"Racial Clearing: Not Just a ‘Southern Strategy'"
James E. Waller, Whitworth College

One of the great debates within the history of psychology revolves around the relative role of the person or the situation in explaining human behavior.  Advocates for the person viewpoint argue that it is the traits and internal attributes of an individual person that best explain the complexities of human behavior.  Situational advocates, conversely, maintain that it is the situation that best explains human behavior; we become that to which we are exposed and that to which we are exposed is what animates how we think, feel, and behave.  Students of the philosophy of history will recognize this similar theme in the Great Individual v. Zeitgeist ("the spirit of the time") debate that has shaped much of our discussions surrounding the making of history.

Contemporary historians view the person-situation debate as an outdated, false dichotomy that ignores the rich interplay between the two influences.  Most now advocate an interactionist position in explaining human behavior.  That is, the varieties of human behavior are explained best by reference to a complex interaction between person and situation in which each shapes, and is shaped by, the other. 
This question of person and situation underlies Michael F. Flynn's "Southern Strategy."  The cast of characters, while familiar, develops some intriguing alternate personas that have been shaped by alternate, albeit fictitious and largely unexplained, situations.  In a telling shift of reformers, for instance, Martin Luther King, Jr. appears as John Calvin King, "generalissimo" of the SCLC – not the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (which King actually founded in 1957), but the Southern Colored Liberation Corps in Flynn's retelling – who trusts his right to bear arms more than the power of turning the other cheek.  Adolf Hitler remains a mediocre Austrian painter and a spellbinding speaker, but gets a new life as a crusader against smoking, vivisection, and animal abuse. 

Other characters in the story retain more of their real-life persona but find themselves products, and producers, of situations that allow for alternate behavioral expressions of their persona.  George Wallace, for instance, appears in his early unrepentant "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" form.  Flynn, however, goes beyond Wallace's  "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door" at the University of Alabama (though the story concludes with Wallace making a more fatalistic stand at a schoolhouse door) to a depiction of him as the leader of the nightriders responsible for the burnings, beatings, and lynchings that constitute the "racial clearing" of blacks in the American south.  Tricky Dick, a none-too-thinly-veiled persona of Richard Nixon, is recast by Flynn as a guerrilla leader (terrorist or loyalist?), "pleased with his own cleverness," "convoluted as a snake," a "master of prevarication," and "a master manipulator" (OK, so maybe this particular persona is not so much recast as it is rehashed).  In a shift from Nixon's real-life Southern strategy to curry sympathy for the Republican party by making "law and order" and "states' rights" appeals to white southerners, Tricky Dick works out his own behind-the-scenes, very extra-legal, solution to the "Situation." 

Central to the story, however, is the alternate persona of Adlai Stevenson (in one of the three roles he plays in Dr. Strangelove, Peter Sellers is said to have modeled his portrayal of President Merkin Muffley on Stevenson).  In real-life, born in Los Angeles in 1900 to a political family, Stevenson had a self-described  "bad case of heredity politics."  His grandfather had been Vice President of the United States under Grover Cleveland and his father, though never holding an elected office, was Secretary of State of Illinois and was considered a strong candidate for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination in 1928.  The eminently quotable Stevenson, credited with saying "In America, anyone can become president…that's one of the risks you take," never had to pay the cost of that risk.  He was twice an unsuccessful candidate for President of the United States – once in 1952 and then again in 1956.   (I remember a colleague who humorously refused to stand for election to a faculty committee because he had lost two such elections the previous term and had no desire to become our "institutional Adlai Stevenson").  Flynn's depiction of Senator Stevenson, thrown into a diplomatic quagmire of trying to negotiate a compromise between the Northern and Southern factions of the Democratic Party that might lead to a solution for the "Situation," portrays a figure less self-assured, more brooding, and more gullible than most accounts of the real-life Stevenson. 

For me, however, far more intriguing than the alternate personas is the alternate history laid out in "Southern Strategy."  Flynn reimagines a 1950s Selma, Alabama that has been partitioned into French and German zones because the US failed to enter the Great War.  We see a South so plagued by "racial clearings" of blacks that, in an ironic twist of real history, the Germans have stepped in to lead occupying League of Nations forces in preventing further death and rooting out racial oppression.  Flynn's story marries the two areas of my own fields of academic work – race relations and genocide studies – and confronts us with an alternate history that has too many parallels, in both American and international history, to be comfortably dismissed as fiction.

Is it far-fetched to believe that something like "racial clearings" of blacks in the American South in the 1950s could have happened?  Absolutely not.  As a matter of fact, if we could go back in time, one could easily argue that it would have been far-fetched to believe that such a thing was not likely to happen.  The "honor of the South," which figures prominently in Flynn's story, was under attack as Northern liberals criticized its way of life and its treatment of blacks.  The nascent civil rights movement had little to model its liberation efforts on and suffered from a grievous apathy – from both whites who benefited from the status quo and blacks who could envision nothing different – that made it difficult to rouse a compelling interest in justice issues.  White backlash in the South, both to external criticism as well as sporadic internal unrest, began to re-entrench decades of racial hostility (it was not until my high school years that I can recall a teacher calling the Civil War anything other than the War of Northern Aggression).  For some racist white southerners in the 1950s, the only hesitancy about the thought of "racial clearings" of blacks would have been the fact that it would come on the heels of a similar event, the Holocaust, against which the world had rallied in unanimous condemnation.

Moreover, it's not as if American history was without precedent for "racial clearings."  Beginning in 1830, the US undertook a policy of "removing" all indigenous people from the area east of the Mississippi River.  In the series of internments and forced marches that followed, entire peoples were decimated.  By 1840, with the exception of a handful of tiny Iroquois reservations in upstate New York and the remaining Seminoles in the Florida Everglades, the eastern third of what would become the continental United States had been cleared of its indigenous population.  Moreover, it became obvious that the land west of the Mississippi was never seriously intended to be the exclusive domain of the continent's indigenous people. 

Generally, in pursuit of their "Manifest Destiny" to enjoy limitless expansion, the US government did not openly espouse extermination policies, or "racial clearings," against Native Americans.  The fact is, though, that the US government was always ready to resort to outright physical eradication of indigenous peoples – genocide – where necessary.  Massacres of Indians were well reported in the local press and perpetrators were often paid bounties by the government for the scalps of their victims.  In more than 40 military confrontations, or "Indian Wars," it became clear that extermination was the express objective.  There were numerous large-scale massacres of Indians – including Horseshoe Bend (1814), Bad Axe River (1833), Bear River (1863), Washita River (1868), Marias River (1870), and the well-chronicled massacre of over 200 Minneconjou and Hunkpapa Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890 – that accounted for untold thousands of native dead. 

One of the most brutal massacres of Indians occurred at Sand Creek in the Colorado Territory in 1864.  The government of the Colorado Territory had created a unit, the Third Colorado Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, expressly for the purpose of killing Cheyennes and any other indigenous people they might encounter over a 100-day period on the South Platte Trail.  Echoing the tenor of the time, William N. Byers – publisher of the Rocky Mountain News – wrote: "Eastern humanitarians who believe in the superiority of the Indian race will raise a terrible howl over this policy [of extermination], but it is not time to split hairs nor stand upon delicate compunctions of conscience.  Self preservation demands decisive action, and the only way to secure it is [through a] few months of active extermination against the red devils."

Colorado Governor John Evans published a proclamation claiming that "the evidence [was] now conclusive" that most Indians on the Plains were "hostile," calling upon whites to "organize [themselves] to pursue, kill and destroy" Cheyennes wherever they might be found.  The military commander of this killing unit, Colonel John Milton Chivington (a former Methodist minister now nicknamed "The Fighting Parson"), made clear his intention to kill everyone from the most elderly and infirm to newborn infants – the latter for no reason other than that they would one day grow up to become adult Cheyennes. 

At around 8 p.m. on November 28, 1864, Chivington led approximately 700 soldiers out of Fort Lyon and toward an unarmed, noncombatant village of about 500 Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians along Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado Territory.  Two-thirds of the village was women and children, purportedly under the protection of the military. So sure were the Indians of their absolute safety that they kept no night watch except of the pony herd that was corralled below the creek.   "Kill and scalp all," Chivington instructed his men, "little and big…Nits make lice."  Chivington's men struck at dawn on November 29, despite the fact that both American and white flags were flown over the sleeping village.  Amazingly, the majority of villagers at Sand Creek, including many who were severely wounded, somehow escaped the soldiers and survived.  After seven hours of attack, however, at least 150 Cheyennes and Arapahos lay dead.  The following day, soldiers and officers roamed the site of destruction scalping and otherwise desecrating the dead – as well as plundering and burning the village in its entirety.

The American precedent for "racial clearings" was complemented by a precedent of evading responsibility for such atrocities, reflected in Flynn's depiction of a Wallace who seems stuck in present time and thinks nothing of the eventual consequences – legal, moral, ethical or otherwise – of his campaign of mass murder.  In the case of the Sand Creek massacre, the federal government convened three separate investigations – one each by the House, Senate, and War Department – all of them concluding that Chivington and numerous others were guilty of the atrocities.  In the end, however, none of the "guilty" were penalized.  Chivington and the others, it was said, were not subject to prosecution in civilian courts because they had been in the military at the time their crimes were committed.  Conversely, the military claimed prosecution could not occur since the perpetrators' military commissions had expired prior to the massacre, meaning they were technically civilians at the time it occurred.

Moreover, America's "racial clearings" of its indigenous population were undeniably "successful" (in the morally-inverted sense of the word).  The size of the aggregate indigenous North American population in 1500 is estimated at about 15 million.  By 1890, it had been reduced by some 97.5%, to less than 250,000.  Yes, many of these died as a result of diseases for which they had no ready immunity, as well as economic and ecological exploitation.  Many, though, were also victims of massacres and genocide.

Even when the killing stopped, the ongoing destruction of American Indians continued through "ethnocide" – that is, the destruction of a culture rather than a people per se.  These ethnocidal practices include forced relocation, compulsory transfer of native children into boarding schools designed to assimilate them into non-Indian society, decimation of indigenous economies, and forced imposition of new forms of sociopolitical organization in reservation settings that led to the destruction of Indian societies.  Through the Dawes Act of 1887, citizenship was granted to only those American Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States (that is, not on tribal lands or reservations) and who had "voluntarily taken up" their residence "separate and apart from any tribe of Indians" and who had "adopted the habits of civilized life;" in 1888, to American Indian women marrying American males; and, in 1919, to American Indian veterans of World War I.  It was not until 1924 that Native Americans received U.S. citizenship rights and it was another decade before the government lifted its ban on Native American's practice of their traditional religious activities. 

Clearly, the scenario laid out in Flynn's "Southern Strategy" is an alternate history that runs painfully parallel to America's own history.  Rather than involving the removal of an indigenous people, it involves the extermination of a people brought here for economic exploitation and who have, in the constrained judgment of Wallace and his nightriders, outlived their usefulness and were now expendable.  Even though this genocidal alternate history was never fulfilled, blacks in America, similar to American Indians, certainly have lived through its real-life sequel of ethnocide.  From the arrival of the first Africans in the United States in 1619, blacks have a 387-year history on this continent – 245 involving slavery, 100 involving legalized discrimination and only 42 years involving anything else.  The US Constitution, with its Bill of Rights, legitimized the enslavement of blacks in three of its provisions.  By the time slavery was officially abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, 10-15 million Africans had been brought to America; another 30-35 million died in transport.  Even after the abolition of slavery, state-supported oppression in the forms of economic (sharecropping and tenantry) and cultural exploitation, political disenfranchisement, and legal racial segregation continued throughout the country.

Part of the white backlash against black emancipation included frequent violent attacks.  The lynchings mentioned in "Southern Strategy" are, sadly, anything but alternate history.  Between 1882 (when reliable statistics were first collected) and 1968 (when the classic forms of lynching had disappeared), an estimated 4,742 black men and women died at the hands of lynch mobs.  These data, however, only tell us about the lynchings of record.  They do not include the thousands of unrecorded atrocities whose prime targets, by and large, were black.  Leon F. Litwack quotes a black Mississippian recalling white violence in the 1930s: "Back in those days, to kill a Negro wan't nothing.  It was like killing a chicken or killing a snake.  The whites would say, ‘Niggers jest supposed to die, ain't no damn good anyway – so jest go on an' kill ‘em.'" 

These cold statistics also do not reveal the sadism and exhibitionism that surrounded many of the lynchings.  As graphically depicted in James Allen et al.'s Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, lynchings became public theater, often even festive ("A Good Time Is Had By All As Negro Is Put To Death" one newspaper headline proclaimed), at times including newspaper announcements and special "excursion" trains to transport spectators to the scene.  There are even records of parents sending notes to school asking teachers to excuse their children to attend a lynching!  Historian Robert L. Zangrando has pointed out that lynching was "a ritual of interracial social control and recreation rather than simply a punishment for crime."  Mobs cut off black victims' fingers, toes, ears, or genitalia as souvenirs.  Similarly, the sociologist Orlando Patterson has understood the ritual logic of lynching as social spectacles – often including local politicians, court officers, prominent business leaders, and other "good American citizens."  So, Flynn is not stretching the bounds of credulity to devise an alternate history in which the "control," "ritual," "recreation," and "spectacle" of lynching devolved into "deliberate, planned murder on a scale the world has never seen." 

The notion of blacks as "items" to be bartered and dispensed with also was captured in Derrick Bell's The Space Traders, a racial parable written in science fiction form.  Bell lays out a scenario in which extraterrestrial leaders arrive in the United States on New Year's Day in the year 2000 with a trade offer: If the US would turn over all African-Americans to the alien "Space Traders," the US would receive, in return, enough gold to bail out the national debt, special chemicals to cleanse the polluted environment, and an inexhaustible and safe nuclear energy supply to replace our dependence on fossil fuels.  The aliens did not reveal why they wanted only black people or what plans they had for them.  The proposed trade carried no hint of coercion; America would be free to choose whether to accept the trade or not.  In Bell's story, American citizens, by 70 percent to 30 percent, vote to accept the Space Traders' offer (a percentage remarkably similar to what I usually find in classroom discussions surrounding this story, particularly when the question is phrased as "How would most whites in your community vote?").  The story concludes: "Heads bowed, arms now linked by slender chains, black people left the New World as their forebears had arrived."

Bell's scenario differs from Flynn's "Southern Strategy" in the sense that it's placed in the future rather than the past; its context is the post-segregation era rather than the era of de jure and de facto segregation in which Flynn's story is set.  Both stories, however, deal with the question of inclusion: To what degree are blacks included in America's universe of moral and ethical obligation?  For Flynn, the American South of the 1950s has excluded blacks to such a degree that it is not only right to "clear" society of their presence, but it's even wrong (in some people's minds) not to do so.  For Bell, who wrote The Space Traders to illustrate the involuntary sacrificial role that blacks often have played in earlier national policies, the exclusion is not a physical death but a social death that barters blacks to an unknown fate in exchange for the promise of a better America.  Other commentators have asserted that Bell's story is an illustration of not simply the black experience in America but also the experiences of people of color more generally.  In the end, both Flynn and Bell remind us of the ways in which America's promise is often not met by its practices.

If we broaden the context of this discussion beyond America's borders, there certainly is international precedent for the types of "racial clearings" described in "Southern Strategy."  Aptly dubbed the "Age of Genocide," the past century saw a massive scale of systematic and intentional mass murder coupled with an unprecedented efficiency of the mechanisms and techniques of mass destruction.  On the historical heels of the physical and cultural genocide of American Indians during the nineteenth century, the twentieth century writhed from the near-complete annihilation of the Hereros by the Germans in South-West Africa in 1904; to the brutal assault of the Armenian population by the Turks between 1915 and 1923; to the implementation of a Soviet man-made famine against the Ukrainian Kulaks in 1932-1933 that left several million peasants starving to death; to the extermination of two-thirds of Europe's Jews during the Holocaust of 1939-1945; to the massacre of approximately half a million people in Indonesia during 1965-1966; to mass killings and genocide in Bangladesh (1971), Burundi (1972), Cambodia (1975-1979), East Timor (1975-1979), and Rwanda (1994); and, finally, to the perpetual human crisis that continues to rage in the former Yugoslavia.  All told, it is estimated that at least 60 million men, women and children were victims of mass killing and genocide in the last century alone.

The dawn of the twenty-first century brings little light to the darkness.  Since 1999, Russian armed forces have escalated their use of extortion, torture, violence, and murder against Chechen civilians; a wave of massacres in the early months of 2002 targeted Muslims in the state of Gujarat in India; at the close of 2003, Ethiopian government troops and local militia slaughtered more than 400 people of the Anuak tribe in the Gambella region of western Ethiopia.  In Darfur, the western region of Sudan, at least 300,000 people have died as a result of a Sudanese government-sponsored campaign of violence and forced starvation that began in early 2003. 

Clearly, despite the end of the colonial era and the dismantling of the Cold War, the persistence of inhumanity in human affairs is incontrovertible.  I am speaking here not of isolated executions but of wholesale slaughters; of the type of "racial clearings" as depicted in "Southern Strategy."  As collectives, we engage in acts of extraordinary evil, with apparent moral calm and intensity of supposed purpose, which could only be described as insane were they committed by an individual. 

Given the close parallels of "Southern Strategy" with American and international history, and particularly given the volatile racial climate of the times in this country, we're compelled to close with a counter-question.  Instead of "Could this happen?," we must ask:  "Why didn't this happen?"  Why didn't Flynn's nightmare of "racial clearings" happen in the American south in the 1950s?  Did the federal government somehow legislate morality that, over time, enabled racist whites to grow a conscience – or, at the very least, made violent racism socially unacceptable?  Did whites of conscience in the South develop a set of tolerant, progressive norms and expectations that stared down the racists among them?  Was the prospect of black resistance, particularly violent resistance, enough to stop racist whites short of mass murder?  Did racism simply become "bad business" in the eyes of the international community and, as Bell argues, lead to an interest convergence in which it was in whites' best interest to allow modest social, economic, and political gains for blacks?

While there is likely some truth found in each of these alternatives, perhaps the most compelling answer lies in the complex changes that occurred in the black community following World War II.  More than three million black men registered for the military during the war years and around 500,000 of those were stationed overseas.  They returned from the war, having fought for "democracy" and "human rights" abroad, only to find that a battle against oppression waited to be waged on the home front.  The urbanization of the black population, ongoing since the early twentieth-century, further transformed the character, and confidence, of black communities.  Perhaps most animating were the mounting legal challenges to segregation, primarily under the initiative of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), that led to the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, mandating desegregation of public schools, in which separate was ruled to be inherently unequal. 

While the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s certainly proceeded in fits and starts, it did empower black communities across the nation to a newfound confidence, bordering on militancy, that gave a damn about citizenship and believed that the practices of America could one day live up to its great promises.  Under the influence of people such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Mamie Bradley (the mother of Emmett Till), Ella Baker, John Lewis, and the Freedom Riders – and of organizations like the SCLC, the NAACP, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Students for a Democratic Society – this deepened resolve for equality found its expression in nonviolent, rather than violent, means.  The struggle for civil rights was cast as a moral and political issue, rather than an ideological and military issue.  As King wrote: "Rivers of blood may have to flow before we gain our freedom, but it must be our blood."  This spirit of nonviolent resistance was not always perfectly manifested or unanimously endorsed by the black community.  Nonetheless, it prevailed enough to preclude racist southerners from launching the type of violent, genocidal "revolution" so chillingly portrayed by Flynn.  In so doing, "Southern Strategy" is left as the reimagining of a story rather than the story itself.  And, for that, we all ought to be grateful.