RPW to S. Baskin Letter 3/22/65 Searchable Text

West Wardsboro, Vermont

March 22, 1965

Dear Suzanne:

          Another favor please!  I desperately need a quote from Faulkner’s Southern Historical Society speech, which is in Ch VI of Who Speaks _____ or Albert has it elsewhere in the office in a publication of the Southern Regional Council.  The quote concerns the wrecking of the  South twice in a hundred years on the Negro question.  It is several sentences.

Many thanks!

Red Warren

(handwritten letter)

429 : :                                                         Conversation Piece

          Faulkner:   

          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?”*/

          *Three Views of the Segregation Decision, Southern Regional Council, Atlanta, 196.