 Through everything there is a seed, and a time to every purpose under the heavens. A time to be born, and a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is plant. A time to kill, and a time to heal. A time to break down, and a time to build. The National Broadcasting Company presents A Time to Build. In cooperation with the Alfred T. Sloan Foundation, the Public Affairs Department of NBC has these past six months explored what we believe to be one of the most significant developments of our generation. The rebirth of the South. There's a long a hundred roads that twist from Atlanta to Chapel Hill. From New Orleans to tiny crossroads too small to be registered on any map. We began in the belief that we were recording simply an economic change. An evolutionary thing to be measured in decades. But we were wrong. What we witnessed and what we caught on our recording machine was a revolution in industry, in farming, in economics, and in the whole pattern of life as it lived in the South. We are ready now to report on what we saw and heard. The voices and the sounds you're about to hear are real. We have no actor. The script was written by a hundred hands and underlined by the sound of machines. A witness to all of this and our guide in the weeks to come is Mr. Henry Cassaby, distinguished foreign correspondent and NBC Observer at the United Nations. Mr. Cassaby. At the outset, I'm afraid I must admit that I was chosen for this assignment not because of what I knew, but because of what I did not know. In talking to the gentleman who arranged this tour of the South, apparently my most appealing asset was my complete ignorance, ignorance I hasten to add of the South. You see, I'm in New England though. I was born there and there I lived until I joined that group of correspondence who worked at the crossroads of the world. In London, I know, in Paris, I can tell you the best place to eat in Casablanca and I know how the walls of the Kremlin look when they're red with the setting sun. But there was one place, one huge area, virtually a third of a continent that I did not know, the southern portion of the United States. The mountains and the plains, the cities and the villages, the farmland and the waste that lie below the straggling line of Mason and Dixon, all that I did not know. Of course I thought I did. I read some books and heard some music. Listen. There it is. There is the South I thought I knew. Workers loading cotton at the wall in, tobacco smelling sweet in the hot sun, hovels for some folks and mansions for others and for the righteous, a mint jewel at the end of the road. I was completely, absolutely irrevocably wrong. While I'd been away reporting the goings on in Europe, a revolution had taken place behind my back. It's always exciting to observe a revolution. What would you give to be taken back to Philadelphia 1776 and hear the voices of the folk of independence and the rights of men? No such magic is afforded it. But in this age of science we have a magic of our own, a wizardry compounded of test tubes and chemicals and spinning reels, the tape recorder. I need but touch it. And like some latter-day Aladdin, I summon up whom I will. I remember one evening in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the location, as you know, of the University of North Carolina. I had gone there to seek out one Paul Green, the author of In Abraham's Bosom. Here I knew I could find a starting out place for my journey, a guide for the unknown places that lay ahead of me. These eyes had looked on much of the South, the old and the new. Tell me, Mr. Green, I said please, of the changes you have seen. There is a new culture in the South that goes along with the new economic and industrial era of this part of the country. It is a glorious thing that is true because there are some nations, some sections of the world that may have a tremendous industrial and economic and engineering power and not a company that with what I would call things of the spirit. We need to smile at the word spirit, but maybe it's a good word. Take the case of Sparta, ancient Sparta. Her citizens were trained to fight, and Sparta gave no culture, no art, no music, no drama, no great epic poetry to the world. But think what Athens did. In the South, we have something of the spirit of Athens working among the people. There is a new and powerful dynamic of beauty in the South, the grace, the decoration, even the fire and inspiration and glory of the people's lives is now being realized in their sense and in their spirits to cultural values. We've had the privilege of this NBC documentary of traveling on the road with the North Carolina Symphony Society. Now there I suppose you have an example of the flowering of culture in the New South, and I believe you've had something to do with it. Well, I remember when the efforts to found the symphony were congregating or coming to a permitting boil. One of the leading educators stood up in the meeting and said that he was against having an orchestra here because the musicians were notoriously lax in their morals and if we had such a group here at Chapel Hill, this group would contaminate the students body. Well, I got up and tried to make a reply to that and I said, take a great professional tennis player. They come by here and we let the boys see them and it has tremendous effect on the playing power of these boys. Now I think we've got a good orchestra started down here and have good musicians and the young people who are interested in the violin and the piano and the tuba and the combos can come and listen and watch good players at work think what it would do to that improvement in their own chosen art. The other night, no doubt you heard a folk song out of the mountains of North Carolina. I think the name of it is Johnson's Old Grey Mew played by the symphony arranged here and I heard the other night in the midst of the legislature of North Carolina and the legislators listened to it, shouted their applause and one of them on the money committee said, I say let's give Benjamin Swarley an air that he won't. South still has I think the potentiality of being one of the greatest creative cultural regions of the earth and I think it's popping out this culture. That's a good word. I'm not ashamed of it. Here in Chapel Hill, this little southern town right now as I'm talking, there are 100 or 150 people getting ready to get their supper and go to that typewriter to write books. And when I came here in 1916, the only man in town that had written a book was Dr. Archibald Henderson and he was a miracle. But as I say tonight, there must be 150 people in this little town writing books. There are people here composing music tonight and composing poems, dreaming their dreams out on paper for the edification of the soul I talked about. Now we are going back and are trying to beautify our lives. The things of the spirit. I heard that in a hundred different ways in a hundred different places. Not all had Mr. Green's solicity of expression, but whatever the words, the message was the same. Consider, for example, Mr. Ralph Ford. Mr. Ford is a grocer in Georgetown, South Carolina. He's known lean times. He can remember days when not a single customer pushed open his screen to announce his meet. Then a few years ago, the Georgetown Mill opened down the road and, well, here's how Mr. Ford put it. Well, he took the biggest change that I've seen in the pop-in real estate. When we put poor the military in there, we were at a lower level we were trading amongst ourselves and we were living, but we were doing more trading with each other than anything else. And then how about now? Well, it's a different proposition now. It's wide open market. Well, when I put it in these terms, Mr. Ford, how about your own business? How would you compare your own business now to what it was before the mill came here? Well, before the mill came here, I think we employed about six people. Six, yeah. And how many now? Twenty-six. How about tens of volume of business? Well, we didn't hear much income back in the old days. I'll tell you now, I'm going to give you a favorite expression of both the international people coming to Southern Crafts Corporation. They came to Georgetown and, of course, like any other industry, had their faults. They have a terrific smell, see? Yes, as a matter of fact, they told us about it themselves. You know, they got around and they asked us if we were all the time like Dr. Bell and myself, what does it smell like? I said, it smells like bacon and eggs, me. So we traveled across this land, to Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida. We thought Texas and learned how courageous men fight back the dust when rain doesn't come. We went to Natchez and talked to one who had gone out from the South in return, Tennessee, Mississippi. Each turn of the road was a new starting out place and always there were hills beyond the hills. There was one facet of Southern life that I had been warned might be well to leave alone, the social aspects of the revolution, the changes that have taken place in the relationship between, as one Southerner put it, those with white skin and those with brown. But I found that Southern thinkers were perfectly willing to discuss the subject. Like all sincere visitors to the South, I was well aware that there were some things in my own hometown that I would rather see ignored by kings with neither solution nor recrimination. The ignorant are best prepared to learn. I learned much. I learned from Dr. Mitchell, the guiding light of a little-known organization that typifies the new attitude. Tradition, of course, dies hard. But listen. Until three or four years ago, the newspapers in our good Southern states felt treated most Negro news with a slight scoff in their attitude and bearing of the 1850s. Negroes were hard on news, if news, then funny news or crime news. We saw that and thought something ought to be done about it. Senator Tavares of our friends said, look, save us all the clippings out of your local paper on this thing. We threw them in a big shoebox. Got a young journalist and piece out of the emerald to take the box of clippings home after about a year and dump it out on his bedroom floor. His wife called around in the pile of clippings and saw them out in the five little piles and it turned out to be the five main ways to be mean in the Southern white paper. Then he wrote a smart little pamphlet on what was in the little pile. And it was done with wit and with restraint and good temper and illustration and example. And we printed it as a little pamphlet. In it, in big black print, there were five rules of what to do. They were building headlines and using courtesy titles and treating the news impartially and what to do in crime and so on. Then we were very lucky and got the Southern newspaper publishers to send that out to all their people. Then we were able to get local committees of people, very large church women to go and call an editor and talk to them about what was in the little book. I won't go further, but you can see that that could clean them up paper by paper and it has done so as to a large proportion of the papers of the South. So here you've had a specific effect from your activity? Well, you never can know how much one little organization does on one of these things. But three years ago, most of the papers were careless and most of them were careful. Well, in what other fields like that have you operated, Dr. Mitchell? Well, I'll give you another one. Notariously, the police are a problem in all matters of race relations. A colored guy on the street is accused of some crime. A white policeman comes up and made it and that's an interracial incident. And other colored people are a little inclined to say, there's that poor colored man being beaten up by that big white cop and ain't that bad. And it's admitted that our police have not been too well paid, no in many instances too well trained, no too careful of everybody's rights. What could you do about that? Well, we talked to all the guys that know about criminology and police administration and we wrote another little booklet called Race and Law Enforcement, How the Police Automated Hand. Then we got our friends in each state to send that to every sheriff in every county, to every chief of police. Then again we got the church women to go in little committees of three and four and call on the sheriff, booking hand and talk to him about getting the police and his deputies to swing around or this way of behaving in that county. I'll give you one little story out of that. In a county in a deep southern state in the south end of that county, I won't name it, the three church leaders went and called on the sheriff and wrote back into us, give them as a so-and-so. We took the little blue book to our sheriff and the sheriff said everything is all right. He is nice to color and all his deputies are nice to color. But could you send us one more copy of that little blue book we want to give it to the night watchman in the jail? Dr. Mitchell, I wonder about this. In what you're doing, do you encounter resentments? Do you have opposition? Do you have trouble? Some, but not much. You can do things here both if you're polite. All you've got to do is be courteous and truthful, honest and people respect that in them. They want to do better and they will if they're decent about it. And the people in power are decent people too. They just want a little time and a little more knowledge and it's not for courtesy and we can work it out. We'll work it out, he said. That was a recurring theme. We heard it often in a lounge car threading its way through the smoked-dimmed outskirts of Birmingham in a businessman's club just outside Atlanta. A Negro dock worker used almost these same words one hot afternoon as he paused in his work to wipe his brow and talk for a moment with these inquisitive fellows. We'll work it out. It's a compact with the past, a challenge to those who will come after. Listen to this voice, George Buchanan, editor of the Columbia Record in Columbia, South Carolina. I believe that the racial problem in the South and the racial problem in South Carolina in particular is nearer solution today than it has been in many years. What the Negroes call gradualism is, of course, an attempt by the whites and by the Negroes to educate the people of the state in sound racial relations and granting fairness and fair treatment to persons of all races. The whole problem of racial relations has been an up-and-down process. I think we have made and are making very considerable progress throughout the South in better racial relations generally. And here's a voice rich with the music of his people. Emre Jackson, Negro editor of the Birmingham World. Listen, here is the past and the future. Well, in some of the newer industries which are coming into the South, you have a few Negroes who are being given better jobs. One of the things is the matter of training for these new jobs which are opening up. And it may be that when they get more training that they will be able to step into some of these newer occupations. Others have heard that phrase, that promise. Let's sit for a moment in the back row of this Negro school. A late afternoon sun splashes across gaily colored dresses and the uniform blue shirts of the boys. It's almost time for the final bill. Already the lucky ones near the windows are marking the scrawling shadows, counting the hours of sunlight left in this day. But wait, what's this? One of the boys is on his feet. He's talking of the future, his future. One of the changes that has been made in the South for the Negroes in the last 15 years are the building of more schools to try to equalize education among the races. When I finish high school planning to go to college, I want to be a lawyer. I think that if we all could get together in the South and learn to cooperate with each other and try to stop segregation, it would be better in the South and no one would have to be afraid of anything that would happen. School will be out in a moment and already they have forgotten. Mark the sun, young people. Count the time for your hundred plans. Time seems short. You're young. You've not learned what we have learned. There's always tomorrow. Whence came this change that we have marked over the land? What was the compelling force that stirred into life this New World Renaissance? We brought that question to Dr. Rex Winslow of Chapel Hill. Why, I asked, why has it happened this way just now? Well, it hasn't gotten that way just now. It has gotten that way through a period of time, but the change has been stirred up by such shaking events as the Great Depression and two world wars, which upset all ways of doing things and all ways of thinking. The change once started tends to be cumulative. But there must have been some other natural physical handicaps that the Old South had on its back that prevented it from coming to this new era more quickly. That is true. The South carried over after the Civil War a bankrupt economy and a bankrupt point of view. Much of the South continued to operate what was in effect a peonyed system in which the land was owned by relatively few families and a great many people without property worked that land. Under this system there was no incentive to do two things which is necessary in any prosperous society. You've got to have an incentive that will make the worker put out. And you've got to have an incentive which will make the owner and the enterprise accumulate and save capital to reinvest in better tools and production techniques. There was no incentive for the tenant farmer and the renter to produce more since the landlord got it all. So he inclined to let the soil wear out and inclined to be shipless and not economically ambitious. He raised the big families of kids to tend the crops and these kids could not afford to go to school, they were needed to work so they grew up to perpetuate the system. On the other hand, the families who owned the land had not much incentive to save and invest. They used the surplus to live a very gracious and hospitable life as contrasted with the behavior of the owning class in New England where frugality and industry were virtues. Therefore you have a sociology which as long as it persists tended to hold back those elements of productivity namely worker output and capital accumulation which are characteristic of other sections of the United States. As a newspaper man it was only natural I suppose that sooner or later I should turn to a fellow craftsman Bill Workman, news analyst, editor of station WIS in Columbia, South Carolina. Bill, how did it all begin? Well the big thing in industry that impresses us who are kind of growing with this picture and there is this fact that industry like agriculture is becoming diversified. It means in a number of respects it means increased income and the textile field there only so much money to be made in the average run of jobs. You become a doffer or weaver or whatever your specialty may be. You're in that, you become good and you draw good wages but in the more technical fields synthetics and so on the pay is higher and the people prosper accordingly. But we felt that perhaps there was something more some missing ingredient too subtle to be charted or measured a thing without dimensions or form or shape. Once again we found ourselves in the pleasant bookline study of Paul Green. Mr. Green, why this revolution now and here? Well it's almost the same sort of question on a farmer in a drought. It won't rain. It just won't rain. He looks at his crops burning up and he gets up at night to see if there's any lightning in the sky any sound or sign of coming what he calls falling weather. One morning he'll get up and the air feels different. He doesn't know why but it feels different and along about noon or slightly after noon you'll see these dark little clouds in the west and then a little later the clouds will thicken and soon you'll hear a roar and rumble of thunder down under the western earth and your shiver and the crops will shiver and the trees will shiver because they sense the coming of rain. Now why did it rain? The times were right for rain. Yes, there is a new music over the land. Listen to this. It's like the beat of a heart sounding of a pulse but there's melody there too if you will listen. What are they making? Steel? Is this how coal is mined or how they are freezing food trapping flavor and nourishment in icy temperatures? It doesn't matter. It's all there. You can see the pins on the map a new factory where six years ago there was a sleepy time-haunted village new ways to grow food better methods of raising cattle new, bigger, better. The words repeat like the refrain of a song speed it up. This is a time to build. Of course, some of the old survive. The ancient pride is still there the love of land that Jefferson knew and Patrick Henry and the others not in a few years or a decade nor yet a generation does one wipe out the past but I have seen a revolution in economy, in industry, in agriculture, in living. It's a proud thing conceived in sunlight and born of courage and of hope a revolution contrived not of anger nor of hate but of pride and vision. This then is the new self the promise and the fulfillment the future rising from the ashes of the old. To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven a time to be born and a time to die a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted a time to break down and a time to build. You have been listening to a time to build the first in a series of 13 programs entitled Heritage over the Land based on the developments in the American South. Our field reporter has been Arthur Hepner this program was written and directed by William Allen Bales produced by Miss Lee F. Payton. These reports on the new South of the first in a series done in cooperation with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation it is planned that other programs will deal with a remarkable growth and changes in other sections of America. Next week at this time we will bring you the second of the series a story of the new changes that have come to those who farm the lands that once were thrall to cotton.