From Southern writer William Faulkner, and decades ago, describing white American fear that lasts even unto today. The reason for Black Lives Matter.
That’s what the white man in the South is afraid of: that the Negro, who has done so much with no chance, might do so much more with an equal one that he might take the white man’s economy away from him, the Negro now the banker or the merchant or the planter and the white man the sharecropper or the tenant. That’s why the Negro can gain our country’s highest decoration for valor beyond all call of duty for saving or defending or preserving white lives on foreign battlefields, yet the Southern white man dares not let that Negro’s children learn their ABC’s in the same classroom with the children of the white lives he saved or defended.
© 2017 Faulkner Literary Rights, LLC. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the Literary Estate of William Faulkner, Lee Caplin, Executor.
From “On Fear,” which appeared in the June 1956 issue of Harper’s Magazine.