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Winner of the 2013 Sarah Gordon Award
n 1956, Herbert Ravenel Sass wrote, "It is the deep conviction of nearly all white Southerners in the states which have large Negro populations that the mingling or integration of white and Negro children in the South's primary schools would open the gates to miscegenation and widespread racial amalgamation" (1-2). Sass's article, titled "Mixed Schools and Mixed Blood," was printed as a pamphlet for the Citizens' Council of Mississippi and was also published in the Nov. 1956 issue of The Atlantic. Concern about miscegenation was a strong persuasive element for many southerners, and segregationists used a platform of anti-Communism to further their agenda. Sass argues, "It must be realized too that the Negroes of the U.S.A. are today by far the most fortunate members of their race to be found anywhere on earth. . . . What America, including the South, has done for the Negro is the truth which should be trumpeted abroad in rebuttal of the Communist propaganda" (2). By associating Communism with miscegenation, segregationists spread the notion that to be antiCommunist, and therefore patriotic and American, was to be supportive of segregation and opposed to miscegenation.
For southerners, this loyalty extended even further. To be a segregationist, against any type of integration but particularly miscegenation, was to be a supporter of southern identity. Jon Lance Bacon1 writes that in Black Monday, a 1956 pamphlet, Tom P. Brady claimed that "U.S. Communists adopted their 'plan to abolish segregation' after the failure of an earlier plot 'to destroy the South'" (qtd. in Bacon 94). During this period of racial conflict and Cold War fear, Flannery O'Connor wrote and published her 1954 short story "The Displaced Person," a story that focuses not only on the anxiety caused by the presence of a foreigner in the rural South, but also on the anxiety created by the potential for race mixing. My focus is on the function of miscegenation in "The Displaced Person" and its link to the fear that pervaded the US in the years of the Cold War following World War II. Though the story is intensely regional, and southern beliefs about race mixing are central to the plot, the impact of the entire country's anxiety about Communism...