The vagueness of expression to which Senator Spessard Holland was forced to resort in pursuit of an amendment eliminating the poll tax – a result of his rather awkward position between the upper chamber’s reformers and its conservatives – continued to hamper his efforts as his conversation of March 16th, 1962 with Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright went on. TO that end, having just heard Holland proclaim that his fundamental objective in eliminating the poll tax was to promote “a representative expression from the states,” Fulbright naturally sought a degree of clarification as to exactly what this somewhat ambiguous language was intended to signify. “Do I draw the right conclusion from his statement [,]” he asked of the Floridian,
That thereby he believes the quality
of the government of the State and the representation of the State is superior
to those whose voters do not participate in the same percentage? Does the
Senator see any connection between the enlarged participation and the quality
of the representation of the State?
It was a fair
enough question. Holland spoke of “representative expressions” and “cleaner
government” without clearly stating whether or why either of these things might
have been particularly desirable. Was he saying that the states that could
boast of higher voter participation percentages possessed inherently superior
governments as a result? The Floridian, as ever, continued to be somewhat
circumspect. “The point the Senator from Florida has made,” he said,
And the only point he has made, is
this. It is not to point any finger of criticism at any State, but simply to
point out that it is established, as was stated yesterday, that it is the
business of other States, because the States have an interest in the electoral
results of other States in seeing that there is a representative expression by
those States. That is the only point the Senator from Florida wishes to make.
It was true enough
that Holland had explained why and how states that lacked poll taxes of
their own might have claimed a direct interest in the electoral practices of
those that still possessed them. Presidential elections were national affairs
with national consequences, and poll taxes were capable of effecting the
outcome of said elections in such states where they remained in force. But he
still declined to explain either what he understood the phrase “representative
expression” to mean or why such an outcome was supposed to be desirable.
All credit to J. William Fulbright
for being sharper than the average senator; the man was not one to be handled. Having
asked Holland for clarification and received nothing of the sort, he thereafter
proceeded to seize upon his colleague’s rhetorically ambiguous tone and
demanded specific confirmation or denial of what the Floridian seemed to him to
be saying. “I do not quite follow the Senator in his point about the quality of
our government,” he thus retorted,
And that goes not only to the quality
of its participation but to that of its representatives, whether they be local
officials, Governors, Representatives, or Senators. If the Senator is trying to
make the point that, because there is a large participation and more people
vote, thereby there is a higher quality of Representatives and Senators and
Governors, I would like to see the Senator demonstrate it, because I do not
follow that point, and I do not believe it.
Again, Fulbright’s
request seemed to be an entirely reasonable one. Since Holland had declined to
provide a clear answer to his previous question, the senator from Arkansas was
forced to hypothesize. Did Holland mean to say that a higher percentage of
voter participation was bound to lead to a higher quality of government? And if
that was what he meant, could he prove the validity of the claim? Could
he show precisely how these two things were supposedly connected?
Unsurprisingly, the Floridian could
not. This isn’t to say that the answer he came out with was necessarily all
that bad. He may not have been able to prove, as Fulbright demanded, that
higher voter turnout inevitably led to a higher quality of government, but he
nevertheless managed to make a moderately compelling case for increasing ballot
access as a potential good in itself. “In my concluding remarks, I say,
regardless of the views of the Senator from Arkansas,” he began,
That the Senator from Florida has
great confidence in the verdict of the people. What I am trying to do is get
the people to give a verdict. Obviously, where only a small percentage of the
people are giving the verdict, the Senator from Florida thinks the whole Nation
has an interest, and in these 5 States which are trying to swim upstream
against the heavy current of expression of the other 45 States, that people
should be encouraged and allowed to vote, without putting obstacles in the way,
as to whether they can make the payment, or laying down a certain means of
collection, or whether they will or will not be intimidated. The Senator from
Florida believes in the expression of the people of each State. As a State
senator, he voted to give his people full expression, and he expects to vote
the same way here.
While Holland once
again neglected to explain why, exactly, gaining the input of as many eligible
voters as possible represented an innately positive outcome for the United
States as a whole, the response that he did provide to Senator Fulbright was at
the very least posed in a reasonably convincing way. The issue, he explained,
was that the American people weren’t being allowed to benefit from a
comprehensive evaluation of their own collective intentions. There was a bigger
picture, in short, that they weren’t being allowed to see. Who did the American
people really want as their president? Until every eligible voter in every
state was allowed to cast a ballot, the readily available answer would only
ever be a partial one. Would the addition of a few million votes spread across
a small handful of states realistically change the outcome of any given
presidential election? Maybe it would. Probably it wouldn’t. The specific
outcome wasn’t the point. The point was that until everyone who was qualified
to vote did vote, the validity of the final outcome of any such elections would
always be somewhat in question. America’s vaunted democracy would always be
incomplete.
This paean to the true potential of
democratic expression wasn’t even the most interesting part of Holland’s
answer, however. What most stands out in the Floridian’s response to Senator
Fulbright – specifically in light of the former’s otherwise very circumspect
approach to reform – was his declaration that the five states in which poll
taxes remained the law of the land were “trying to swim upstream against the
heavy current of expression of the other 45 States, that people should be
encouraged and allowed to vote, without putting obstacles in the way, as to
whether they can make the payment, or laying down a certain means of
collection, or whether they will or will not be intimidated.” There was nothing
particularly shocking in Holland placing himself on the side of those who believed
that “people should be encouraged and allowed to vote, without putting
obstacles in the way, as to whether they can make the payment, or laying down a
certain means of collection [,]” to be sure. This had been his acknowledged
objective from the start. But for the Democratic senator from Florida, in the
spring of 1962, to endorse the proposition that “people should be encouraged
and allowed to vote, without putting obstacles in the way, as to […] whether
they will or will not be intimidated [?]” That was equal parts remarkable and
quite unexpected.
Let us recall, first and foremost, that Holland was a Southern Democrat who came up through Florida state politics in the 1930s and 1940s and first arrived in the United States Senate in 1946. Not only, as a Democrat, had he wholly imbibed the doctrine of states’ rights and fashioned himself, as a public servant, into one of its most erstwhile defenders, but he had also come to identify the policy of racial segregation – in common with his fellow Southern Democrats – as paramount to the Southern way of life and inviolable as a matter of constitutional law. He believed, in short – had always believed – that the principle of “separate but equal” was both necessary to the functioning of contemporary Southern society and could be implemented by any state without fear of federal interference. The Floridian had already made this stance clear when he appended his name to the aforementioned Southern Manifesto in 1956. And as the major events of the Civil Rights Movement played themselves out in the United States over the course of the 1960s, he would confirm his position time and time again. He would vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He would vote against the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He would go on to vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1968. In most cases, without fail, the man was as ardent a segregationist as one was like to find in the contemporary Senate.
On that specific note, it also bears recalling that when Senator Keating mentioned the finding of the Civil Rights Commission that the five remaining poll tax states all had means at their disposal of suppressing the Black vote beyond and outside of the poll tax itself, Holland – alike with his fellow Southerners Hill and Eastland – had nothing at all to say. This observation on Keating’s part was aimed at Hill and Eastland in particular, of course, the purpose being to aid in convincing them that the poll tax was functionally unnecessary to their most cherished goal of Black voter suppression and could be safely done away with as a result. But it was also true – though the New Yorker had no reason to say as much – that Florida was also as guilty as Mississippi or Alabama of just the same crime. That is, while Florida had done away with its poll tax in the late 1930s, it most certainly had not ceased using other methods to prevent its Black residents from voting.
Since the repeal of said poll tax in June of 1937, for example, Black men continued to be lynched in the State of Florida. Cellos Harrison was murdered in his jail cell in 1943 after being reindicted for a murder that he was previously cleared of on appeal. The following year, Willie James Howard was forced to jump to his death into the Suwannee River after sending a Christmas card to a white female coworker. These names were but two of many. Since the repeal of said poll tax, Black citizens also continued to face the threat of violence in response to demands for equal treatment. In 1956, during the Tallahassee Bus Boycott – launched in sympathy with the Montgomery Bus Boycott by Black students from Florida A&M University – numerous Black bus passengers were arrested while several were directly threatened by members of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Furthermore, since the repeal of said poll tax, attempts at organization by Florida’s Black community – in an attempt to play within the rules set by the state’s white political leadership – were met with dismissal, repression, and violence. Of particular note was the fate which befell Black activist Harry T. Moore (1905-1951), a teacher by trade who helped organize the Brevard Country chapter of the NAACP, personally investigated lynchings, filed lawsuits against white primaries, and led voter registration campaigns. He was fired from his teaching job in 1946 specifically because refused to give up his work as an activist and was then murdered in 1951 when a bomb went off under the floor of his house. All of this was in an attempt to put Black Floridians “in their place.” The poll tax had been repealed, but nothing else had really changed. Black people living in the Sunshine state were not suddenly free to vote as they wished. Indeed, they were not free to do much of anything without explicit white approval. Until 1956 – thanks to the success of the Tallahassee Bus Boycott – they could not choose where to sit on public transit. As late as the 1940s, on pain of death, they had to be careful to whom they spoke and how. And as late as 1951, any attempt to make best use of existing legal and judicial institutions might conceivably have resulted in anything between job termination and murder.
Bearing all of this in mind is what makes Holland’s aforementioned remark such a meaningful one. It was the determination of the forty-five states in which there were no poll tax laws, he avowed – Florida being among them – “that people should be encouraged and allowed to vote, without putting obstacles in the way, as to […] whether they will or will not be intimidated.” What were the lynchings, and arrests, and wrongful terminations, and murders described above if not a campaign of intimidation? The state and people of Florida were not just trying to punish specific offenders for real or perceived crimes when they saw to the deaths of Cellos Harrison, Willie James Howard, and Harry T. Moore. And they were not just attempting to enforce a specific corpus of state law when they precipitated the arrest and brutalization of the Tallahassee Bus Boycott’s student participants. These men and these students may have been the immediate victims of the force so exerted, but they were not really the intended targets. It was the larger Black community at which all of these actions were aimed. Cellos Harrison was not killed solely in an attempt to enforce “eye for an eye” justice. He was killed to serve as an example to every other Black person in the State of Florida. So was Willie James Howard. So was Harry T. Moore. Did the state government directly participate in any of these murders? Perhaps not. But by turning a blind eye to such extrajudicial killings, the political leadership of the Sunshine State sent a very clear signal to all those white Floridians who had ever considered taking matters into their own hands in regard to the perceived ills of the Black community. “Put them in their place,” they were saying. “You have our permission.”
Why should the government of Florida
have thus sanctioned vigilante violence? The answer would seem to be rather
obvious. The more terrified the state’s Black inhabitants were of voicing any
sense of dissatisfaction with the reigning status quo, the less likely they
were to organize, to protest, to take direct action, or to vote. Their fear
would accordingly neutralize them as a political force in the State of Florida,
thereby allowing the established white leadership to continue benefitting from
Black economic activity without having to cater to Black interests, or even to
acknowledge that such interests existed. And where did Holland fit in all this?
Did he know about it? Was he culpable? Of course he was. Not only had he been
serving as one of Florida’s representatives in the Senate since 1946, but
between 1941 and 1945, he’d been the Sunshine State’s governor. He knew exactly
what kind of treatment Black people often received in the State of Florida and
exactly how, as a member of the political elite, he was expected to respond. Consider
the 1941 lynching of one A.C. Williams as a case in point. Arrested on charges
of burglary and attempted rape – the alleged victim, it bears noting, being a
twelve-year-old white girl – Williams was abducted from his jail cell in
Jackson County, beaten severely and shot several times, and then miraculously escaped
from his tormentors, only to be re-arrested, re-abducted, and finally shot to
death. These circumstances alone would have made it a strange and noteworthy
case, to be sure. How many Black men, in the history of the American South,
managed to survive one lynching only to be lynched for a second time? But what
ultimately made the A.C. Williams case such a controversial one at the time was
the rather sensitive moment in American history at which the relevant events
took place.
American newspapers, circa 1941, had
already been filled for several years with increasingly brutal accounts of
events transpiring across the Atlantic in war-torn Europe. German Nazis and
Italian Fascists were perpetrating atrocities across the continent and the
American people were finding it harder and harder to simply turn away from such
appalling behavior even if the events in question were taking place on the
other side of the world. Add to this the fact that the rash of lynchings which
had swept the South over the course of the 1920s and 1930s had been met with
increasingly harsh and vivid coverage in scores of Northern newspapers, and it
was fair to say that, by the 1940s, even some Southerners were beginning to
grow self-conscious about their longstanding traditions of “communal justice.”
Nobody in the contemporary South was particularly inclined to suffer
comparisons in the national press to Adolf Hitler and his legion of butchers.
And it was also true that some Southerners themselves had become distressed by
the aforementioned descriptions of anti-Black lynchings that were then commonly
seen in print. The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching
(ASWPL), brainchild of Texas suffragist Jessie Daniel Ames (1883-1972), was
perhaps the most prominent outgrowth of this latter impulse towards social
reform. Anti-lynching activists like Ames were not necessarily in favor of
bringing an end to the era of Jim Crow, mind you. They were still white
Southerners who tended to maintain fairly patrician ideas about racial and
social hierarchy. But they did believe, in the words of Ames herself, that mob
violence was “Hateful and hostile to every ideal of religion and humanity [and]
debasing and degrading to every person involved [.]” And so they campaigned for
state anti-lynching laws, promoted respect for judicial authority, and called
for the thorough investigation of any and all confirmed lynchings.
Now, none of this is to say that Southern popular opinion had wholly turned against lynching as of the early 1940s. There remained, among a broad swath of the population of the contemporary American South, a persistent conviction – fed by stubbornness, bigotry, and fear – that lynching, while unpleasant, remained an essential tool by which regular, middle-class white people might effectively deal with the so-called “negro problem.” In the minds of those who held to this conviction, there was simply no way that Northern newspapermen and activists could possibly understand the challenges facing white Southerners in attempting to preserve their way of life and maintain a degree of (extremely one-sided) intercommunal peace. The South’s Black community was the South’s responsibility to deal with, in short, and the white inhabitants thereof weren’t about to just give up what they considered to be one of the most effective tools for doing so just because some people were beginning to feel a little uncomfortable. So it was that Spessard Holland, newly minted Governor of the State of Florida, found himself in the midst of a somewhat fraught situation upon being informed of the murder of A.C. Williams in the spring of 1941.
On the one hand, it was plain to see, Holland couldn’t simply do nothing. The aforementioned ASWPL had some four million members by the beginning of the 1940s, all middle or upper-class white women who, thanks to his own efforts in repealing the state’s poll tax, could vote more easily than ever before. And at the same time, for a governor intent on promoting tourism and investment, he would have done himself no favors at all by sitting idly by while the national press turned the murder of A.C. Williams into a symbol of American brutality comparable to the worst crimes of European fascism. On the other hand, of course, Holland also couldn’t do too much. Though white, middle-class Florida women might have wanted him to take a hard line against the practice of lynching and its perpetrators, white, middle-class Florida men were not in a position to forgive a governor who appeared to agree with the Northern press that vigilante “justice” was fundamentally unacceptable. They had just elected Holland as the governor of the Sunshine State by a margin of thirteen points over primary rival Francis Whitehair (1900-1977), but they would gladly rescind their support if it appeared as though he was the wrong man for the job after all. That is, if he appeared not to understand what really mattered to the people of Florida.
There was also, of course, the matter of the federal government. Even by contemporary Southern standards, Florida’s reputation in terms of extrajudicial violence was shockingly poor. The Sunshine state had witnessed more reported cases of lynching in the 1920s and 1930s than any other state in the region while the government of the same had shown little inclination to do much of anything about it. It was, in consequence, arguably only a matter of time before the Roosevelt Administration opted to take matters into its own hands. Granted, Roosevelt had tread carefully in his first two terms, preferring to quietly encourage Black entrepreneurship and court the favor of Black community leaders without directly appearing to threaten the powerbase of the Southern Democrats whose support he needed to pass various pieces of New Deal legislation. But by the beginning of the 1940s, FDR had grown confident enough in his own popularity and in his control over the Democratic Party – his election to an unprecedented third term in 1940 being very much a case in point – that he began to shift in favor of using federal resources for the purpose of improving the living conditions and economic opportunities available to the nation’s Black inhabitants. One of the most significant outcomes of this shift in focus was the creation, in 1939, of the Civil Rights Section of the United States Department of Justice. In short order, this new arm of the larger federal law enforcement apparatus began to investigate violations of free speech, labor rights, and voting rights, and in 1940 even succeeded in ensuring that a white police officer charged with assaulting a Black youth while the latter was in custody in the State of Georgia did not have their charges dismissed by the relevant judicial authorities. Circa 1941, it was true, the Civil Rights Sections had yet to successfully bring about the prosecution of any of the perpetrators of a lynching. But the Department of Justice had definitely begun to investigate such incidents with greater rigor than ever before.
So, what did Holland ultimately decide to do? Caught between calls for law and order on one side and a communal impulse towards self-conscious conservativism on the other, how did he resolve the situation to the satisfaction of all involved? Well, like any politician worth their salt who wants to be seen as though they are doing something without actually having to do it, Governor Spessard Holland called for an investigation. A man named Maurice Tripp was assigned to look into the matter who then spent two weeks poking around in Jackson County. On May 25th – less than two weeks after Williams was found dead – he submitted his report, the conclusion of which declared that Tripp had found, “No mob sentiment. The largest number ever involved was only four persons. There has been no crowd or gathering of any great number of people. The sentiment of the general public is they feel that the officers did their duty.” This seemed to satisfy Holland well enough. When asked if he was planning to pursue the case any further, a spokesperson avowed – in so many words – that he was simply too busy with his duties as governor to take on the role of detective as well. He did ultimately opt to turn Tripp’s findings over to the Department of Justice, though not until July of 1942, long after whatever trail there might have been had long since gone cold. Reviewing the case on behalf of the DOJ, Assistant Attorney General Wendell Berge (1903-1955) pointedly observed that, “The situation was one that really justified and required an armed guard and protective custody in its best sense. The sheriff’s failure to do this is perhaps directly responsible for the second episode in this unfortunate affair.” Nevertheless, because so much time had passed, and because clear evidence of malice on the part of law enforcement was essentially non-existent, the Department of Justice opted to quietly close the case. To this day, the murderers of A.C. Williams have yet to be identified.
Governor Spessard Holland had thus shown himself to be a man who, when faced with a concrete example of attempted intimidation by one portion of his constituents against another, responded by doing only slightly more than nothing at all. It was accordingly a rather curious thing for Senator Spessard Holland to draw specific attention to the fact that, as of the early 1960s, certain people in certain states might still have been the victims of concerted campaigns of intimidation. In Holland’s opinion, it seemed, it was the position of the State of Florida that people should not have had to suffer being potentially frightened away from the ballot box any more than they should have been required to pay a poll tax in order to vote. But hadn’t he shown himself to be perfectly accepting of the use of intimidation tactics? Wasn’t it true that Black people living in the State of Florida had suffered intimidation throughout his own term as governor? And weren’t they still suffering from the same treatment in 1962? The only honest answers to these questions could not be other than “yes,” “yes,” and, emphatically, “yes.” To live in the American South as a Black person in the 20th century was to be the target of suspicion, discrimination, and violence. No Southern state existed in which this was not the case. And Florida was no different, notwithstanding Holland’s efforts to make it a desirable destination for vacationers and investors alike. The legislature of the Sunshine State may have opted to repeal its poll tax nearly three decades prior, but that only served to eliminate a means of state-directed racial oppression. State-sanctioned racial oppression – in the form of vigilante violence – was yet given free rein.
Given what is known of Holland’s personal and ideological proclivities – the pride he claimed to feel in his forebears who fought for the Confederacy, his later record of voting against both the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), etc. – one is inevitably forced to wonder how it was that he felt comfortable making the statement cited above. How could he claim – albeit indirectly – that potential voters were being intimidated in states where poll taxes were still being collected without inviting his reformist allies to scrutinize the goings-on in his own state? How could he avoid tethering himself to the larger movement for civil rights – something he seemed especially loathe to do – when the values he claimed to espouse were exactly those being given voice by a number of contemporary civil rights activists? “I am against state-directed voter intimidation,” he was saying, “and it is for that reason that I believe the poll tax must go.” But what would be his answer if the aforementioned activists proceeded to direct this same sentiment towards the State of Florida and its government? How would he respond to his fellow Southerners if they began accusing him of an act of betrayal? If they said he was as bad as the activists for claiming that anyone in the South was the victim of a concerted campaign of intimidation? The man seemed to be voluntarily putting himself in a bind.
Perhaps, in Holland’s mind, there was an important distinction at play. The poll tax, after all, was a mechanism of state policy. It restricted access to the ballot by way of an exercise of state power. But most other contemporary methods by which the Southern franchise was restricted were comparatively informal, coming, as they did, at the hands of private individuals or organizations. Violence, to be sure, or the threat thereof remained a common means by which prospective Black voters in a state like Florida were kept away from the polls. And it remained the prerogative of the various state parties and their leadership whether or not Black candidates or voters were permitted to take part in primary races. So what did the state have to do with any of this? As far as the states’ rights orthodoxy of contemporary Southern Democrats was concerned, political parties were private organizations whose behavior – as far as subjects like membership were concerned – was not the responsibility of the state to police. And while it was certainly true that the states then governed by Southern Democrats all looked upon violence and the threat of violence as crimes punishable by law, the leadership of these states also tended towards the principle that it was not rightfully the place of state officials to interfere with or else question the decision making of county or municipal officials. If a local investigation of a lynching or a riot in which the victims were Black turned up inconclusive evidence, in short, most contemporary Southern Democrats would have declined to press for a more thorough, state-led follow-up. Local officials knew what was best for their communities, they were inclined to avow, just as private organizations were perfectly capable of regulating their own behavior.
In what way is any of this relevant? Furthermore, in an environment where state governments could attempt to police the behavior of private organizations and local officials in an attempt to secure more equitable outcomes for their Black constituents but simply choose not to, is the distinction between state-directed voter suppression and state-sanctioned voter suppression really all that meaningful? Well, no, in point of fact, it isn’t. But for the likes of Spessard Holland, it might still have been personally relevant in spite of being practically meaningless. Perhaps, if he could only convince himself and his Southern peers that endeavoring to remove official barriers to voting did not equate to a desire to seek the legal removal of unofficial barriers, he could reconcile the apparent contradiction in his promoting a major electoral reform project at the federal level while still personally believing in the spirit of Jim Crow at the state level. It was, after all, as Kenneth Keating had said: Southern states had a great many means at their disposal to restrict access to the ballot besides the poll tax. And the poll tax had the downside of disenfranchising poor white voters as well as most Black voters. So maybe, thought Holland, it was time for the South to embrace a new reality. Maybe it was simply no longer necessary for the Black vote to be suppressed by way of laws and regulations. Florida had done away with its poll tax back in the late 1930s and managed to avoid an electoral revolt at the hands of newly enfranchised Black voters. For that matter, so had every other Southern poll-tax state whose legislators later opted to vote in favor of repeal. Party organizations, local officials, and concerned private citizens seemed perfectly capable of maintaining the status quo on their own. So why not let them? Why not, in keeping with the fundamental principle of small-government conservatism, peel back another layer of needless regulation and allow the people themselves to see to their own best interests?
If Holland had indeed come to this conclusion, it would certainly explain his willingness to claim that the tide of history flowed in favor of freedom from electoral intimidation. The poll taxes that had originally been implemented across the American South at the end of the 19th century in an attempt to reaffirm the rule of racist white Democrats following the collapse of Reconstruction had simply outlived their usefulness. Northern politicians had long since shown that they were either willing to allow their Southern counterparts to govern their states as they saw fit or simply lacked the power to pursue meaningful civil rights legislation. This being the case – that is, undisputed white rule in the South having been entirely cemented following the “hiccup” that was the immediate post-bellum era of multiracial democracy – Southern Democrats could now safely and more fully embrace the conservative, hands-off style of government to which their principles inclined them. There was no need to be heavy-handed anymore, or to sweep up poor white voters in measures that were never meant to target them. On the contrary, it was time for the South to fully enter the 20th century. Or rather, it was time for these five Southern states to join the rest of the South in this exact realization. Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia; these states had all abandoned the poll tax without coming to any harm. Indeed, as far as Holland was concerned, they were all of them the better for it. They were freer, more prosperous, more attractive in terms of migration. And while it was true that in these states there existed fewer legal impediments to Black political participation, this fact in no way reflected a less than absolute commitment on the part of the political elites therein to the basic principle of white supremacy. It may have been, of course, that the leadership of these five holdout states were simply afraid to join their brethren, afraid to give up one of the central legal pillars of the Jim Crow regime. But as Holland endeavored to explain to them – with a degree of patience bordering on heroic – they truly had nothing to fear. Nothing would change for them that really mattered. The South – for the foreseeable future – would remain as white as ever.
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