“Segregation … has one aspect sometimes neglected, that thousands upon thousands of good white citizens never have any contact with Negroes except with servants and employees in the service trades; … whites and Blacks of similar professional interests almost never meet. There are 55,000 Negro college graduates in the United States. Most Southern whites have never seen one.”
“Roughly one million Negroes entered the armed services [during the war]. Many were treated decently and democratically by whites for the first time in their lives; the consequent fermentations have been explosive. … One famous remark is that of the Negro soldier returning across the Pacific from Okinawa. ‘Our fight for freedom,’ he said, ‘begins when we get to San Francisco.’”
Knoxville is “an extremely puritanical town, serves no liquor stronger than 3.6 percent beer, and its more dignified taprooms close at 9:30 p.m.; Sunday movies are forbidden, and there is no Sunday baseball. Perhaps as a result, it is one of the least orderly cities in the South — Knoxville leads every other town in Tennessee in homicides, automobile thefts and larceny.”
Governor Arnall of Georgia told Gunther that while “talking to Mr. Roosevelt one day, he remarked, ‘We don’t really have any Negro issue in the South; it’s white agitators from the Nawth that make the trouble.’ Mr. Roosevelt (who liked him), turned to him with that well-known twinkle: ‘You mean, Eleanor?’”
A Navajo chief…
