Here is my mom’s response to my post from a couple of days ago about my grandfather, which she gave me permission to post here:
Rusty,
I do agree that your grandfather and I grew up in a period where there were both overt and unspoken prejudices against the ideas related to having an integrated society. However, I strongly disagree with your portrayal of your grandfather as someone who would have brandished a pickaxe to prevent people from entering the PickRick.
My father, like most men in the South, was raised believing that there were two societies - a black society and a white society. While he had strong feelings that those societies should be separated, he never did and never would have resorted to violence to support those feelings. I remember a time when he went to one of his friend’s homes to talk him out going to a Klu Klux Klan rally.
Lester Maddox believed deeply in the concept of State’s Rights and was protesting the Federal Government’s right to force a locally owned and operated business to be forced to serve customers that he did not wish to serve. From his perspective, if he began to serve black customers, he was risking the loss of many of his longtime customers, and eventually, losing his business.
That does not make what he did right, nor does it excuse his resorting to violence to prevent having to acquiesce to government pressure. The fact that Lester was willing to do what he did should not have painted your grandfather with the same brush.
As you so eloquently stated, there was much more good about your grandfather than bad. Both his and Lester Maddox’s attitutes towards blacks and segregation mellowed over time. When Lester Maddox was Governor of Georgia, he did more towards integrating state government than any previous governor. PawPaw as well, willingly worked with black peers and on occasion welcomed black visitors to his church.
Please don’t confuse the prejudices with which PawPaw was raised with the inner goodness that made him who he was.
So, part of my recollection of family lore was off. They were friends, they were both segregationists, but they differed in that Maddox was willing to resort to violence in defense of those beliefs whereas my grandfather was not.
I stand by the majority of what I wrote, but that clarification is necessary. I apologize to my mom and anyone else who may have been hurt by that inaccurate portion of my post. I painted with too broad a brush in a couple of sentences.
I really don’t want to jump into your family stuff, here, not at all. But I met Lester a couple of times, and I have to say -he just wasn’t as bad as the “standard accounts” would have you believe. I really believe your mom has it right when she describes Maddox as an authentic “states rights” guy, and if you do the research, you’ll find he really did appoint more African-Americans to statewide positions than any previous governor. Doesn’t make him a saint, nor excuse his actions. But I’ve always believed that folks are what they do, not what they say. Lester was a man who represented the transition of Georgia (and the south, and the nation if you want to get all grandiose about it) from a place where people were assigned a spot in the world based on their race -to a place where we try to ignore race completely. Personally, I think we’ve made the former step, but not the latter.
I knew three of my four grandparents, and I loved them all. But to have to explain every idiosyncrasy or “generational-foible-that-looks-politically-incorrect-by todays-standards” would take a lifetime. Sometimes, you gotta just take all of them and be happy with the total, not angry with any of the pieces.
FWIW.
PS: Don’t let anyone tell you the South is “racist” just because it used to be. We’re more attuned to the (yes, sometimes delicate) relations between blacks and whites than most of the rest of country. Probably all of it, in fact, because we had to be.
Mike,
Thanks for the response.
re:
Yeah, and I do.
I’ve rarely put any serious thought into it. At the same time, it’s nagged me in the back of my mind. That concept of “double identity” being brought up served as a trigger that made me want to take a few minutes to think about it.
Unfortunately when it goes down on a page in a short blog post written in the center of that train of thought, it gives the appearance of throwing the guy under the bus for what was a small part of the story. That wasn’t the intent at all. Dude was a bonafide superhero in every other respect.
The one thing that I think is very telling (and I already mentioned this to Rusty offblog, is that when his mom writes “most men in the South,” what she really means is “most white men in the South.” Perfect example of white privilege, and useful since a lot of people misunderstand what white privilege is. It’s white as the default, or as we say in linguistics, the unmarked case.
Eh. A black person who met him might disagree. When considering the whole of a person, you have to consider who’s doing the considering!
I’ll defer to actual black people as far as what black people think.
I think Lester Maddox is a more complicated historic figure than my short, one-dimensional post had room for. He is portrayed as monstrous, and he did a few monstrous things so it’s not exactly unfair, but there was more to him than that.
Just like I remember my grandfather as a kind, generous person, a lot of people remember Maddox that way.
I guess I (sort of ironically) negated my own point, that the whole person should be considered, with that portrayal.
Yep, that’s what I’m saying too. The whole person should be considered.
Memory, family, and identity - Isn’t that like the trifecta of taboo topics? For my part, I’ve had to cut ties with family members over our (wildly) divergent recollections of mutual histories.
Sometimes ‘truth’ is an impossibly nebulous thing - while at other times it’s more measurable. You have the option to be silent or speak fallibly. Faced with that choice, I’m more frequently choosing the latter route, while doing my best to be damn sure that what I’m writing is a mostly measurable truth.
That choice has cost me dearly (family members in my case, shall we say, haven’t had even a fraction of the grace and love expressed above by your mother to you, and by you to your mother), but at this point, I can’t have it any other way.
Calls for blind allegiance, at all costs, toward one’s family strike me as incongruous precisely because I consider ‘family’ and ‘community’ to be points along the general continuum of humanity. To be allegiant toward one sometimes means (though you may not recognize it, much less intend it) betrayal of the other. You do what you can to articulate your own (necessarily situational) knowledge, while (hopefully) remaining open to others’ knowledge (rife as it will also be with inaccuracies and ambiguities).