Tag: Eudora Welty

Thinking of the South as having two distinct cultures, one white, one black, as opposed to one culture that was a mixture of the two, is already highly questionable. For these writers, culture and politics were never far apart. And so it is not surprising that many of these arguments were later invoked by people like Powell. Walker’s argument becomes trickier when it involves those black writers who also expressed trepidation about the future of the South’s black culture and wanted to find a way to preserve it. In particular, many of these black intellectuals and activists worried about what would happen if, as Baldwin put it, black culture was integrated into the “burning house” of the United States. Warren and other white Southerners who wanted to see Southern white culture preserved had found few allies within the civil-rights movement; with figures like Baldwin and Carmichael, Warren wanted to show black Americans were making a similar argument. Baldwin and Carmichael, on the other hand, felt they had little in common with someone like Warren. Instead, Powell thought that the only reason diversity could be taken into account was when it was designed to promote “academic freedom.” As Walker notes, this kind of argument, like the Southern moderates’ position examined in his first book, purportedly seeks to protect the “diversity” of cultural institutions but is, in fact, “hostile to aggressive government efforts aimed at achieving equality.” Like Warren, Powell made a case for multicultural pluralism that ultimately weakened the idea of social, as well as cultural, integration. While offering glowing portraits of black culture in the South, Murray also argued in his 1970 The Omni-Americans that it was through these different cultures that a national American culture would emerge. “Ethnic differences,” Murray wrote, “are the very essence of cultural diversity and national creativity.” One could have a cultural pluralism while also not giving way to Warren’s vision of a dual Southern culture, or Powell’s use of “diversity” to defend de facto segregation and racial inequality.