An Integrated Picnic

Outside of the employer-employee relationships the lives of the two races rarely interest. An exception occurred this weekend when the Campbell's Soup factory held its annual open house, a "once a year day' complete with fried chicken, cold soda, popular music, and softball. But the factory needs every bit of Negro support it can muster. Along with Vita Foods (who distribute Eastern shore pickles and herring up and down the Atlantic seaboard) it is the town's chief source of Negro employment about 90 per cent of the colored people here work in one of the two plants. Just now there is a strong movement to unionize the Campbell's plant, which offers, as its maximum wage for skilled laborers, $1.90 an hour. (An unskilled laborer who works across the Chester River in Wilmington, Del., can earn around $2.40 an hour; a skilled worker at Campbell's unionized Camden plant earns around $2.70.)

When two groups of students held sit-in demonstrations here this winter, the white community was forced to realize that there was more to this integration idea than just talk. Although there was only one real "incident' then-a group of students were chased from a roadside tavern back to town, and a week later they were permitted to enter the same place untouched-there may yet be a certain amount of potential difficulty here. The whites have not yet made a major concession to their colored neighbors, and it's difficult to tell how they will accept integration when it begins to become a fact of daily life.

The sit-in demonstrations gave rise to a certain among of activity among the Negroes here. It caused, for example, the formation of a local chapter of the NAACP. However, none of the local Negroes have much knowledge of political tactics or ideas, and, what's more, every local leader is deeply dependent upon the white community for economic security. Right after the sit-ins the colored community did manage to organize a boycott of all stores in town which do not employ Negroes. The only hitch was that after a week or so people grew weary of shopping in Wilmington and informally dissolved the boycott, having gained nothing.

II: July 30, 1962

One has only to spend a little time with the Negro population of a Southern town like Chestertown to catch the full force of phrases like "they live in a different world." The town is tiny, both whites and Negroes have deep roots there, and yet the difference between their respective worlds is enormous. A Negro cannot see the same town as a white, his accent is often unintelligible to his white em-employer (who may have been born two streets away), and no white would think of imitating the Negro style of dress.

White business men, of course, view this difference as the prop on which their tranquility rests. They are assured of the support of most of Chestertown's Negro leaders, whose security still depends upon their approval. This is an increasingly tenuous sort of arrangement; yet for the past 15 years it has managed to satisfy the Negro community, providing it with unmistakable signs of material progress while masking the fact that Chestertown has not even begun to achieve actual integration.

In conversation white leaders cannot help but suggest the kind of things they field. "We don't like the idea of you people coming in here to destroy the quiet, placid life we all enjoy," one man told my Negro partner and me in the midst of a relatively calm discussions. "What you people don't seem to understand is that the whole thing is really a matter of choice. I don't choose to live in your people's world, and they don't choose to live in mine."

An Honest White Man

Older white men, accustomed to a calmer, more paternal relationship with their dusky charges, often talk more frankly. Chestertown's chief health officer is a grey-haired, cigar-smoking migrant from the deeper South: neither his accent nor his words suggest the compromise with Northern ways that one finds among even the most inflexible natives of Chestertown.

After insisting that his own department is thoroughly integrated (which is more or less true), he set the tone for the conversation by describing a recent meeting with a Pakistani health official. "We could learn a great deal from those people," he began, his inflection reminding us that an honest person gives credit where it is due, even if he must praise an off-colored Asian tribe. "Do you know that their men and women never meet until they have to get married? Their society has no problems of immorality."

"Your people," he told my partner, "are fifty years behind us, dirty and immoral. They just don't know how to live the right way. About 44 percent of their children are illegitimate. Of course our people are slipping, too; I don't know what's wrong these days, but I don't want to see it continue. You," he reminded my partner, "are different; you're educated."

Indeed, a good many of Chestertown's Negroes do live in conditions appalling to whites, and to Negroes accustomed to better things. Their thin wood-frame houses which cover two unpaved streets near the center of town are cracked and peeling. One wonders (as, most likely, people have wondered for the past 30 years) just how much longer these houses could last. Many of these Negroes could afford better, but habit and the relatively low rents set by their colored landlord have kept them immobile.

Working Private

Until World War II a Negro had no need of education to get on in Chestertown. He had no possible source of employment save as a domestic for a white family, or occasionally as a gardner or field worker. There were no factories in the areas, and of course no self-respecting store would take him on. As a consequence most of the people who today from Chestertown's Negro middle class left home to "work private" in New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore. Few of them ever intended to stay away (family roots are extremely strong among Chestertown Negroes), and by the time the war began most of them were back, in view of the homes where they had been born. But even today some of them boast of how "Mrs.--called my husband the best kitchen man she had even seen." And despite years of suscribing to national newspapers, they are far more conscious of the private life of the hiring class than of the international events that have surrounded them. For example, one night my landlady gave me a detailed account of the Titanic's sinking, including an extensive list of its first-class passengers and a fairly clear account of most of their backgrounds.