (p. 23)
When the Wright Brothers flew an airplane for just 59 seconds, they knew the problem of flight was solved. Only in that sense can we be optimistic about the race question in America. It was clear after that flight that intense effort would be required to enable man to fly. The same is true for us in this instance. Time alone is a neutral container. It needs to be filled with action. (p. 144)
The Negro has always been a hitchhiker in American history.... The kindnesses have come more often from Northern drivers than Southern ones. But this does not alter the essence of the Negro's status as a subordinate being whose progress, up to now, has depended on the pleasure of others. The revolution in the South today is precisely an attempt to change this status, and it is not so much an assault on the South as it is on the nation. (p. 228)
Compromise and vacillation on the race question are intrinsic parts of our national political heritage. Vociferous as it may be, the South is still much less than a majority of the country and is economically backward enough to be susceptible to pressure. The failure of national political action against racism, therefore, is attributable to national weakness rather than to Dixie strength. The power of the South is sufficient to deter a hesitant executive, but not a determined one. We will only be able to prove this, it seems, when we get one. (p. 231)
The South is everything its revilers have charged, and more than its defenders have claimed. It is racist, violent, hypocritically pious, xenophobic, false in its elevation of women, nationalistic, conservative, and it harbors extreme poverty in the midst of ostentatious wealth. The only point I have to add is that the United States, as a civilization, embodies all of those same qualities. That the South possesses them with more intensity simply makes it easier for the nation to pass off its characteristics to the South, leaving itself innocent and righteous. (p. 262)
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The middle two essays describe Zinn and his students at Spellman College attempting to do more than sway a rampart; instead, they attempt to topple the castle. In “The ‘Mysterious’ Negro,” Zinn describes his interactions with students and faculty at Spellman in their attempts to get the federal government to enforce the Fourteenth amendment; in “Albany, Georgia: Ghost in the Cage,” Zinn examines a specific city as a representative example of “the Black Belt” and a place where “the mystique of the South is overwhelming, stifling, depressing.” Here Zinn tells the story of his and other’s attempts to have the federal government enforce the International Commerce Commission’s 1961 ruling that all train and bus facilities would be integrated. Such attempts were often met with violence and examples of the heroism that Zinn argues only a place like the South could create.
Finally, in “The South as a Mirror,” Zinn argues that all of the scorn heaped upon the South by supposedly enlightened northerners is an attempt to isolate what are actually American practices and values. “Far from being utterly different,” Zinn states, the South is really the essence of the nation” (emphasis in original). The aspects of Southern life most readily pointed out by others in a mood of self-righteousness—racism, violence, evangelicalism, xenophobia—are, according to Zinn, characteristics of American life that have been concentrated bellow the Mason-Dixon line. The South is “not a mutation born by some accident into the normal, lively, American family; it has simply taken the national genes and done the most with them.” And this is why the South is viewed as an alien place to those in the North: “Because the South embarrasses us, we try to disown it, apologize for it, hold it at a distance, pretend that it is an abnormal growth of the human body.” Such a train of thought recalls Flannery O’Connor’s line that “anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” Both she and Zinn viewed the South as peculiar yet filled with universally-found figures and truths.
Don’t let the title fool you: the mystique Zinn examines is a miasma that he argues hangs over the South, the region he calls “the most terrible place in America.” Zinn’s book is interesting both as firsthand reporting of lunch-counter sit ins and as a look at what a Zinn thought of the issues facing the South in the early 1960s. Like him or not, agree with his psychological explanation about the South as red-headed stepchild or not, a reader has to respect Zinn for never condescending to his reader and expressing himself in straightforward, workmanlike prose. Would that all academics wrote as clearly as he does and with as much conviction, regardless of their politics. Zinn never resorts to hand wringing, mealy-mouthed self-congratulation, or blanket accusations.
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