James
McBride Dabbs (1896-1970), writer, teacher, theologian, and civil rights
leader, was a native of Dabbs Crossroads, near Mayesville, in Sumter County,
South Carolina. He was a briefly an English professor at the University of South
Carolina, then a longtime professor at Coker College; was for many years a
farmer at Rip Raps, his plantation at Dabbs Crossroads; and was a Presbyterian
lay leader. From 1957 to 1963 Dabbs was president of the Southern Regional
Council, a progressive civil rights—and human rights—organization.
His books The Southern Heritage (1958) and Who Speaks for the South? (1964) are essential interpretations of the history, culture, society, and mind of the South from its colonial origins to the mid-twentieth century. His personal and spiritual autobiography The Road Home (1960) is also valuable as well. The best study of Dabbs’s life, writings, and significance is Thomas Johnson’s two-volume dissertation, “James McBride Dabbs: A Life Story” (University of South Carolina, 1980, unpublished).
Dabbs completed the manuscript for his book Haunted By God at Rip Raps on May 30, 1970, saying, “There it is. I’ve done all I’m going to do to it.” He died later that day. It was edited by his widow Edith Mitchell Dabbs and published in 1972.
Dabbs’s assessment of the white South and its fierce attachment to the Civil War—and to the Lost Cause narrative it created to help it deal with defeat—is astonishingly relevant today, in the summer of 2015, in the week the South Carolina General Assembly voted to remove the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina State House grounds:
His books The Southern Heritage (1958) and Who Speaks for the South? (1964) are essential interpretations of the history, culture, society, and mind of the South from its colonial origins to the mid-twentieth century. His personal and spiritual autobiography The Road Home (1960) is also valuable as well. The best study of Dabbs’s life, writings, and significance is Thomas Johnson’s two-volume dissertation, “James McBride Dabbs: A Life Story” (University of South Carolina, 1980, unpublished).
Dabbs completed the manuscript for his book Haunted By God at Rip Raps on May 30, 1970, saying, “There it is. I’ve done all I’m going to do to it.” He died later that day. It was edited by his widow Edith Mitchell Dabbs and published in 1972.
Dabbs’s assessment of the white South and its fierce attachment to the Civil War—and to the Lost Cause narrative it created to help it deal with defeat—is astonishingly relevant today, in the summer of 2015, in the week the South Carolina General Assembly voted to remove the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina State House grounds:
The
South, which lasted as a nation for only four short years and which died at
Appomattox, was immediately resurrected as a dream. . . . The Civil War was
fought almost exclusively on Southern soil. It was lost. Out of this futile
defense of the homeland, and out of its destruction, there arose in the mind of
the white South the shining image of the Lost Cause. This was a highly
romanticized concept, but the image, though slowly fading, has influenced the
South for a hundred years. There arose a memory of a unified South which had in
fact never existed. It became the role of the white Southerner to remember and
honor this imagined past and as far as possible to keep it unchanged.
James
McBride Dabbs, Haunted By God (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1972)
This
admonition, FORTY-FIVE LONG YEARS after he wrote it, is something all
too many white South Carolinians, and all too many white Southerners, still do
not understand.
God
grant that we may all learn from our separate and shared histories, and move
forward into a bright future that learns from them rather than clings
desperately to them.
