Stephen M. Ward Quote

Jimmy likely wrote all three editorials, and one, titled Who Is for Law and Order? carried his byline. He argued that the spectacle, seen in other recent conflicts and then repeated most dramatically in the Little Rock crisis, of white people defying police as well as state and federal troops raised the question, If white people defy the Constitution, who then are the law-abiding citizens of the U.S. and who is for democracy? Inherent in his answer was a reshaping of the relations between blacks and whites. On one hand this meant the loss of white people’s claim to civic and moral authority. The Little Rock crisis has put an end to the era of the white man’s burden to preserve democracy, he asserted. The white man’s burden now is to prove that he believes in democracy and that he can follow the example of the colored people in upholding law and order. As for black Americans, their newfound racial assertion struck a blow to the edifice upon which their subordination had long rested. For years untold colored people have been forced to maneuver in all directions trying to avoid a head-on collision, Jimmy wrote. They have allowed white people to name them ‘Negroes’ by which the whites mean a thing and not a person. They have stayed out of the public parks, restaurants, hotels and golf courses, walked on the cinder path when meeting whites on the sidewalk, gone to separate schools, worked on the worst jobs under the worst conditions, smiled and acted unhurt when abused in public places. But the recent tide of black protest revealed that African Americans were making an about face. Black people, he wrote, were not only pressing for their rights but were also beginning to denounce the people and practices that had denied them those rights. 80 Jimmy’s analysis of Little Rock differed from other commentaries, which tended to emphasize it as an advance in the struggle for integration, highlight the moral questions it raised, or discuss it as a crisis of authority played out through conflict among the local, state, and national governments. Instead, Jimmy said Little Rock represented a rather sudden transformation now taking place among black people. The importance of Little Rock for him was in revealing how black people were seeing themselves differently and thus making this about face, no longer accepting the southern way of life and even rejecting the standards by which white people had organized society and elevated themselves. This analysis, and all of the editorials on Little Rock more generally, continued the focus and tone of Jimmy’s previous writings in the paper, but they also reflected the greater attention that Correspondence was soon to give to the escalating civil rights movement.