And we had better take in with us as many as we can get of the nonwhite peoples of the earth who are not completely free yet but who want to be and intend to be, before that other force which is opposed to individual freedom, befools and gets them. Time was when the nonwhite was content to—anyway, did—accept his instinct for freedom as an unrealizable dream. But not any more; the white man himself taught him different with that phase of his—the white man’s—own culture which took the form of colonial expansion and exploitation based and morally condoned on the premise of inequality not because of individual incompetence, but of mass race or color. As a result of which, in only ten years, we have watched the nonwhite peoples expel, by bloody violence when necessary, the white man from all of the middle east and Asia which he once dominated. And into that vacuum has already begun to move that other and inimical power which people who believe in freedom are at war with—that power which says to the non-white man: “We don’t offer you freedom because there is no such thing as freedom; your white overlords whom you just threw out have already proved that to you. But we offer you equality: at least equality in slavedom; if you are to be slaves, at least you can be slaves to your own color and race and religion.”
We, the western white man who does believe that there exists an individual freedom above and beyond this mere equality of slavedom, must teach the nonwhite peoples this while there is yet a little time left. We, America, who are the strongest force opposing communism and monolithicism, must teach all other peoples, white and nonwhite, slave or (for a little while yet) still free. We, America, have the best chance to do this because we can do it here, at home, without needing to send costly freedom expeditions into alien and inimical places already convinced that there is no such thing as freedom and liberty and equality and peace for all people, or we would practice it at home.
The best chance and the easiest job, because our non-white minority is already on our side; we don’t need to sell them on America and freedom because they are already sold; even when ignorant from inferior or no education, even despite the record and history of inequality, they still believe in our concepts of freedom and democracy.
That is what America has done for them in only three hundred years. Not to them: for them, because to our shame we have made little effort so far to teach them to be Americans, let alone to use their capacities to make of ourselves a stronger and more unified America:—the people who only three hundred years ago were eating rotten elephant and hippo meat in African rain-forests, who lived beside one of the biggest bodies of inland water on earth and never thought of a sail, who yearly had to move by whole villages and tribes from famine and pestilence and human enemies without once thinking of a wheel, yet in only three hundred years in America produced Ralph Bunche and George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington, who have yet to produce a Fuchs or Rosenberg or Gold or Greenglass or Burgess or McLean or Hiss, and for every prominent communist or fellow-traveler like Robeson, there are a thousand white ones.
I am not convinced that the Negro wants integration in the sense that some of us claim to fear he does. I believe he is American enough to repudiate and deny by simple American instinct any stricture or regulation forbidding us to do something which in our opinion would be harmless if we did it, and which we probably would not want to do anyway. I think that what he wants is equality, and I believe that he too knows there is no such thing as equality per se, but only equality to: equal right and opportunity to make the best one can of one’s life within one’s capacity and capability, without fear of injustice or oppression or threat of violence. If we had given him this equal right to opportunity ninety or fifty or even ten years ago, there would have been no Supreme Court decision about how we run our schools.
It is our white man’s shame that in our present southern economy, the Negro must not have economic equality; our double shame that we fear that giving him more social equality will jeopardize his present economic status; our triple shame that even then, to justify ourselves, we must becloud the issue with the purity of white blood; what a commentary that the one remaining place on earth where the white man can flee and have his blood protected and defended by law, is Africa—Africa: the source and origin of the people whose presence in America will have driven the white man to flee from defilement.
Soon now all of us—not just Southerners nor even just Americans, but all people who are still free and want to remain so—are going to have to make a choice. We will have to choose not between color nor race nor religion nor between East and West either, but simply between being slaves and being free. And we will have to choose completely and for good; the time is already past now when we can choose a little of each, a little of both. We can choose a state of slavedom, and if we are powerful enough to be among the top two or three or ten, we can have a certain amount of license—until someone more powerful rises and has us machine-gunned against a cellar wall. But we cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it; our freedom must be buttressed by a homogeny equally and unchallengeably free, no matter what color they are, so that all the other inimical forces everywhere—systems political or religious or racial or national—will not just respect us because we practice freedom, they will fear us because we do.
The question is no longer of white against black. It is no longer whether or not white blood shall remain pure, it is whether or not white people shall remain free.
We accept insult and contumely and the risk of violence because we will not sit quietly by and see our native land, the South, not just Mississippi but all the South, wreck and ruin itself twice in less than a hundred years, over the Negro question.
We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say, “Why didn’t someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?”
[Memphis Commercial Appeal, November 11, 1955; the text printed here is that of the revised and expanded version first published in the pamphlet Three Views of the Segregation Decisions, Atlanta, Southern Regional Council, 1956.]
Address upon Receiving the
Silver Medal of the Athens Academy
ATHENS, MARCH 28, 1957
I accept this medal not alone as an American nor as a writer but as one chosen by the Greek Academy to represent the principle that man shall be free.
The human spirit does not obey physical laws. When the sun of Pericles cast the shadow of civilized man around the earth, that shadow curved until it touched America. So when someone like me comes to Greece he is walking the shadow back to the source of the light which cast the shadow. When the American comes to this country he has come back to something that was familiar. He has come home. He has come back to the cradle of civilized man. I am proud that the Greek people have considered me worthy to receive this medal. It will be my duty to return to my country and tell my people that the qualities in the Greek race—toughness, bravery, independence and pride—are too valuable to lose. It is the duty of all men to see that they do not vanish from the earth.
[Press release issued by the United States Information Service in Athens at the time of the address. Faulkner received help in writing this speech from Duncan Emrich, cultural affairs officer of the American embassy. See Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, New York, 1984, p. 637.]
Address to the American
Academy of Arts and Letters
in Presenting
the Gold Medal for Fiction
to John Dos Passos
NEW YORK, MAY 22, 1957
The artist, the writer, must never have any doubts about where he intends to go; the aim, the dream, must be that high to be worth that destination and the anguish of the effort to reach it. But he must have humility regarding his competence t
o get there, about his methods, his craft and his craftsmanship in it.
So the fact that the artist has no more actual place in the American culture of today than he has in the American economy of today, no place at all in the warp and woof, the thews and sinews, the mosaic of the American dream as it exists today, is perhaps a good thing for him since it teaches him humility in advance, gets him into the habit of humility well ahead whether he would or no; in which case, none of us has been better trained in humility than this man whom the Academy is honoring today. Which proves also that that man, that artist, who can accept the humility, will, must, in time, sooner or later, work through the humility and the oblivion into that moment when he and the value of his life’s work will be recognized and honored at least by his fellow craftsmen, as John Dos Passos and his life’s work are at this moment.
It is my honor to share in his by having been chosen to hand this medal to him. No man deserves it more, and few have waited longer for it.
[Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, second series, New York, 1958; the text printed here has been taken from a copy of Faulkner’s typescript. According to Malcolm Cowley, Faulkner’s actual address was abbreviated, and recorded. What he said was, “Oratory can’t add anything to John Dos Passos’ stature, and if I know anything about writers, he may be grateful for a little less of it. So I’ll say, mine is the honor to partake of his in handing this medal to him. No man deserves it more.” See Malcolm Cowley, The Faulkner-Cowley File, New York, 1966, pp. 146–7.]
Address to the Raven,
Jefferson, and ODK Societies of
the University of Virginia
CHARLOTTESVILLE, FEBRUARY 20, 1958
A Word to Virginians
A hundred years ago Abraham Lincoln said, “This nation cannot endure half slave and half free.” If he were alive today he would amend it: “This nation cannot endure containing a minority as large as ten percent held second class in citizenship by the accident of physical appearance.” As a lesser man might put it, this nor any country or community of people can no more get along in peace with ten percent of its population arbitrarily unassimilated than a town of five thousand people can get along in peace with five hundred unbridled horses loose in the streets, or say a community of five thousand cats with five hundred unassimilated dogs among them, or vice versa. For peaceful coexistence, all must be one thing: either all first class citizens, or all second class citizens; either all people or all horses; either all cats or all dogs.
Perhaps the Negro is not yet capable of more than second class citizenship. His tragedy may be that so far he is competent for equality only in the ratio of his white blood. But even if that is so, the problem of the second class citizens still remains. It would not solve the problem even if the Negro were himself content to remain only a second class citizen even though relieved of his first class responsibilities by his classification. The fact would still remain that we are a nation established on the fact that we are only ninety percent unified in power. With only ninety percent of unanimity, we would face (and hope to survive in it) an inimical world unified against us even if only in inimicality. We cannot be even ninety percent unified against that inimical world which outnumbers us, because too much of even that ninety percent of power is spent and consumed by the physical problem of the ten percent of irresponsibles.
It is easy enough for the North to blame on us, the South, the fact that this problem is still unsolved. If I were a northerner, that’s what I would do: tell myself that one hundred years ago, we, both of us, North and South, had put it to the test, and had solved it. That it is not us, the North, but you, the South, who have refused to accept that verdict. Nor will it help us any to remind the North that, by ratio of Negro to white in population, there is probably more of inequality and injustice there than with us.
Instead, we should accept that gambit. Let us say to the North: All right, it is our problem, and we will solve it. For the sake of argument, let us agree that as yet the Negro is incapable of equality for the reason that he could not hold and keep it even if it were forced on him with bayonets; that once the bayonets were removed, the first smart and ruthless man black or white who came along would take it away from him, because he, the Negro, is not yet capable of, or refuses to accept, the responsibilities of equality.
So we, the white man, must take him in hand and teach him that responsibility; this will not be the first time nor the last time in the long record of man’s history that moral principle has been identical with and even inextricable from practical common sense. Let us teach him that, in order to be free and equal, he must first be worthy of it, and then forever afterward work to hold and keep and defend it. He must learn to cease forever more thinking like a Negro and acting like a Negro. This will not be easy for him. His burden will be that, because of his race and color, it will not suffice for him to think and act like just any white man: he must think and act like the best among white men. Because where the white man, because of his race and color, can practise morality and rectitude just on Sunday and let the rest of the week go hang, the Negro can never let up nor deviate.
That is our job here in the South. It is possible that the white race and the Negro race can never really like and trust each other; this for the reason that the white man can never really know the Negro, because the white man has forced the Negro to be always a Negro rather than another human being in their dealings, and therefore the Negro cannot afford, does not dare, to be open with the white man and let the white man know what he, the Negro, thinks. But I do know that we in the South, having grown up with and lived among Negroes for generations, are capable in individual cases of liking and trusting individual Negroes, which the North can never do because the northerner only fears him.
So we alone can teach the Negro the responsibility of personal morality and rectitude—either by taking him into our white schools, or giving him white teachers in his own schools until we have taught the teachers of his own race to teach and train him in these hard and unpleasant habits. Whether or not he ever learns his a-b-c’s or what to do with common fractions, wont matter. What he must learn are the hard things—self-restraint, honesty, dependability, purity; to act not even as well as just any white man, but to act as well as the best of white men. If we dont, we will spend the rest of our lives dodging among the five hundred unbridled horses; we will look forward each year to another Clinton or Little Rock not only further and further to wreck what we have so far created of peaceful relations between the two races, but to be international monuments and milestones to our ridicule and shame.
And the place for this to begin is Virginia, the mother of all the rest of us of the South. Compared to you, my country—Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas—is still frontier, still wilderness. Yet even in our wilderness we look back to that mother-stock as though it were not really so distant and so far removed. Even in our wilderness the old Virginia blood still runs and the old Virginia names—Byrd and Lee and Carter—still endure. There is no family in our wilderness but has that old aunt or grandmother to tell the children as soon as they can hear and understand: Your blood is Virginia blood too; your great-great-great grandfather was born in Rockbridge or Fairfax or Prince George—Valley or Piedmont or Tidewater, right down to the nearest milestone, so that Virginia is a living place to that child long before he ever heard (or cares) about New York or, for that matter, America.
So let it begin in Virginia, toward whom the rest of us are already looking as the child looks toward the parent for a sign, a signal where to go and how to go. A hundred years ago the hot-heads of Mississippi and Georgia and South Carolina would not listen when the mother of us all tried to check our reckless and headlong course; we ignored you then, to all our grief, yours more than any since you bore more of the battles. But this time we will hear you. Let this be the voice of that wilderness, speaking not just to Mother Virginia but to the best of her children—sons foun
d and chosen worthy to be trained to the old pattern in the University established by Mr Jefferson to be not just a dead monument to, but the enduring fountain of his principles of order within the human condition and the relationship of man with man—the messenger, the mouthpiece of all, saying to the mother of us all: Show us the way and lead us in it. I believe we will follow you.
[University of Virginia Magazine, Spring 1958; collected in Faulkner in the University, edited by Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, University of Virginia Press, 1959. The text printed here has been taken from Faulkner’s typescript.]
Address to the English Club
of the University of Virginia
CHARLOTTESVILLE, APRIL 24, 1958
A Word to Young Writers
Two years ago President Eisenhower conceived a plan based on an idea which is basically a sound one. This was that world conditions, the universal dilemma of mankind at this moment, are what they are simply because individual men and women of different races and tongues and conditions cannot discuss with one another these problems and dilemmas which are primarily theirs, but must attempt to do so only through the formal organizations of their antagonistic and seemingly irreconcilable governments.