Word: chestertown
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...Cowan, a former Executive Editor of the Harvard CRIMSON, is in Chestertown, Md., with a group called "Project Eastern Shore...
...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 enourmous. A Negro cannot see the same town as a white, his accent is often unintelligible to his white employer (who may have been born two streets away) and no white man would think of imitating the Negro style of dress...
White businessmen, 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 satisfying 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...
Older while 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...
...totally unschooled in the ways of segregation would find nothing extraordinary on the surface of Chestertown's daily business life. Both Negroes and whites do their serious shopping on the town's main street and neither race is confined to the "inside lane." Negroes loiter in white areas, and when colored people talk and walk together no one seems to wonder on whose ground they stand. If Negroes eat at the same crowded restaurant or get their haircuts in one of two tightly packed barbershops, well, they might prefer it that...