by John Egerton
From that declaration, delivered when he was still a young man (thirty-nine), Booker T. Washington went on to twenty more years of influential service before his death in 1915. He was the unofficial “Secretary of Negro Affairs” for Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and a favored recipient of Northern philanthropy from such self-made men of wealth as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. None of his white admirers was able, though, to fulfill the one request he included in his Atlanta Compromise speech: that blacks be given a truly fair and equitable share of public support within the framework of segregation. “Separate but equal,” from the very first, was an empty and meaningless phrase.
Nine years earlier, another young Southerner, thirty-six-year-old Henry W. Grady, a white journalist and “New South” booster who was part-owner and managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution, had made a speech in New York that, like Washington’s address, had a curious staying power. Grady was already heralded as a colorful orator for his incisive commentaries on the South’s colonial poverty. (Once, describing a fellow Georgian’s funeral, he noted that the dead man was dressed in a New York suit and shoes from Boston, laid out in a Cincinnati casket, and buried under a Vermont marble tombstone; all the South furnished, he said, was “the corpse and the hole in the ground.”) In his 1886 address to an overflow audience of wealthy and conservative New York businessmen (one of whom was retired General William Tecumseh Sherman, drolly recognized by Grady as a man “slightly careless with fire”), the Atlanta speaker lived up to his advance billing.
The South must have economic growth and development in order to recover fully from the Civil War, he said, and the way to get it was to put the memory of war behind them, court Northern capital and industry, and treat their fellow citizens of color in a fair and honorable way. In the satisfied manner typical of whites of his class, Grady maintained that the race problem was virtually solved, and needed no further assist from the North. He made no apology for his belief in white supremacy, and his audience appeared not to expect or even want one; they and the Northern newspapers that spread the word of his appearance in days to come were full of uncritical praise for the dynamic journalist’s vision of a New South.
The welter of state laws and local ordinances mandating segregation of the races thus received affirmation and even a certain validity not only from the swelling ranks of political opportunists and demagogues but from the mouths of two earnest and presumably well-intentioned young Southern spokesmen, one black and the other white. Public opinion in the North, from the business leaders to the philanthropists to the man on the street, tended to seize upon the good news and ignore the bad. They had heard enough from Booker T. Washington and Henry W. Grady to be persuaded that the South was returning to the national fold, rejoining decent society. They could dismiss the rantings of Ben Tillman and Tom Watson as meaningless political diatribes; the New South, the Real South, was bright with promise and no longer a menace or a nagging concern. A comforting thought, no doubt—but unfortunately a long way from the truth.
More than a thousand blacks were lynched, almost all of them in the South, in the decade between Grady’s speech and Washington’s, and several hundred whites met the same fate; the death toll continued at a rate of about a hundred victims a year right on into the first decade of the new century. A rising tide of white extremism was sweeping through the South as the ruling majority, armed with a welter of new segregation laws, moved to complete the resubjugation of former slaves whose tenuous hold on freedom had been slipping since the end of Reconstruction.
Urban riots reflecting the growing hostility of whites toward blacks erupted in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898 and in New Orleans in 1900; in 1906, martial law was imposed to halt such outbursts in Brownsville, Texas, and in Atlanta. Two witnesses to the latter event were William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, a thirty-eight-year-old New Englander who taught at Atlanta University, and Walter White, a thirteen-year-old boy who lived in the heart of the city, where the four-day rampage of lawlessness took place. In later years, Du Bois and White would serve together in New York as officers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (hereafter referred to by its well-known initials—NAACP), and would eventually part company in strategic and philosophical disagreement over policy issues. But in 1906, before they even knew of each other, the Atlanta riot gave permanent shape and meaning to their understanding of the South and of the deep complexities of race.
Du Bois didn’t literally witness the riot—he was out of town when it erupted—but he saw the destruction and death that it caused, and felt the intensity of white radicalism that fueled the outburst. The effect was to strengthen in him a conviction that already showed through in his writing and would remain a central focus throughout his influential life—namely, that meek submission and accommodation to whites in the manner of Booker T. Washington would be disastrous and ultimately fatal to all people of African descent in America.
Du Bois was already recognized as a direct and dissenting rival of Washington. He had written The Souls of Black Folk, an incisive volume of essays on black culture, in 1903, and had organized a reformist task force of twenty-nine national (mostly Northern) black leaders at the Niagara Falls Conference in 1905. Largely in response to urban riots such as the one in Atlanta, he helped to found the NAACP in 1909, serving as the only black on its initial slate of officers; a year later he left Atlanta for New York to launch and edit a hard-hitting monthly magazine, the Crisis, for the new civil rights organization. There he was to remain for twenty-four years, solidifying his reputation as an outspoken advocate of black pride and racial justice.
W. E. B. Du Bois—balding, goateed, somberly formal in manner and appearance—was in every sense a formidable figure. Born and raised in small-town Massachusetts to parents of mixed African and European descent (“not Anglo-Saxon, thank God!” he always said), he got his first look at the South and its large African population when he enrolled in 1885 as a seventeen-year-old freshman at Fisk University in Nashville. Before he graduated three years later, he had discovered the strength and beauty of an oppressed race, and the revelation inspired him permanently. Three particular remembrances from his Nashville experience surfaced in his writing years later. One was the rigorous and challenging quality of his formal instruction. Another was the eager receptivity to learning shown by black children in the impoverished rural Tennessee schools where he taught each summer. And the third was the breathtaking beauty of a Fisk coed, Lena Calhoun—who later saw her good looks replicated in her talented and famous grandniece, Lena Home.
But Du Bois had little time for socializing. He went on to take another degree at Harvard, to study further at the University of Berlin, and to return to Harvard and earn a Ph.D. in 1895. Unable because of his race to get a teaching post at any of the major universities in the North, he taught briefly at Wilberforce, a black college in Ohio, and then conducted a research study on Negro life in the city of Philadelphia. In 1897 he returned to the South to direct a new program in the social sciences at Atlanta University.
One day in the spring of 1899, as he was on his way to keep an appointment with Joel Chandler Harris, an editor of the Constitution and creator of the Uncle Remus tales, Du Bois was jerked to a halt by something he saw in the front window of a grocery store. There on display was the twisted hand of a recently lynched black man. The heinous symbolism of that exhibit struck him with such force that he turned around and went home, convinced that not even the “better sort” of Southerner, like Harris, could mitigate the deep-rooted sickness in the souls of white folks.
Temperamentally an abrasive and cantankerous man—some said cold and arrogant—Du Bois more than compensated in scholarly and journalistic brilliance for whatever he may have lacked in personal charm. Walter White, who was known to some as a rather difficult man himself, more than met his match in Du Bois, and their time together at the NAACP was seldom tranquil.
“I am a Negro,” wrot
e White in his 1948 autobiography, A Man Called White. “My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.” Both of his parents were very light-skinned, and he could easily have passed undetected into the freer and more comfortable life of the white majority. But the reign of anarchy and violence that gripped Atlanta during four oppressively hot Indian summer days and nights in September 1906 caused him to know, “in terror and bitterness of soul,” that he would forever choose to fight for the rights of racial minorities.
In the fever of an explosive gubernatorial campaign between two factions of Democrats trying to “outnigger” each other, Atlanta had worked itself into an emotional frenzy as the oppressive summer heat dragged on into autumn. The candidate of the party regulars was Clark Howell, who ran Henry Grady’s old Constitution. A faction of insurgents headed by Hoke Smith, a former part-owner of the rival Journal, had joined forces with the volatile Tom Watson, and the two sides slugged it out daily on the stump and in the pages of their papers. Egging them on were two even more sensational and extreme dailies—the Georgian, edited by John Temple Graves, Sr., and the News. All were addicted to yellow journalism and incendiary language on matters of race and politics.
The already-besieged black masses quickly became pawns in the political campaign, and by late September, when fabricated rumors of murders and sexual assaults by blacks against whites were blaring daily in the headlines, a violent outburst seemed unavoidable. At about that time, the North Carolina novelist Thomas Dixon, celebrated for his fictional incitements to Negrophobia, showed up in Atlanta with a fiery stage version of The Clansman (the same story that D. W. Griffith would put on film as The Birth of a Nation in 1915, setting off another reactionary wave).
Walter White was with his father, a mail carrier, in a horse-drawn cart on Peachtree Street in the early-evening shadows of a sultry Saturday—the date was September 22, 1906—when a casual acquaintance of theirs, a lame Negro bootblack, hobbled past them with a white mob in pursuit; he was quickly caught and clubbed to death. Stunned and shaken by the sight of this vicious attack, George White and his son retreated, barely managing to get to their home on Houston Street without being assaulted themselves. All through the night and the next day, they waited in fear of more violence.
At dusk on Sunday, a white mob gathered on the street outside their house. “That’s where that nigger mail carrier lives!” Walter White heard someone shout. “Let’s burn it down!” He and his father were at the front window with pistols, frozen with fear and excitement, and as the mob began to move toward them, the young teenager experienced a terrifying and indelible moment of truth. “In that instant,” he later wrote, “there opened up within me a great awareness: I knew then who I was. I was a Negro, a human being with an invisible pigmentation which marked me a person to be hunted.” At what seemed like the last moment, a volley of shots from nearby distracted the mob, and they dispersed, but the memory stayed with Walter White for the rest of his life.
About two dozen blacks and at least five whites were killed in the Atlanta riot, and close to a hundred people were injured. The message to the Southern black minority was crystal clear: If such unrestrained lawlessness and violence could happen here, where many middle-class blacks in business, academia, the church, and the professions were living, then no place was safe.
In the overheated and explosive atmosphere of the time, the South appeared to have lost whatever forward motion it had, and had begun to slip backward. Blacks in particular sensed the falling, for they were the objects of the violence and the discriminatory laws. They were rapidly losing their elected representatives in government, too, as whites systematically stripped them of their right to vote. The few Southern whites who acknowledged the problem publicly and tried in their own limited ways to address it were a tiny minority swimming against the tide, and even the best of them were hardly heard from at all until the Jim Crow laws of disenfranchisement and usurped civil rights were firmly in place throughout the South.
If there was any institutional base at all for the promotion of better living conditions for the region’s masses of poor people, white and black, it was in the churches. Then as always, religion was a powerful controlling force among all classes of Southern people; it was the one institution that almost everyone turned to for aid and comfort in times of distress. The overwhelmingly conservative and orthodox emphasis of the churches was on individual salvation in the hereafter, but simple Christian charity compelled them to acknowledge the needs of suffering people in the here and now.
Elsewhere in the nation at the turn of the century, a social gospel movement was emerging in response to a multitude of problems associated with the shift from an agricultural to an urban-industrial society. The North was in turmoil over long and punishing work hours, the exploitation of women and children in industry, unsafe workplaces, paltry wages, the lack of benefits for workers, slum housing, poor to nonexistent health care, and a general disregard for laboring people. (These, incidentally, were essentially nonracial issues. About nine million of the seventy-six million people living in the United States in 1900 were identified as Negroes, and of them, fewer than one million lived outside the South; their relatively small numbers and the informal barriers to employment they faced as a racial minority made blacks only a minuscule fraction of the workers in Northern industries.)
The leaders of the social gospel movement felt a greater need to make the world around them a better place for their church members to live in than to help lift souls up to heaven one by one. While Southern churches were holding revivals to rescue sinners from the devil, the mainline Protestant denominations of the urban North were bringing moral pressure to bear on the sins of capitalism. The more conservative of those congregations simply wanted a greater show of charity from the industrial barons, but their more radical counterparts longed to replace capitalism with an altogether different social order in which wealth and power would be more widely distributed. What emerged and defined the social gospel movement was a moderate fusion of the two, a reform-minded union of denominational groups interested in progressive, socially conscious Christianity.
They were largely responsible for the founding in 1908 of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, an ecumenical body drawing primarily from seven Northern denominations: Baptist, Congregational, Disciples of Christ, Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, and Presbyterian. There were separate organizations of some of these churches in the South—lingering vestiges of the secessionist impulse that had precipitated the Civil War—and still others that were all black, but none of them took part in the formation and early mission of the Federal Council. Even so, a scattering of prominent Southerners, leaders within the churches and other institutions, kept a close eye on the Northern movements of religious and political progressivism, and tried in modest ways to apply them to the overriding issues of race and poverty in the South. One of these quiet reformers was Willis D. Weatherford, a Texas-born religious educator.
His middle-class family of Methodist and Baptist regulars had given Willis Weatherford a solid grounding in church and school by the time he transferred as a twenty-two-year-old junior to Vanderbilt University in Nashville in 1897. Five years later, armed with a Ph.D. in classical studies and theology, he moved directly into a Nashville-based job as a student secretary covering colleges in fourteen states of the South and Southwest for the Young Men’s Christian Association. The International YMCA, a nondenominational organization founded in England, had been active in the religious mainstream of the United States for about fifty years when Weatherford embarked on his mission to help spread its programs of evangelism and youth-support services throughout the South.
Traveling by train, the energetic young organizer spent the next seventeen years covering his territory, and then, from 1919 to 1936, he presided over a Nashville graduate school of Christian education, another endeavor sponsored by the YMCA. A tall, rugged, forceful man with a commanding
presence, Weatherford gained stature and influence (and a certain paternalistic formality) as the years passed. Well connected to the philanthropic families and institutions of the North, he was to be a skillful fund raiser for a succession of institutions: Blue Ridge Assembly, a YMCA summer conference center in the mountains of North Carolina; the Southern Sociological Congress, an organization that studied racial and social issues; the YMCA college in Nashville; the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta; and two higher-education institutions with which he maintained close ties—Fisk University in Nashville and Berea College in Kentucky.
As the twentieth century progressed, the South found it harder and harder to ignore all the reforms that characterized the social gospel and political progressivism in the North. The same forces that spawned those reforms—industrialization, population density, ethnic conflict, extreme divisions of wealth and poverty—were clearly evident in the Southern region, and people were gradually being compelled to acknowledge them. Then too, of course, the South was burdened with its own peculiar curses, from the evils of peonage and convict leasing to illiteracy, malnutrition, and the ever-worsening state of race relations.
Willis Weatherford was a moving force in the small circle of indigenous leaders who gave their time and energy to these matters. He organized a conference of white and black educators in Atlanta in 1908 to discuss “what college men can do to improve the racial situation.” He wrote a book in 1910—Negro Life in the South—that served as a college text on race relations. At the Blue Ridge Assembly beginning in 1912, he convened steady streams of college students, academicians and administrators, church officials, politicians, and leaders of business and industry to reinforce their Christian faith and to contend intellectually with social issues. More and more as the years went by, these groups included both whites and blacks, Protestants and Catholics, progressives and conservatives, even Southerners and Northerners. In a spirit of brotherhood and good intentions, they dealt earnestly but gingerly with the segregation issue, sometimes observing it in the breach but never, until years later, insisting openly that Jim Crow laws be removed from the statute books.