By Paul Gaston
Scientist and Pulitzer Prize winner E.O. Wilson once wrote:
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We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit
to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell
about where we came from, and why we are here.
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In my autobiography, Coming of Age in Utopia: The Odyssey
of an Idea, the “utopia” was created by my
grandfather, Ernest Gaston, an Iowa
journalist and communitarian reformer. [Communitarianism seeks to balance the
needs of the individual with those of the community.] Struggling to find ways
of exposing and combating society’s exploitation and inequality, he drew up a
plan for a “model community” that would produce a good society for all. In his
community land would be common property, individualism would reign in
production and distribution, and so-called “natural monopolies” would be owned
and operated by the community.
Fairhope, as his colony was called, began to take form in
1894, on the Eastern shore of Alabama’s Mobile Bay.
It grew steadily, reaching its peak in the 1920s. Numerous visitors were drawn
to the community by its idealism and progressive character.
By the time I left for college in the early 1950s, Fairhope
had been turned on its head, and had become a place where people came to escape
social problems, not to solve them. My mother would later snort that it had
become “Wallace country” [after the ultraconservative Alabama Gov. George
Wallace].
All signs in the 1950s pointed to mounting struggles for
justice in the South. I wanted to be
part of those struggles. The course I chose was to teach southern history in a
southern university. In 1957, I joined
the faculty of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville
and stayed for 40 years.
In the first decade at the university, I was a counselor
and friend of students leading protests against the school’s racial policies.
During that period a movement was built that swept away most of the remnants of
a white supremacy culture and opened the way for the creation of a multiracial
institution of distinction.
In the community, I served on the board of the NAACP and the 1963 sit-ins we joined led to the virtual
end of segregation in Charlottesville’s
theaters, motels, hotels, and restaurants. In the struggles at both the university
and in the city we experienced firsthand the truth that deeply ingrained
privilege is never given up voluntarily.
These experiences, coupled with
25 years of helping to direct the civil rights work of the Southern Regional
Council, and my several visits to South Africa to learn from
anti-apartheid leaders there, helped me to understand that struggles for a just
society do not come easily, and never really come to an end.
Too often, my father used to tell me, struggles against
injustice lead to palliatives, not cures. Gaining the right to vote and to sit
where one wanted, for example, did not get to the root causes of racial
discrimination. Then, when the palliatives were falsely (and successfully)
portrayed as the cures, they became barriers to a fully just society, not the steppingstones to one.
There is a phrase in the Talmud that says what this means
for those who would go beyond the palliatives:
It is not given to us to complete
the task. Nor may we remove our hands from the plow.
Charles Gomillion, the hero of the Tuskegee freedom movement, put it this
way: "Keep everlastingly at
it."
And Ned Cobb, an Alabama
sharecropper, said simply: “It takes many a trip to the river to get clean.”
Paul Gaston is a retired professor of history at the University of Virginia and author of the new book Coming of Age in Utopia: The Odyssey of An
Idea.
March 25, 2010
