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poor white trash that work the plantations.

Lillian Smith, it seemed to me, accounted for that white element better than anything else in her book. It's that that her book is important for, and not the Negro question.

I don't think it's much accounted for in that. They had an inferiority complex, of course. They were pushed down and around. The only thing that was lower than they were was a Negro, and so they naturally wanted to stick up above that. I mean, you don't want to be pressed down to the lowest level, so you tend to keep that thing that is low already, you keep it low. That keeps you from being submerged. You can tell the difference between you and that.

You must remember that the south had a very strange settlement. The people that came to settle the South were not the kind of people that came to settle New York or Pennsylvania or New England. I mean, in the very earliest days--the colonial element. The immigration that came into New York and Pennsylvania and Ohio and New England and Wisconsin and so on out, didn't go into the South.

Well, one was a fleeing of culture, the other a transference-- the South simply transferred the culture of England into the South. I mean, bringing England into the South, whereas in the North they were starting a new country.