Word: faulkner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Shooting in the Streets. After receiving the Nobel Prize in 1950, Faulkner reluctantly began to develop a sense of responsibility to his audience, and also as a spokesman for the South, though he could still be unpredictable and self-contradictory. His most notorious statement on the racial crisis came in the course of a rambling, angry Oxford interview in February 1956 with British Newsman Russell Warren Howe, who reported Faulkner as saying: "If it came to fighting I'd fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes...
...that same interview, Faulkner insisted repeatedly that "the Negroes are right-make sure you've got that-they're right," and that Southern white racists "are wrong and their position untenable." But ripped from context, shooting in the streets made headlines. Negro Author James Baldwin condemned Faulkner, in large part for that statement, as "guilty of great emotional and intellectual dishonesty...
...Faulkner himself followed up the headlines with letters to many newspapers insisting that he had been misquoted by Howe. What the letters naturally did not mention was the fact that at the time of the interview Faulk ner had spent several days working his way through a demijohn of bourbon, a bout set off by a running quarrel about the racial question with his brother John Faulkner, who was a diehard segregationist...
...While. Not a call to arms for the South, but a plea to the North to "stop for a moment," to hold off forcible desegregation until the South had "a little time" to come to its senses and voluntarily grant the Negro's inevitable equality-this was Faulkner's concern in articles he wrote for LIFE and Ebony that same year. As early as 1948, Faulkner had put a similar plea in the mouth of Lawyer Stevens in Intruder in the Dust. And in a letter to a white student at the University of Alabama at the time...
Such views hardly make a man a radical from the Northern point of view. But in Mississippi, Hodding Carter recalls, people who had always vaguely thought that "Bill Faulkner is one of us" by the mid-'50s were calling him "small-minded Willie, the nigger lover." He was the target of abusive mail and crank phone calls. Around Oxford there were stores and filling stations that refused to serve...