The Black Calhouns

by Gail Lumet Buckley

  According to his honorable discharge paper, John Harris was born in Richmond, Kentucky, in 1924. He had brown hair and eyes, was five feet eleven inches tall, and weighed 168 pounds. His civilian occupation was student and his military occupation was pilot. Under “campaigns and battles” the entry was: none. Under “service schools attended”: pilot training. Under “decorations and citations”: the American Campaign Medal and the World War II Victory Medal. John completed his pilot training in the last Tuskegee class. By 1945, the air force had begun to desegregate itself. John Harris trained as a bomber pilot, not a fighter pilot; this meant that future bomber crews would be integrated. But there were still no civilian jobs for black pilots.

  John Harris and Catherine Nash met at Kentucky State, where she was a librarian and he was a freshman on the GI Bill. They were married in 1948. Their state of Georgia, Fulton County, marriage certificate, read: “I hereby certify that John S. Harris (COL) and Catherine Graves Nash (COL) were joined together in the Holy Bonds of Matrimony on the 5th day of September 1948 by me Homer G. McEwen, Pastor First Congregational Church, Atlanta, Georgia.” First Congregational had been the spiritual home of so many Graveses, Nashes, and Calhouns over the years. The twenty-eight-year-old bride was beautiful in a white satin gown, with a veiled headdress framing her radiant face. The large wedding party included Harriet’s three-year-old daughter, Cheryl Chisholm, as flower girl. Catherine and John’s daughter, Karen, would be born in 1953.

  Karen Harris remembered her parents:

  I think Daddy majored in history because his first job here in Atlanta after they married was as a history teacher at David T. Howard High School [the school that Walter White won the funds for during World War I]. After I was born he got a job with the old Schlitz beer company … He handled the black distributors. He was gone a lot, but all that changed when Schlitz promoted him and we moved to Milwaukee.

  After World War II, certain industries, especially beer, whisky, and cigarettes, realizing that black buying potential was significant, began aggressively wooing postwar Negro families with advertisements in black magazines and newspapers. They also sought out talented black candidates, especially veterans, for mid-level executive jobs. Schlitz called itself “the beer that made Milwaukee famous.” Working for Schlitz in Milwaukee was a very good job indeed for a black veteran. Corporate America was inching itself to the forefront of postwar desegregation.

  Catherine was three years younger than her third cousin Lena Horne, whom she did not really know—though they met in Fort Valley, Georgia, in 1928 when Lena was nearly twelve and Catherine was almost nine. Catherine would no more have had Lena’s political problems in the 1950s than fly to the moon. She might very well have had Lena’s opinions, but she never would have voiced them outside her home. Unlike Catherine, Lena had been raised in the North, and her grandparents there, having come from the South where politics were forbidden to Negroes, had a passionate faith in political action. Lena had been formed by the politics of Cora the Republican/suffragist/uplift activist and Edwin, the lapsed Republican Tammany man. Catherine, a Southern Negro woman who came of age in World War II, would have had less than zero opportunity for political expression. So Catherine, like many Southern women white and black over the decades, became a domestic goddess. In the words of her daughter:

  She made ALL my clothes until I went to college! … Singlehanded she crocheted tams (about 50) for the drill team at our high school where she was the Librarian. No one ever suspected my clothes weren’t from [a store] …

  Was 1945–1946, the moment of victory against the Axis and the moment when the world was still idealistic about the United Nations, the point when America could have become more liberal about race? Not in the South. Black soldiers were hated—especially black soldiers who came home wanting to vote. Killing black voters was still encouraged and condoned by white Southern officials, including U.S. senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi (cited in Richard M. Dalfiume’s Desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces), who called on “red-blooded Anglo Saxon” Southerners to use “any means” necessary to stop blacks from voting. “If you don’t know what that means,” Bilbo added, “you are just not up on your persuasive measures.”

  In the North, oppression took the form of blacklists and red-baiting. In the South, everything was more visceral. “The first nigger to vote will never vote again” read a sign on a black church during the 1946 Georgia primary. Maceo Snipes, a black veteran, the only black to vote in Taylor County, Georgia, was taken from his house and shot to death the day after the election. Two days later, on July 25, 1946, in Walton County, Georgia, George Dorsey, a twenty-eight-year-old black veteran of the war in the Pacific; his twenty-three-year-old wife, Mae Murray Dorsey; and Roger Malcolm, aged twenty-four, and his wife, Dorothy Dorsey Malcolm, who was seven months pregnant, were all killed—taken from a car driven by a white man, J. Loy Harrison, who employed both couples as sharecroppers. The mob stopped the car and sixty bullets were pumped at close range into the bodies of the two black couples. Harrison, the only eyewitness, was brave enough to be quoted in the August 5, 1946, issue of Time magazine:

  A big man who was dressed mighty proud in a double-breasted brown suit was giving the orders. He pointed to Roger and said, “We want that nigger.” Then he pointed to George Dorsey, my nigger [italics mine], and said, “We want you too, Charlie.” I said, “His name ain’t Charlie, he’s George.” Someone said “Keep your damned big mouth shut. This ain’t your party.”

  The Dorsey-Malcolm lynching “party,” known as the Moore’s Ford lynching, was said to be “the last mass lynching in America.” But no charges were ever brought against any of the twenty men rumored to be part of the lynch mob. For all practical purposes, lynching in the South, which white Southern senators would not permit to become a federal crime, was a state-sanctioned institution—and victims were always murdered with impunity. But most decent people everywhere were appalled by Moore’s Ford, including President Harry Truman, already angered by assaults on Negro vets in uniform. “My God! I had no idea it was as terrible as that! We’ve got to do something!” said Truman when Walter White, the influential NAACP leader, informed him of the Georgia murders. So he set about desegregating the U.S. military and creating the Presidential Committee on Civil Rights.

  One young black Atlanta lawyer and World War II veteran was also ready to act. Donald L. Hollowell, a former army second lieutenant, was made so bitter by his treatment and the treatment of black GIs in the war that he determined to make a difference. Hollowell is quoted in Saving the Soul of Georgia: Donald L. Hollowell and the Struggle for Civil Rights, by Maurice C. Daniels:

  I grew up considerably in the military … I learned how to work with men and to guide them; to administer an office; to be disciplined in conduct and habits. At the same time there were many bitter experiences that were sufficient to cause a man to hate. And I am confident but for the fact that I found Jesus along the way back when I was about 15 and had practiced a relationship with Him, I would have entered civilian society with a heart full of hate … but I also knew that hate consumes one and that one has to use that energy constructively … That’s what I chose to do.

  In 1940, for example, there were only seven black lawyers in Georgia: three in Atlanta, two in Savannah, and one each in Macon and Augusta. But by 1945 black Atlanta lawyers were winning blacks the right to vote in the Democratic primary. Hollowell, in partnership with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the great Constance Baker Motley and Thurgood Marshall, became the foremost civil rights lawyer in Georgia. Unfortunately for Hollowell, in 1948 he also came to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover.

  In a January 1948 memo Hoover wrote: “You are requested to conduct a thorough and discreet investigation to determine the loyalty and patriotism of the above-named individual Donald Lee Hollowell …”

  Two years earlier, in October 1946, when Hollowell was a student at Lane College in Tennessee, he was elected to represent the Lane student body at th
e Southern Negro Youth Congress convention. Paul Robeson was a guest speaker at the convention—reason enough in 1947 for the attorney general to deem the whole convention “subversive.” For Hollowell, however, meeting Robeson was inspiring:

  He was a big man. A big, dark-brown-skinned, heavy-voiced, beautifulvoiced man who loved what he did. Who was smart—when at Rutgers was an honor roll man. He was smarter than the average man. Therefore, he saw no reason for himself to be subjugated because of his color … When he sang “Climbing Up,” it just made your soul feel the need, and your mind to understand that this is a man who believed that you have to work at eliminating those things which stand in your way.

  Hollowell’s life was now thoroughly investigated, and it was determined on February 8, 1948, that there was nothing “derogatory” or pro-Communist in his background. But in March Hoover asked the FBI’s Washington field office to see if HUAC had anything on Hollowell. The field office reported that “inquiries failed to indicate any lack of patriotism or loyalty for US Government.” In September 1949 the U.S. assistant attorney general wrote a rather cryptic memo to Hoover on the subject of Hollowell that basically stated that there was no evidence to warrant “prosecution” at this time. Should “additional proof” be received, or should “confidential informants become available to testify,” the division would, of course, “re-examine the case.” The only explanation for Hoover’s obsession with Hollowell was, of course, that he hated blacks almost more than he hated Communists. He especially hated blacks who were working for civil rights.

  In August 1948 Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9981 desegregated the U.S. military and created both a Fair Employment Practices Committee and a Civil Rights Commission. Truman came from the border state of Missouri, which had stayed in the Union but remained a slave state. As a young Democratic politician working for the Kansas City Pendergast machine, he inherited a black ward and knew blacks as individuals. As a World War I officer, he had sympathy for black troops. But there was nothing new in the 1948 Georgia elections. In Montgomery, Georgia, the local NAACP president was beaten for escorting blacks to the polls. In Vidalia, Georgia, a man named Robert Mallard was lynched because he voted.

  It was an election year. The Republican platform, which favored a federal antilynching law, was also in favor of military desegregation:

  Lynching or any other form of mob violence anywhere is a disgrace to any civilized state, and we favor the prompt enactment of legislation to end this infamy … We are opposed to the idea of racial segregation in the armed services of the United States.

  The Democratic platform said:

  We again state our belief that racial and religious minorities must have the right to live, the right to work, the right to vote, the full and equal protection of the laws on a basis of equality with all citizens as guaranteed by the Constitution.

  The Democratic Party called on Congress to support the president in guaranteeing Negroes the right of full and equal political participation, equal opportunity in employment, the right of security of person, and equal treatment in the service and defense of the nation. But white Southerners did not want blacks to vote, or to have decent jobs or a sense of personal safety. They especially did not want blacks to defend their country—so thirty-five Southern delegates walked out of the Democratic convention and formed the Dixiecrat Party, whose candidate was Strom Thurmond:

  We stand for the segregation of the races … We oppose and condemn the action of the Democratic Convention in sponsoring a civil rights program calling for the elimination of segregation …

  Southern Democrats continued to reject all efforts to make lynching a federal crime.

  The Progressive Party’s platform stated:

  The Progressive Party condemns segregation and discrimination in all its forms and in all places … [It supports] Federal anti-lynch, anti-discrimination, and fair-employment practices legislation, and legislation abolishing segregation in interstate travel … and full use of Federal enforcement powers to assure free exercise of the right to franchise … a Civil Rights Act for the District of Columbia to eliminate racial segregation and discrimination in the nation’s capital … the ending of segregation and discrimination in the Panama Canal Zone and all territories, possessions and trusteeships.

  Henry Wallace’s Progressives were about twenty years ahead of their time. Blacks were torn during that election year, choosing between a racial revolutionary and the man who desegregated the army. At first Lena supported Wallace. The good thing about the racial revolutionaries: they were the most idealistically inclusive party since the abolitionists. Progressives were the only party of all races, creeds, colors, ages, and social and economic conditions in America, running the narrow political gamut from pink to very red. The trouble with the racial revolution was not the open Communists—it was the many background figures who were in what Lena’s friend Howard “Stretch” Johnson (the Cotton Club dancer who became a very important Harlem Communist) called “Deep Freeze.” Johnson, the brother of Cotton Club chorus girl Winnie Johnson, described the underground organization:

  We divided our top leadership, of which I was a part, into three segments: One segment we called the Availables, who continued to function in the open; the second segment consisted of the Unavailables, who were linked to the Availables through a courier system; and then a third segment we called the “Deep Freeze,” whose members were not active at all but were just holed up somewhere in case FBI surveillance and reconnaissance exposed those who were in the Unavailable category. We also had a fourth group whose members were sent out of the country to eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. We said they were “On Ice” … I was so well known, having been in show business and everything, that it was decided I should join the ranks of the Unavailables.

  The Communist platform read:

  The most shameful aspect of American life is the Jim Crowism, the terror and violence imposed upon the Negro people, especially in the South … [it called for] a national FEPC law … the outlawing of the Ku Klux Klan … Federal enforcement of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.

  Black voters bypassed the pink and the red, even Paul Robeson, and gave their votes to the man who desegregated the military—which says a lot about how blacks felt about being in the military, despite the shameful treatment they received from their government and the Jim Crow army in both world wars. The Atlanta Negro Voters League was founded in 1949 to concentrate the Negro vote on candidates most favorable to blacks in local elections. Atlanta had the first Negro-owned radio station that year: WERD.

  In 1949 Dr. Helen Nash, aged twenty-eight, third of six children born to Homer and Marie, became the first black woman to join the attending staff of St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Described by her cousin Kathryn as “A Lady trim and elegant / If breadth of forehead shows breadth of brain / She’s really most intelligent,” Helen had received her bachelor’s degree from Spelman College in Atlanta in 1941—and, against her father’s wishes, in 1945 she received her medical degree from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, America’s only black medical school. She completed her internship and pediatric residency, including chief residency, at Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis. Opened in 1937 as a segregated hospital to serve the black community, Homer G. Phillips was the only place in St. Louis where nonwhite doctors could get internships and residencies. (Helen was named president of the Homer G. Phillips medical staff in 1977.)

  Homer Nash Jr., the lone Nash brother, actually had the first postwar wedding. “Homer Nash Nutt’s a mighty fine Nutt / of which there is no doubt / His vocal tones range from do to so / while in height he seems to sprout.” A graduate of Morehouse and Meharry Medical College, twenty-two-year-old Homer Nash Jr. married Ellene Terrell Bentley in Columbus, Ohio, on August 25, 1947. Ellene had attended both Fisk and Atlanta University. Homer and Ellene moved to St. Louis to be near Helen, who was already a hospital resident. Homer soon began a successful private pediatric practice.

  In 1950 t
he Nash children lost their grandmother Katie Webb Graves, aged eighty-eight. Her husband, Antoine, had died ten years earlier. She and Antoine were an example of a long, devoted marriage—an inspiration to their children. Katie had been the family matriarch, the redoubtable yardstick of rectitude. Katie, who called herself “Catherine” after she married Antoine Graves, was always a child of Reconstruction. One of the Talented Tenth, Katie took uplift and good works seriously—like her cousin Cora. Katie’s life was the Southern version of Cora’s. They were both clubwomen—but belonging to very different clubs. Much of Katie’s Southern philanthropy was church-oriented, while Cora’s Northern philanthropy counted on lay benefactors. Southern clubs were mostly mini-Chautauquas—gatherings for self-improvement on every possible subject save anything controversial. That went double for politics. Cora on the other hand, was fighting real social and political ills—not discussing horticulture. Both women were important leaders in their communities. Katie’s importance came from her husband. As Mrs. Antoine Graves Sr., she was the wife of one of the most successful black men in Atlanta. Cora won her importance on her own. Yes, she was married to Edwin F. Horne, a key figure in New York’s Black Tammany, but she was also a member of the National Republican Women’s Auxiliary. Cora was her own woman. Katie, who had everything except political and social freedom, was a prisoner of her time and place in the segregated South. Katie had a long, happy, loving marriage—Cora did not. But fate had brought them together in other ways. Each of them lost her eldest son. It was to Katie that Cora wrote in 1918 when her newlywed son, Second Lieutenant Errol Horne, died in the influenza pandemic. Writing on black-bordered stationery, Cora said that Errol’s young wife, Lottie, was “a wreck,” that Errol had a military funeral with full honors, and that his commanding officer had been very complimentary—but “O, it is a deep, deep sorrow.”