by John Egerton
Probably the most visible and far-reaching effort by Southerners to confront their social dilemmas in this period was the Southern Sociological Congress, a regionwide assembly that first convened in Nashville in 1912 and continued annually for eight years. Weatherford was one of the moving forces behind it. The effort began when Tennessee’s Republican governor, Ben W. Hooper, was persuaded to host the first conference and issue the call to delegates. About seven hundred ministers, educators, social workers, government officials, and others attended the four-day meeting to discuss a wide range of Southern social issues. (The few blacks who came—mostly ministers and college administrators—were assigned to segregated seats in accordance with the Jim Crow laws.) There was a strong religious flavor to these proceedings, underscored by the presence of numerous representatives of the Federal Council of Churches and of the Southern denominations that were by then entering a cautious liaison with the council.
A spin-off group, the University Commission on Southern Race Questions, was created at the first congress by representatives of eleven white state universities who viewed the subject “with sympathetic interest.” In years to come, they and other white Southerners, including the indefatigable Willis Weatherford, would call repeatedly upon a small cadre of black college and university presidents for advice and assistance, among them Robert R. Moton, Booker T. Washington’s successor at Tuskegee; John Hope, the first black president of Atlanta’s Morehouse College and later president of Atlanta University; and Mordecai Johnson, who in time would become the first black president of Howard University in Washington.
After 1912, as the Southern Sociological Congress reconvened annually in Atlanta, Memphis, Houston, and other cities, the segregation of delegates was made an issue—and resolved, finally, in favor of ignoring the law and letting people sit where they pleased. This act of defiance was played down by all in attendance, but most of them must have felt privately that it was too radical for comfort; in any case, by 1919 the number of delegates had diminished to a remnant too small to keep the organization alive.
The congress and its satellite assembly of university officials never formally came to grips with the segregation issue. All of the whites, including Weatherford, paid lip service to the separate-but-equal doctrine, and by the time the First World War was over, segregation was so deeply entrenched in the South that the best the white liberals could muster was a professed “understanding of and friendship with the Negro” and a commitment to push for improvements in the status of blacks within the bounds of the segregation laws. Nothing could have shown more clearly than this cautious response just how ineffectual the religious and academic institutions were against the prevailing forces of racial and political orthodoxy in the South.
It was at about this time that communism and socialism swept from Russia and Western Europe into the bubbling cauldron of American political thought and action, there to maintain a controversial presence for decades to come. But the isms that immobilized the South in those years were far more ancient: medievalism in agriculture and industry, fundamentalism in religion, traditionalism in academia, racism in the laws and customs of white supremacy. Forty years after their return to national politics, Southern congressmen and senators were building empires on a base of unchallenged seniority that promised to put them soon in complete control of Congress. Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern-born president in fifty years, offered little or no opposition to the forces, North and South, that kept the region barefoot and bigoted. Even his Republican predecessors, William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt, had seemed relatively more sensitive to the problems of race and class. (It took the Republican presidents of the 1920s, behaving like the storybook trio of monkeys that heard, saw, and spoke no evil, to make Wilson seem—undeservedly—a tiny bit better by comparison.)
It could be argued that World War I helped race relations a little, providing as it did a unifying surge of patriotism and opportunities for blacks to excel as soldiers (albeit in segregated units). The South got an economic boost, too, from war industries and military bases and rising cotton prices. But as soon as peace was declared, war against the black minority broke out at home, not just in the South but in the urban North as well. James Weldon Johnson, a Floridian of many talents who was then serving as acting secretary of the NAACP (with Walter White of Atlanta as his handpicked assistant), labeled the time as “the Red Summer of 1919”—red with the blood of hundreds of people killed or injured in race riots from Longview, Texas, and Elaine, Arkansas, to Tulsa, Knoxville, Washington, and Chicago. Twenty-six riots erupted in that one year alone (more than half of them outside the South); seventy Southern blacks, some still wearing the uniform of their country, were shot, beaten, or burned to death by lynch mobs.
Acute anxiety over the uncontrolled violence and the rumors of worse racial conflicts to come spurred a small group of prominent white Southerners, including Willis D. Weatherford and a thirty-five-year-old Methodist minister named Will W. Alexander, to meet in Atlanta and at the YMCA’s Blue Ridge retreat in North Carolina for extended discussions of the crisis. They assembled a team of staff field-workers—two men, one white and the other black, in each Southern state—and sent them into communities where tensions were highest, offering their services as mediators and as organizers of concerned citizens willing to work for improved race relations.
All through 1919 and into 1920 the cadre of planners worked, bringing other whites and several blacks into the circle with them. The group had first informally called itself the Interracial Committee; in time, with Will Alexander as director and John J. Eagan, a progressive industrialist, as president, the organization was officially incorporated as the Commission on Interracial Cooperation.
4. A Stirring of New Voices
Will Alexander was ordained into the Methodist ministry while he was still a Missouri farm boy, almost a decade before he earned a degree from the Biblical Department at Vanderbilt in 1912. He spent about a dozen years in Nashville, first as a student and then as pastor of a church near the campus, where Willis Weatherford, nine years his senior, was a member of his congregation. The two men teamed up on a mission of social service in the winter of 1914, organizing a charity fund for unemployed people in the city. That was the beginning of a close personal and professional association that would continue for forty years.
With Weatherford’s help, Alexander got a job during the First World War in a YMCA program at army camps in the South, serving as a sort of chaplain and social worker. Much of his time was spent soothing overheated tempers in an atmosphere made volatile by continued acts of hostility and aggression toward blacks and by such highly publicized events as a dramatic cross-burning on Stone Mountain near Atlanta in December 1915 to herald a “rebirth” of the Ku Klux Klan. (Kentuckian D. W. Griffith’s motion picture The Birth of a Nation was the torch that lit the cross.) At war’s end, Alexander felt a calling to continue his work in race relations rather than return to the ministry, and it was he, with the advice and assistance of Weatherford, who came up with the plan to create the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. (For the remainder of the twentieth century, that organization and its eventual successor, the Southern Regional Council, would typify indigenous liberal initiatives to promote racial harmony.)
Throughout the 1920s, the commission was just about the only Southern organization with any influence or effectiveness at all in opposing racial violence in the region. It sought out and brought together people who were concerned about the destructive consequences of continuing hostility. Hundreds of local groups—some white, some black, some biracial—and statewide affiliates in thirteen states (the old Confederacy plus Kentucky and Oklahoma) gave the CIC a grassroots base. Men and women of both races came into the organization from churches, schools and colleges, agriculture and industry, the press.
If any single common interest bound them together, it was their abhorrence of violent and abusive treatment of law-abiding black citizens. The whites who predominated in the
organization saw themselves as liberal friends of the black minority in the South, but not necessarily as enemies of segregation; as a matter of fact, none of them publicly expressed any interest in challenging the Jim Crow system, and in general they looked upon the CIC as an instrument of fairness and conciliation vital to the maintenance of “separate but equal” segregation. Most of the funds needed to support the commission’s staff and programs came from Northern philanthropists—who likewise avoided direct opposition to Southern laws and customs.
It was Will Alexander’s special talent that he could hold together so large an aggregation of diversely motivated people. Once, in 1926, he expressed his personal belief that segregation laws were unjust to blacks and thus indefensible morally, but when that opinion almost cost him his job, he discreetly avoided repeating it. Instead he tried to meet people where he found them, giving patient counsel to the conservatives who feared social change and quiet encouragement to the progressives who yearned for it. As a consequence, the CIC developed a curious image of liberal activism within the bounds of cautious and proper respectability.
Such men as Weatherford, industrialist John Eagan, and M. Ashby Jones, pastor of a large Baptist church in Atlanta—all patrician gentlemen of the “father knows best” school—dominated the board. Robert Moton, R. E. Jones, and a few other black members tended to be paternalistic and authoritarian toward other blacks but deferential to the white leaders. A women’s division of the organization, first headed by Carrie Parks Johnson and then by Jessie Daniel Ames, was able from the start to present a biracial example of progressive thought and action that generally exceeded that of the men.
Alexander had been quick to grasp the importance of enlisting women in the cause of improving race relations. Even though they held a superior status over the blacks they employed in their homes, white women were themselves considered subservient to white men, so they had an inkling of what it felt like to be low-rated. What’s more, many of them knew to their shame that a prime excuse for lynching was the perpetrators’ vow “to protect the purity of white womanhood.” As for black women—deemed inferior by both race and sex—Alexander had enough common sense to see that they were in fact a rock of stability for families on both sides of the color line.
Speaking at a meeting of Southern Methodist women in 1920, the CIC director set in motion an idea that promptly led to the creation of a race-relations committee headed by Carrie Johnson of Georgia. Soon the women went to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to meet with a similar group of black women that included Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Margaret Washington, widow of Booker T. (Charlotte Brown, a North Carolina native educated in Massachusetts, was the founder and headmistress of a private academy in Sedalia, North Carolina, for black girls; Mrs. Bethune, raised in a South Carolina sharecropping family, had prepared for missionary work in the North before founding a college in Florida for black students.)
The Tuskegee gathering was quickly followed by another pathfinding event: a biracial conclave of a hundred women in Memphis. Many of them would remember years later the electrifying moment when the white women, seated in the meeting hall, rose in unison in a spontaneous act of courtesy as the black women marched in. They remembered, too, the tears of emotion when Belle Harris Bennett, leader of the whites, sang “Blest Be the Tie That Binds.” It was these women, white and black, who sparked the formation of the CIC’s Division of Women’s Work under Carrie Parks Johnson.
But the CIC was hardly a radical force. Though it was an outspoken foe of the Klan, lynch mobs, and various forms of intolerance, it didn’t urge and wouldn’t endorse a federal statute outlawing lynching—that, the leaders insisted, was a local and state responsibility—nor did it challenge in any way the entrenched laws and customs of segregation. Its administrative staff included, in addition to Alexander and the director of the women’s division, a research director (first Thomas J. Woofter and then Arthur F. Raper, both of whom had Ph.D.’s in sociology) and an experienced writer and editor, Robert B. Eleazer. All were white; no black staff member ever worked in the Atlanta office of the commission.
In sum, the CIC in its first decade of existence was a reflection of the times, a moderate response to a festering social problem that the vast majority of white Americans preferred to ignore. Will Alexander and his associates were benign and honorable men and women of high motivation and goodwill, seeking, in the words of one of them, “some plan by which the two races may be able to live in friendliness and mutual respect”—but separately, leaving the thorny question of segregation to be resolved “by the wisdom and justice of oncoming generations.”
The South—and all of America—was in no mood to settle much of anything in the roller-coaster decade of the Roaring Twenties. The 1918 constitutional amendment prohibiting the manufacture or sale of alcoholic beverages had set off an epidemic of defiance and gangsterism, and all kinds of lawbreakers seemed to catch sparks from it: lynchers, urban rioters, Klan vigilantes, Communist agitators, the shock troops of management and organized labor’s guerrilla fighters. Women got the vote by constitutional amendment in 1920, but that had no immediately discernible moderating or humanizing influence on the white men who made up the lion’s share of the electorate.
Blacks had begun to flee the South by the tens of thousands annually, and wherever they went—New York, Chicago, Detroit—white hostility tended to follow. White Southerners couldn’t decide whether the exodus was a good sign or a bad one. Some argued that reduced numbers of blacks would lessen white fears and improve race relations; others said it would only cause a shortage of hired help and make matters worse. In general, Southern blacks perceived that many Southern whites held warm personal feelings for them as individuals but thought of African-Americans in general as an inferior race, while Northern whites tended to support the principle of justice for the black race but had no personal contact with any of its people. There was a common expression for this anomaly: In the South, it doesn’t matter how close Negroes get, as long as they don’t get too high; in the North, it doesn’t matter how high they get, as long as they don’t get too close. Segregation was not the law up North, but it was the fact—nothing like as oppressive as in the South, of course, but bad enough to make a mockery of the Promised Land image held out to northbound emigrants. And the Klan was there too, almost as virulent and menacing in, say, Indiana as it was in Georgia or Alabama.
On every side, the walls were pressing in. The South was not working its way out of the old problems that had precipitated the Civil War, or the newer ones that had arisen in the postwar years of Reconstruction and redemption and radicalism. In the graphic image of the farmer, the region was still sucking hind tit on the national hog, still acting and reacting like the runt of the litter.
One of the oldest and most complex dimensions of the racial dilemma was sexuality. It hung like an albatross about the neck of the South. During slavery, virtually all of the racial intermixing was occasioned by white men—slave masters, in the main—availing themselves of powerless black women who were theirs for the taking. (The 1860 census counted a half-million “mulattoes,” practically all of them descended from white paternal roots.) Emancipation drastically reduced that source of sexual favors, or cut it off altogether. In the decades that followed, all sorts of weird psychological reactions bubbled to the surface. The final, terrible consequence was that black men were envisioned as the demons responsible for every outrage, from alienation of affections (both white and black) to white male guilt to the worst offense of all: rape and dethroning of the queens of white purity. For those largely imagined transgressions, they were dismembered and murdered in the cruelest ways imaginable.
Novelists sometimes ventured into the forbidden chamber of race-sex horrors, but not until after World War II would many social scientists get past the taboos and begin to ask blunt and painful questions. Until then, it was as if no one with a voice to protest could see clearly what was happening and summon the courage t
o condemn it. In blind defiance of reality, the orthodox view before and after slavery was that white males were not guilty of any significant crossing of the sexual line; there were occasional transgressions, yes, but not many. When the lynching of Southern black men became epidemic in the 1890s and early 1900s, the white “man on the street” no doubt believed that the vast majority of such incidents occurred in reaction to the rape of white women by sexually crazed black men. Careful studies subsequently showed that fewer than one-third of all lynchings involved even a claim of rape, and the number in which a black assailant was positively identified came to only a minor fraction of the total. Numerous writers, including some Southerners, laid out these facts in print time after time, but they were no match for demagogic manipulators of public opinion. The devastating truth was that all along—even in the twentieth century—by far the most incidents of interracial sex in the South were initiated by white males with black females. Whether by terror, force, coercion, enticement, persuasion, or mutual consent, white men were the primary instigators of physical union between the races in the generations after the Civil War, just as they had been in the generations before.
No one was in a position to understand these truths as profoundly as the offspring of interracial unions. The culture ordained that they were colored people, Negroes, blacks, mulattoes—members of an inferior and subjugated race—regardless of the fractional proportions of their racial makeup. (If people of mixed racial heritage in the United States were now to be officially classified as “colored,” as they are in many other cultures, they might well constitute close to a majority of the population.) In the restrictive era of segregation, countless thousands of Americans whose ancestry embraced two or more racial and ethnic identities transcended the confining labels of society and, with great generosity of spirit, made significant contributions to both the white and black strands of American history. Some of them attached particular importance and high priority to defending the rights of racial minorities and attacking such atrocities as lynching. Walter White was one such person; James Weldon Johnson was another.