Southern Influence in National Politics

Southern Influence in National Politics

Howard Zinn opens this address to the Third Annual Spring Conference of SNCC by rejecting the assigned title, "Southern Influence in National Politics," arguing that it perpetuates a myth: that the United States is otherwise a decent, democratic nation merely spoiled by a few evil Southerners. He insists racism is a national, not a Southern, characteristic, noting the country has been a slave nation for roughly as long as it has been a free one, and that Negroes moving north or West Indians moving into England encounter the same prejudice found in the South. He argues the Negro has almost always been a minor issue in American political concern, except briefly around the Civil War when the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments passed. Zinn then examines the Kennedy administration as an example of national, not merely Southern, failure. He describes the fight over Rule 22, the Senate rule requiring two-thirds to end a filibuster, and how a 50-48 vote early in Kennedy's term could have been swung by two votes Kennedy declined to change, possibly due to an unproven deal with the South. He cites Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania's 1963 speech naming the "Senate establishment," including Richard Russell of Georgia, and Clark's discovery that Woodrow Wilson had replaced twenty-three committee chairmen in 1913 to advance his program, something Kennedy did not attempt. Zinn details Kennedy's balancing act: inviting Martin Luther King Jr. to the White House while also hosting John Patterson of Alabama; appointing Thurgood Marshall to the circuit court while appointing segregationist judges in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Georgia, including Robert Elliot; and naming Merriweather, former campaign manager for Patterson and Admiral Crommelin, as director of the Export-Import Bank. He broadens the critique to the American political structure itself, arguing it fails not only Negroes but the poor, citing 8.5 million families earning under $2,000 a year alongside 700,000 families owning 25 percent of the nation's wealth, a distribution unchanged for decades. He argues the same structure has failed to secure peace. Zinn concludes that voting alone offers little real power, and that SNCC's method, creating independent centers of pressure and embarrassment outside official political mechanisms, illustrated by an account of a quiet sit-in at Leb's restaurant in Atlanta, represents the meaningful "Southern influence" the South can now offer the nation. He closes by describing political engagement as a temporary means toward eventually discarding political mechanisms altogether, ending with the words "we shall overcome."

By Howard Zinn · Genre: Political Speech, Political Commentary, Civil Rights History · 6,007 words

First lines

Howard Zinn was an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and wrote the book SNCC: The New Abolitionists to document their important work. In this speech, delivered at the Third Annual Spring Conference of SNCC, he questions the title of his talk given by the conference's organizers and challenges the audience to ask tough questions about the challenges facing the civil rights and student movements.

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American politics · Southern history · regional influence · political power · historical analysis · United States history · political movements · national policy · American South · political science · government history · political dynamics

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