The Black Calhouns

by Gail Lumet Buckley

  In the summer of 1950 the national convention of the NAACP decided on a full-scale attack on educational segregation. In response to blacklisters, the organization ordered its own investigation of Communist infiltration. This was a year of many firsts: the American Medical Association announced its first Negro member; Althea Gibson became the first Negro to play in the National Tennis Championship games at Forest Hills, New York; and the first black player in the National Basketball Association, Charles “Chuck” Cooper from Pittsburgh, who played at West Virginia State and Duquesne, was drafted by the Boston Celtics. But there were still Northern cities with Southern mind-sets. Chicago was one of the worst because Southern blacks and whites migrated at the same time. Statistics show that between 1940 and 1950, a total of 1,597,000 Negroes moved out of the South. The Chicago race riot of July 12, 1951, erupted when a veteran, a bus driver, tried to move into an apartment in Cicero, Illinois—reputed to be home to the Chicago Mafia. A white mob smashed the apartment windows and set fire to the furniture. Governor Adlai E. Stevenson called out the National Guard. On July 15 the NAACP announced that the apartment building was now black-owned and would be rented to black and white veterans.

  In 1952, for the first time in seventy-one years, there were no recorded lynchings in America. But it was no wonder that only 21 percent of blacks voted for Eisenhower. He was remembered and disliked by blacks for testifying against the desegregation of the military. Now he told the NAACP that he opposed federal aid to segregated school systems, but would not dictate to Southerners how to run their schools. In 1953 the NAACP began its ten-year Fight for Freedom to end all racial discrimination by 1963. And the Supreme Court agreed to hear five school desegregation cases—culminating in Brown v. Board of Education in May 1954. White Citizens’ Councils, the “respectable” face of racism, now sprang up all over the South. White Citizens’ Councils, known as the “Country Club KKK,” sought to obstruct the 1954 decision in any way possible—through racist “education” as well as covert violence.

  Atlanta’s own Walter White, the hometown boy who was so brave during the race riot of 1906 when he pondered the idea that he might have to kill a man, died in New York City in March 1955 at the age of sixty-one. The Atlanta University graduate had been executive secretary of the NAACP since 1931. According to the New York Times obit:

  Mr. White, the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington, was a Negro by choice. Only five-thirty-seconds of his ancestry was Negro. His skin was fair, his hair blond, his eyes blue and his features Caucasian. He could easily have joined the 12,000 Negroes who pass the color-line and disappear into the white majority every year in this country. But he deliberately sacrificed his comfort to publicize himself as a Negro and to devote his entire adult life to completing the emancipation of his people.

  In 1930, while not yet executive secretary, White led the defeat of President Hoover’s appointment of Judge John J. Parker of North Carolina to the Supreme Court because Parker openly espoused racial segregation. In 1938 White came closer than anyone else to getting a federal antilynching bill passed, but it was defeated by seven weeks of Southern filibuster. Despite his personal feelings and the persuasions of his wife, FDR never publicly fought for the bill, which the NAACP had been officially pursuing since the 1920s. Roosevelt needed white Southern support in Congress more than he needed black votes, which he had anyway. But White was the author of FDR’s FEPC executive order on discriminatory practices in war industry employment. And in 1948 he was responsible for Truman’s stand on civil rights that caused Dixiecrats to leave the Democratic Party. In 1949 White divorced his first wife to marry popular South African–born journalist Poppy Cannon, food editor of House Beautiful magazine. (Poppy and Walter White became social friends of Lena and Lennie.) But White’s second marriage was a scandal because Poppy was white. Oddly enough, his first wife was just as “white” in appearance as Poppy Cannon, but no one had been scandalized then.

  In 1955 Atlanta desegregated the municipal golf course, but not the schools. The Georgia Board of Education passed a resolution revoking the license of any teacher who taught mixed classes or belonged to the NAACP. This was great for the NAACP, which had a surge in membership, and bad for the Georgia Board of Education, which was seen as a joke, even by many whites. Atlanta was fortunate in its mayor, William B. Hartsfield, who believed that the business of Atlanta was business—and good business required racial peace. Hartsfield, considered one of Atlanta’s greatest mayors, would serve six terms (1937–1941, 1942–1961), build biracial coalitions, and, in August 1961, oversee the peaceful integration of Atlanta schools. After he left office to become “mayor emeritus” and a consultant for the Coca-Cola Company, Hartsfield would call Atlanta the city that was “too busy to hate.”

  And Georgia was not Mississippi. Lynching returned to the South in 1955, with three in Mississippi, including that of Emmett Till. A black minister was lynched for voter registration action. As a result of white terror tactics, the number of registered black voters in Mississippi dropped from twenty-two thousand to eight thousand in less than a year. And a state official sought to create an “Authority for the Maintenance of Racial Segregation,” with the power to punish people for “interfering with individual rights under the auspices of the Federal Government like FBI officers investigating Constitutional violations.”

  In 1956 Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia called for “massive resistance” against school desegregation. The only Southern senators who refused to sign the manifesto were Lyndon Johnson of Texas and Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee. That year attorney Don Hollowell successfully defended the NAACP against the state of Georgia, which had demanded membership records and inflicted a fine of $25,000 against the Georgia branch of the organization. Hollowell also sued the University of Georgia Law School, in Athens, to admit Horace Ward, a black student. The NAACP had already won a major victory in the 1936 case against the University of Maryland Law School. Since the state did not have a black law school, it had to admit a black student to the white school. Now Hollowell, joined by an NAACP team, sought the same sort of ruling for Horace Ward in Georgia—but Ward was suddenly drafted into the Korean War. Governor Eugene Talmadge claimed to have had no hand in the action—but he had told an aide, “Keep that damn nigger out of the University of Georgia while I’m governor.”

  In 1946 Nellie Brown, the musical Brown sister, had received a bachelor of arts degree from Clark College, part of the Atlanta University Center (Asa Ware’s famous dream). While still in high school, then throughout the 1940s and 1950s, she had played the piano in various Atlanta clubs and restaurants. According to Catherine Nash’s daughter, Karen, “she played at everybody’s wedding in Atlanta Black Society.” A rare Southern “child of divorce,” Nellie was a divorcée herself. When she received her BA from Clark College in 1946, she was Nellie Brown Flanagan. In 1950, when she received her master of arts degree from Teachers College at Columbia University, she was Nellie Patricia Brown Mosley. As a pianist and composer she won prizes and even had a song recorded. On October 15, 1956, she signed a standard songwriter’s contract with Dootsie Williams, Inc. The contract produced a 45-rpm record on the Dootone label called “Crazy Over You,” sung by the Calvanes. Dootsie Williams, Inc., seems to have paid Nellie one hundred dollars for the rights to four songs.

  Outside Atlanta life remained difficult and dangerous for Southern blacks—and their white friends. In April 1957 in Americus, Georgia, snipers shot at Dorothy Day, the white Catholic peace activist, who was visiting the courageous interracial Baptist Koinonia community. Fortunately the drive-by snipers missed. In her Catholic Worker column of May 1957 she described the incident: “Last night I was shot at for the first time in my life … It is strange how the fear always comes afterward, your bones turn to water, and your whole body seems to melt with fear.”

  The Koinonia community continued to be threatened by terrorist attacks for its defiant stand against
segregation.

  In 1957 Atlanta, displaying the old mind-set, created a reading test for voter registration that the Atlanta Constitution said probably no one could pass. But changes were coming to Atlanta. That year Ella Baker, a fifty-four-year-old former NAACP field secretary, became executive director of the new Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), led by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. The SCLC was founded, in the words of James Weldon Johnson, to redeem “the soul of America.” As Dr. King wrote in January 1957:

  This conference is called because we have no moral choice, before God, but to delve deeper into the struggle—and to do so with greater reliance on non-violence and with greater unity, coordination, sharing and Christian understanding.

  The conference released a manifesto, encouraging black Americans to “to seek justice and reject all injustice” and to dedicate themselves to the principles of nonviolence “no matter how great the provocation.” It also called on whites to realize “that the treatment of Negroes is a basic spiritual problem.” The goal was to create an organization that would coordinate and support direct nonviolent action across the South. A small office was established on Auburn Avenue, with Ella Baker as SCLC’s first and, for a long time, only staff member. Baker would prove to be one of the most charismatic and important leaders in the movement, believing in “group-centered” rather than “leader-centered” action.

  Another future leader of the new nonviolent civil rights movement arrived in Atlanta in 1957 to attend college. As cited in The Saving Soul of Georgia, Julian Bond wrote:

  Even though Atlanta was a modern segregated city and the burden of segregation didn’t fall as heavily on black people in Atlanta as it did, say, in rural Mississippi, nonetheless, the Atlanta I found in 1957 was a completely apartheid society. There were some chinks in that apartheid armor. The Atlanta University Center … had white teachers teaching black people, probably against the law in Georgia [shades of Asa Ware], and there were the occasional white exchange students at Spelman, Morris Brown, Clark, Morehouse, or Atlanta University … but in all public places—restaurants, lunch counters, movie theaters, every place in life—there was a rigid divide enforced by law between black and white.

  Unlike the rest of the city, Asa Ware’s thriving educational and social center for Atlanta blacks, Atlanta University, was still as essentially “color-blind” as when Moses Calhoun entrusted his daughters to its care. Asa Ware’s nineteenth-century dream had become a twentieth-century reality. The first major campaign, the Crusade for Citizenship, began in late 1957 to educate and register thousands of disenfranchised prospective voters for the 1958 and 1960 elections. In 1958, twenty-eight Southern counties in various states with Negro populations up to 82 percent of the total population did not have one Negro voter. That year, to fight desegregation, the Georgia legislature suspended the compulsory school attendance law in the case of a child forced to attend school with children of another race. And credit was given on the state income tax for contributions to segregated private schools.

  By the end of 1959 Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina had not even begun token desegregation. The state of Georgia authorized the governor to close any school that ordered desegregation. And the state university refused to educate blacks even though their taxes supported the institution. Atlanta’s blacks were tired of waiting. From Saving the Soul of Georgia: “In the grand tradition of Atlanta’s black middle class, the community activists selected two candidates with impeccable and wholesome backgrounds.”

  Charlayne Hunter, the daughter of an army chaplain, and premed student Hamilton Holmes, son of a middle-class family long active in the civil rights movement, had applied for admission to the segregated University of Georgia in July 1959. (She became the celebrated journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault.)

  And Siny Calhoun’s great-granddaughter Cheryl Chisholm, daughter of Harriet and Chiz, was selected by community activists to desegregate an Atlanta high school. The year 1960 promised to be memorable.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  North/1960s

  “NOW”

  THE FIRST time I heard “We Shall Overcome” the singers were members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced snick), the offshoot of Ella Baker’s Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC, pronounced slick). Like the 1930s, the 1960s were an era of acronyms. The students in SNCC came from the same Missionary institutions that educated the Talented Tenth. The place was the 1961 National Student Association congress at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I was at the NSA congress as an observer for the New York–based National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students (NSSFNS, pronounced nessfeness), where I was a counselor advising black college applicants on available scholarships. I worked at NSSFNS because I belonged to the Kennedy generation. “Give something back” was the generation’s mantra. Among my Harvard and Radcliffe classmates there seemed to be only two career paths: the Justice Department and the Peace Corps. I opted for a different route but followed the pattern by choosing a nonprofit organization.

  Madison, Wisconsin, one of the great college towns in America, was a revelation. The Wisconsin campus made Harvard seem puny. I had never seen middle America before. I knew both coasts, but nothing in between. Now here was Madison, as beautiful as any European tourist attraction, under an endlessly vast sky. The landscape, so clean, dotted with barns, silos, lakes, and cows, was certainly exotic in its way to a city-dwelling New Yorker. The beauty of Wisconsin in the summer was in the flatness, the spaciousness—flat, yet lush and green. I had the same feeling of American spaciousness earlier that summer when I first saw Detroit, only my sense was vertical, not horizontal. I thought the smokestacks were thrilling—soaring into the stratosphere. (Since I was then polluting my body with cigarettes, air pollution was of no import.) I was newly in awe of the beauty of America. As an undergraduate, I was a typical Harvard elitist-Francophile-Anglophile, but as a child I had read and reread Stephen Vincent Benét’s “I Have Fallen in Love with American Names.” As a World War II child, I had also been patriotic. Now, in the summer of 1961, thanks to JFK and “giving back,” I suddenly felt patriotic again.

  The Southern civil rights battles of the early 1960s were between the haves and the have-nots—between the armed and the defenseless. Because of a plethora of martyrs, and the egregiously despicable actions of the armed, the have-nots won the moral high ground early. For the first time there were unbiased eyewitnesses: news photographers and television cameramen who went South in combat mode. The battle of black children and teens against dogs, fire hoses, and rabidly racist police was indelibly captured, on double-page spreads, in Life magazine, the news photographer’s magazine. Life turned the craft of news photography into an art form. Life was not alone. A front-page New York Times photograph of a brave little black girl going to school in New Orleans with her very big U.S. Marshal escorts suddenly became an iconic Norman Rockwell painting on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. In certain circles it was an earthshaking event: a clear editorial statement on the side of integration by the conservative magazine. The moral battle was won. Middle America above the Mason-Dixon Line was on the side of the angels—or at least sympathetic to them.

  At this point, the politics of black nationalism and “not in my backyard” white liberalism had not yet intruded on the sympathy of white Northerners, who enjoyed feeling superior to their Southern counterparts. Politics were not the point. The civil rights movement was about blacks having the same constitutional rights as every other taxpaying citizen: equality under the law, no taxation without representation, and voting rights. Official political victory came with the Civil Rights Act of 1964—but it took the assassination of another president who was a so-called friend of the Negro for it to happen. Northern sympathy toward the South had evaporated. The South had no moral persuasion, no equivalent of the small girl and the students; it had only
snarling haters, some of whom later regretted their actions. Congressman John Lewis told of the man who came to his office in tears to confess that he had been the one to beat him so terribly on the bridge in Selma, Alabama. In Little Rock, a young black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, isolated from the other “Nine” seeking to integrate Little Rock Central High School, received an abject public apology some twenty years later from the most hate-contorted white teenager of all, an otherwise pretty young woman with a hideous hate-twisted face. The civil rights battles of 1960–1964 were clearly about moral persuasion. Although the civil rights movement was an unarmed revolution, it did have two powerful weapons: images in newspapers, in magazines, and on the evening news; and songs—above all, Pete Seeger’s version of an old hymn, “We Shall Overcome.”

  Charismatic student leader Tom Hayden of the University of Michigan, editor of the Michigan student daily and a founder of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), was NSA’s president in 1961. It was later revealed that several NSA members were working for the CIA. I’m sure that Hayden was not. He was the real radical deal—author of the SDS manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, and a freedom rider. In 1961, however, a burning issue of the conference was whether the NSA would formalize its relationship with SNCC. It seemed a fait accompli, but the radical right Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) successfully campaigned against it. The Spanish proverb applies: “If you are not left when you are young, you have no heart. If you are not right when you are old, you have no head.” YAF, protégés of William F. Buckley Jr., were far too young to be so heartless.