The Klein bill went nowhere, which came as little surprise to the Courier reporter who covered the world of black World War II veterans. John H. Young III was the son of a well-to-do black family from Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He had graduated from Morehouse College and played semipro football before spending the war as a flight instructor at the Tuskegee Institute. When he left the Army, Young contacted the Courier and persuaded the editors to let him travel across the South and assess the mood and postwar prospects for blacks in different states. The resulting series, which appeared every week for several months in early 1945, grew increasingly pessimistic as Young traveled from South Carolina and Tennessee into the Deep Southern states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, where he found “the spirit of the Negroes at its lowest ebb.”
Moving to the Courier’s Washington bureau, Young took over the veterans beat. When he visited the Veterans Administration for the first time, he was alarmed to discover that its long-serving head, Frank T. Hines, did not have a single Negro on his staff. Soon afterward, President Harry Truman replaced Hines with General Omar Bradley, and Young held out hope that the hero of the Normandy invasion might rectify the situation. But when Young interviewed the general and pressed on the issue, Bradley grew defensive. He argued that to appoint a black adviser would look like an admission of discrimination, and that to hire a Negro as his administrative assistant would mean passing over more experienced white employees. Did that mean that Bradley had no plans to hire someone who could advise him on the concerns of black vets? Young asked. “Yes, I am not considering any such appointment,” Bradley replied curtly.
Charting the legislative path of the GI Bill on Capitol Hill, Young identified all the ways in which its original 1944 version penalized Negro veterans. To be eligible for educational benefits, returning soldiers had to be twenty-five or younger—a provision that shut out older black enlistees. The bill only covered courses of study that lasted at least thirty-five weeks, excluding the part-time and shorter trade school training sought by blacks with limited time and money. Housing loans were available only for properties priced at “reasonable normal value”—a tough standard to meet in Northern urban neighborhoods where the price of real estate had skyrocketed since the beginning of the war. By the end of 1945, Young was able to report that amendments to the bill had eased some of the most punitive conditions, but not enough to eliminate numerous disadvantages for Negro vets.
In the most racially insidious feature of the GI Bill, administration of its benefits was left to individual states. In the South, especially, that allowed for a proliferation of petty obstacles designed to frustrate and disqualify Negro applicants. To investigate, Young traveled across Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, identifying himself as a veteran Army pilot seeking a GI Bill business loan. At every turn, he encountered a maze of maddening conditions: Loans were available only for property and equipment, not for merchandise needed to stock shelves. Applicants were required to provide an existing business address, and to have lined up a security guarantee before the local VA office approved the loan. Most discouraging, applicants had to show evidence of previous experience in their proposed line of work, making it impossible for them to pursue a new profession or to branch out beyond the world of black businesses serving black customers. When Young told one banker that he hoped to open a furniture store, the man scoffed. “I can’t imagine a Negro wanting to go into the furniture business,” he said.
In another monthslong Courier crusade, Young highlighted the plight of Negro soldiers who had received so-called blue discharges. By the end of the war, as many as 200,000 veterans—a disproportionate number of them black—had been sent home early with blue-tinted certificates indicating no specific misconduct but flagging “habits or traits of character which served to render retention in the service undesirable.” The early discharges became notorious as a means of casting out bed wetters, klutzes, and suspected homosexuals; but they also gave white officers a way to get rid of blacks who offended them for any reason. Many Negro servicemen returned with stories of being deliberately enticed or harassed to take the releases, without knowing what they were signing. (Underscoring how widely misused the blue discharges were, 30 percent of recipients who protested the status to a War Department review board won those appeals and were instead issued the white or beige certificates denoting honorable service.)
For most vets with blue discharges, the consequences only became apparent once they got home. The original language of the GI Bill stated: “a discharge or release from active service under conditions other than dishonorable shall be a prerequisite to entitlement to veterans benefits.” That did not appear to exclude blue discharges, which technically were not dishonorable. But in a series of exposés, Young documented how the Veterans Administration gave its local and regional officers free rein to deny benefits to the blue certificate holders. When challenged, VA officials fell back on semantics, arguing that the mere reception of a blue discharge amounted to a “dishonorable condition.” The stories raised enough disturbing questions that a sympathetic member of the Senate Veterans Committee had them read into the Congressional Record—but ultimately, Young’s crusade had little impact in altering the fate of the blue dischargees.
While Young campaigned on behalf of black vets, his bosses in Pittsburgh and their colleagues in the Negro press tried to pin down the new president on his civil rights agenda. After more than a decade of watching FDR kowtow to Southern Democrats, the black editors hoped for better from Harry Truman. In late May 1945, less than two months after Roosevelt’s death, Truman did something his predecessor never had: he received a delegation from the National Negro Press Association. Robert L. Vann’s widow, Jesse, and Courier president Ira Lewis were among fifteen black publishers and editors who met with Truman and presented him with a list of demands. Although Truman did no more than “listen with interest and cordiality,” as the Courier described it, the group left encouraged. When Truman met with the group a second time in March 1946, Jesse Vann read him a statement “on behalf of 15,000,000 colored Americans” commending him for the handful of blacks he had named to his administration.
The publishers were even more encouraged a year later when Truman appointed a Commission on Civil Rights. Southern Democrats immediately threatened to block any of its recommendations, but Truman talked tough about persisting with the commission as he prepared to run for election in 1948. Once the race was under way, he further endeared himself to the Pittsburgh editors by praising a Courier story that blasted Republican foot-dragging on a housing bill. During a campaign stop in Los Angeles, an aide brought a copy of the Courier aboard the President’s train. Later, the aide told a Courier reporter how happy Truman was to see the paper echo the “Do Nothing Congress” attacks he was making on the stump. “The boss got a kick out of the Courier telling off Congress on the Housing bill stall,” the aide said.
As the race entered the home stretch in the fall of 1948, however, Truman turned evasive on the subject of civil rights. Southern Democrats had stormed out of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia after the adoption of a civil rights plank pushed by Hubert Humphrey and other Northern liberals. Forming the Dixiecrat Party, they had nominated South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond for president, a challenge that threatened to cost Truman crucial states in the Electoral College. In the meantime, the Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey, gave a series of forceful speeches denouncing bigotry and calling for a strong “legislative approach” to uprooting racial inequality. Impressed by the Republican candidate’s rhetoric and frustrated by what it saw as continued “Southern control” over the Democrat Party, the Courier endorsed Dewey and joined every other newspaper and polling organization in America in predicting that he would defeat Truman handily.
Yet as Truman biographer David McCullough would note, one reporter remained conspicuously bullish on his prospects: John L. Clark of the Courier. Clark, the former “Wylie Avenue” columnist and publicist for Gus Greenlee’s Pittsburg
h Crawfords, had spent months aboard “the Truman special” as the train crossed the country and “had taken seriously the size of the crowds,” as McCullough put it. In Clark’s last dispatch before the election, he predicted that Truman would win Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, despite Strom Thurmond’s candidacy, as well as Ohio, for all of the power of Senator Robert Taft’s Republican machine. In all, Clark put twenty-three states with a total of 252 electoral votes in Truman’s column. While predicting a narrow Republican victory, Clark speculated that an upset in “one of the big states now conceded to Dewey” would be enough to put Truman over the top.
When Truman shocked the nation and won, Clark chalked it up to the black vote. In the end, Truman carried five more states than Clark predicted for a total of 303 Electoral College votes. In the largest of those, California, his edge among black voters was more than double his margin of victory. Truman’s advantage among blacks also exceeded his overall victory margin in the pivotal Midwest states of Ohio and Illinois. The Courier gave Negro voters additional credit for Truman’s wins in Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, and Arkansas, which limited Strom Thurmond’s inroads to four states. It was a convincing enough victory, the paper argued hopefully, to provide Truman “a mandate, the meaning of which cannot be forgotten” to make good on “his progressive position on civil rights for minorities.”
Once the election was over, Truman finally did begin to make good on some of his grand promises on civil rights. Two weeks after the election, he put out word that there would be no racial segregation at his Inaugural Balls. In his next State of the Union Address, he laid out a plan for what would be one of his most heralded achievements: the official end to segregation in the U.S. armed forces.
In Pittsburgh, the Courier’s editors took satisfaction in their role in bringing about that long overdue milestone, but it was tempered by sadness that two men hadn’t lived to witness it. One was Robert L. Vann, who had led the fight on behalf of black serviceman for so long. The other was Ira Lewis, the loyal deputy who took up the cause after Vann’s death. In the summer of 1948, Lewis had been named to a committee of sixteen Negro leaders appointed to advise the Truman administration on how military desegregation should be implemented. But just two months before the election, on a trip to New York, Lewis suffered a fatal stroke. In a sign of the esteem in which both he and the Courier were held, Truman wired his “heartfelt sympathy” to Pittsburgh. Thomas Dewey hailed Lewis as “a fine American . . . and an influential leader.”
But now the Little Chief was gone, too, only eight years after the Big Chief. It would be left to Jesse Vann, Robert L. Vann’s quiet, self-effacing widow, to try to preserve their legacy, less than a decade into her apprenticeship as the paper’s treasurer and at a time when the Courier’s old rival, The Chicago Defender, was on the rise again.
At four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon in March 1949, Jesse Vann was in her office at the Courier when she received a visit from a pressman named Felix Robinson. Could she come to the newsroom? Robinson asked. As soon as her tiny, gray-haired figure appeared in the doorway, a cry of “Surprise!” rang out. The paper’s entire staff had assembled to wish their new publisher a happy sixty-fourth birthday. There were members of the old male guard that had built the paper with her husband: Bill Nunn; P.L. Prattis; Frank Bolden, now city editor; and Chester Washington, the sportswriter turned business manager who was about to depart for Los Angeles, to oversee the Courier operation there and later to run his own newspapers. There was Daisy Lampkin, the society matron and NAACP leader who was now the vice president of the Courier and the paper’s largest shareholder after Mrs. Vann.
There was also a group of younger female reporters who would prosper under Jesse Vann’s wing. They included Edna Chappell and Hazel Garland, a onetime maid who had joined the women’s section staff and would one day rise to editor-in-chief. Of them all, the most striking was a statuesque redhead—nearly six feet tall in heels, sporting a pearl necklace and dressed in the latest New York fashion—who presented Mrs. Vann with her gift: a gold charm bracelet engraved with the name of every Courier department. They called Evelyn Cunningham “Big East,” and she had just returned to Pittsburgh after reporting the first big story in the next front of the civil rights struggle, Down South.
• • •
ON A WARM GEORGIA evening in September 1948, six-year-old Dorothy Yvonne Nixon was gathering vegetables for dinner in the backyard of her family’s farm when she heard the sound of a car pulling up out front. Her father, Isaiah, was inside, resting after a long day of picking tobacco and cotton and tending to livestock on his hardscrabble, sixty-eight-acre property in the town of Alston, some 180 miles south of Atlanta. Her mother, Sallie, was in bed, recuperating from giving birth a week earlier to the latest of the couple’s six children, little Isaiah Jr. Her grandmother Daisy was sitting on the back porch, watching the sun go down, and together she and Yvonne, as she was known within the family, went to investigate the loud voices calling for Isaiah Sr. to come out of the house.
Two white men stood in the front yard, carrying guns. Yvonne recognized them as brothers who lived down the road: Johnnie and Jim A. Johnson. As she quietly curled up next to one of her sisters on the front steps, her father emerged in the doorway.
“Who did you vote for today?” Jim A. demanded to know.
“I guess I voted for Mr. Thompson,” Isaiah replied.
“Mr. Thompson” was Melvin Thompson, the state’s interim governor. Two years earlier, he had taken the place of Eugene Talmadge, the segregationist who had been reelected governor for the fourth time only to pass away shortly afterward. Now Thompson was running for a new term, but he faced opposition from Talmadge’s son, Herman, who had the strong backing of the Ku Klux Klan. For only the second time since Reconstruction, Southern Democrats also faced a new reality: the Supreme Court had ruled that they could no longer exclude blacks from voting in their primaries. Since then, another Negro farmer named Dover Carter had been bravely defying the Klan and registering blacks in Georgia’s Montgomery County to vote. Two of his newest recruits were Isaiah and Sallie Nixon, and that morning they had gone into Alston to cast their first primary ballots.
As Yvonne looked on, the brothers demanded that her father get into their car. When he didn’t budge, Johnnie Johnson pointed his shotgun at the house. Then Jim A. lifted his pistol and fired at Isaiah, striking him three times. Behind her, Yvonne heard her mother’s voice. “Fall, Isaiah, fall!” Sallie Nixon shouted as she ran out of the house.
It was a blur after that. The men got in their car and drove away. Yvonne’s mother dragged her bloodied husband into the house and called for a gypsy cab to take him to the hospital. Then there was a long two-day wait before her mother told Yvonne and her siblings the terrible news: Daddy was dead. The certificate listed the cause as a gunshot wound that had entered Isaiah Nixon’s abdomen and destroyed parts of his stomach, liver, kidneys, and small intestine. But Grandmother Daisy told Yvonne that the real cause was that her father had dared to “step over the line” and exercise his right to vote—and that there was no way that in Georgia two white men would ever be convicted of the murder.
The ensuing days and weeks proved Daisy right. Announcing Nixon’s death, the Montgomery County sheriff said that he had been killed for insisting on voting even after town folk had advised him not to do so. When the Johnson brothers were detained, they told a different story: that they had gone to the Nixon farm to offer Isaiah work and had shot him in self-defense after an argument broke out. The case was sped to trial by early November, and an all-white jury took less than three hours to find Jim A. Johnson not guilty. The judge also ruled that “there was no need to present a case against Johnnie Johnson” as an accessory. In the white press, coverage of the trial consisted of three perfunctory wire service reports that were picked up by a handful of newspapers around the country and ended as soon as the Johnsons were acquitted.
For the Courier, however, the rushed verdict was only
the beginning of the story. The editors in Pittsburgh became fixated on another angle: what had become of the young wife and small children who had watched Isaiah Nixon shot dead before their eyes? To find out, they dispatched a stringer based in North Carolina, A. M. Rivera Jr., to Georgia. When Rivera got to Alston, friends of Sallie Nixon told him that she had fled, in fear of another visit from the Johnsons or the Klan once the brothers were free. Quietly, she had buried her husband’s body in a faraway corner of a local cemetery, under a tiny gravestone marked “Father.” Then she had left town with her six children and mother-in-law, bringing only as many belongings as they could carry.
Eventually Rivera received a tip that Sallie Nixon was in Florida, staying with an uncle in Jacksonville. He wrote a letter to her address, and in early December he received an answer. Sallie reported that her children and mother-in-law were alive and safe, but that their circumstances were precarious. All eight were sleeping in one room of her uncle’s house, and the young ones had all come down with colds due to the change in climate. They were struggling with the adjustment to new schools and a town where they knew no one. Yet they were all terrified to return to Georgia. “Mama, I don’t want to go back because them people killed daddy and we don’t have anybody to stay with us,” four-year-old Margaret had told her mother. “I am afraid to go back up there.”
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