Putting the South on the Psychological Map: The Impact of Region and Race on the Human Sciences During the 1930S‪.‬

IN EARLY 1939 HARRY STACK SULLIVAN, THE NEW YORK PSYCHIATRIST, spent several weeks in Greenville, Mississippi, studying the effects of race on personality development. Walker Percy later sketched Sullivan's habit of conducting research in his uncle Will Percy's pantry. Every afternoon Sullivan "made himself a pitcher of vodka martinis," a drink unfamiliar to the locals, and "listened and talked to any and all comers," both "white folks" who found their way through the dining room and "the cook and her friends and friends of the cook's friends" entering from the kitchen. Percy admired Sullivan's irreverent method. Although commissioned "by a foundation," Sullivan realized "no one can make sense of any kind of human relations in three weeks," and he "none too seriously made the best of it." (1) Percy's account makes for a quaint tale of an interloper derailed by the South's impenetrability and then assimilated to its friendly ways. The truth was more ragged, yet introduces another story: how North-South encounters helped transform the human sciences during the 1930s and particularly the concept of personality. Contrary to Walker's memory, Sullivan was not a houseguest throughout his stay. Across town at the Hotel Greenville, Sullivan wrote "in despair" to Charles S. Johnson, a leading black sociologist at Fisk University, about "the abysmal lack of any opportunity" for black youth and their inability to trust, leading to conclusions that "(b) the problem of the Deep South could best be solved by a holocaust; and (c) I am a damned fool to expect to understand anything much about human personality." (2) Rather than decide brief fieldwork was useless, Sullivan was intellectually shaken.