Rare, like Mr. Clean with hair

A few weeks ago I was in my grandmother's basement helping my dad move an 11-ton marble coffee table. Good old Gran, six years dead, kept a lifetime of books down there in the damp and the mildew and the cobwebs. Upon cursory inspection, most of the books seemed rather pedestrian. Many of them were children's texts Granny used as a schoolteacher way back when. Others--judging from the multiple copies--were probably leftovers from the bookstore my grandfather used to run.

But a couple of books immediately caught my eye. One is a simple green hardback called Contemporary Essays. It was published in 1928 and includes essays by Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, H.L. Mencken, George Santayana, and Virginia Woolf. I haven't read much of it yet, but the Eliot essay, about the tension between an artist's individuality and the lush traditions of his medium, is pretty damned interesting.

The other book is called Race Relations and the Race Problem: A Symposium on a Growing National and International Problem with Special Reference to the South. It was published by Duke University Press in 1939. Scanning the insides of its dust jacket, I noticed one of the contributors was a zoologist from Berkeley. My curiosity was piqued: any essay about race by a Jim Crow-era zoologist had to be good.

I wasn't disappointed. I couldn't bear to read the whole thing, but I picked out the central thesis easily enough: whenever two races find themselves in close proximity (thus forced to compete for a finite set of resources), the races will naturally remain at odds until one eventually marginalizes the other following a sustained period of superior fertility and/or mortality. The author compares the birth rates, death rates, and age compositions of whites and blacks in both rural and urban environments, then goes on to consider other factors, such as birth control and immigration policy. Ominous conclusion: "Since our cities will doubtless continue to be potent destroyers of Negroes for many years, the fate of the Negroes will be decided on the farms and in the small villages of the Southern states."

Yikes.

Also compelling were a couple of papers I found tucked inside the front cover. One is a copy of a letter written in July 1956 by a partner at a D.C. law firm criticizing the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and advising local school boards on how best to circumvent the decision's mandate. The other is a transcript of a speech given by a fellow segregationist, also in July 1956, to a group called The Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties.

Your dead grandmother's musty basement: where history comes queasily alive!