Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  In the coalfields of Appalachia, other laborers struggled for fair treatment. Even before 1920, the United Mine Workers of America had tried to organize workers in the Southern coalfields, but it was not until 1931 that the followers of John L. Lewis, in a pitched battle with coal company forces that included state and local police, won the right to collective bargaining in eastern Kentucky. At Evarts, in Harlan County, Communist organizers tried to squeeze between the UMWA and the company chiefs to win the loyalty of the miners, but they failed. Harry M. Caudill, an eloquent chronicler of Appalachia (and also a native and lifelong resident), described the Harlan County miners as “unswervingly patriotic”—but, he said, “the operators, their lawyers and a large segment of the press raised the hysterical cry that the workers were Communists whose demands were written for them in the Kremlin. To the everlasting shame of every Kentuckian, Governor Flem D. Sampson repeated this slanderous nonsense.”

  Among the people who came to Harlan County with the support and encouragement of the U.S. Communist Party were a group of writers called the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. The novelist Theodore Dreiser headed the group, which included Sherwood Anderson (then living in Virginia) but no others who could be even remotely identified as Southerners. So great was the number of American intellectuals professing a passion for communism and socialism at that time that it is impossible to say whether the writers—and specifically any Southern-born writers who identified with their cause—were in fact members of the Communist Party, which was then a legally constituted body. In any case, Caudill’s conclusion rang true: The miners themselves were unswayed by either the coaxing of the Communists or the accusations of the coal operators.

  The Socialist Party had been represented on the U.S. presidential election ballot since 1900 (though not always in the Southern states), and the Communists, under various banners, had been active politically in the country (but again, mainly in the North) since 1919. At about the time of the stock market crash in America, the international Communist Party was pursuing ways to exploit social and racial unrest in this country, and particularly in the South. Increasingly in the 1930s, conflicts between labor unions and company bosses, workers and the unemployed, blacks and whites, poor and affluent people—and between Socialists and Communists—spilled out into public view. Two of the most visible incidents—the case of the “Scottsboro boys” in Alabama and the trial of Angelo Herndon in Atlanta—brought the Communists squarely into the center of things. Like the coal and textile strikes before them and the Scopes trial before that, these were cases that broke out of regional isolation and onto a national stage—reinforcing, in the process, the South’s unflattering image as a place of bigotry and intolerance.

  The Scottsboro tragedy unfolded in March 1931 when two teenage white girls hoboing on a freight train in north Alabama told the police that they had been raped by several blacks. Nine young black males, age thirteen to twenty, soon were arrested as suspects and then charged with the crime. In the space of just fifteen days, the youths were indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced (except for the youngest) to die in the electric chair. In the mob atmosphere that prevailed, the nine became pawns in a complex struggle between their defenders and attackers: on the one side, the NAACP, the Communist-supported International Labor Defense, and a variety of liberal and progressive groups and individuals, all of whom were convinced of the innocence of the defendants and determined to win their release; and on the other side, local and state prosecutors and various white supremacy groups, all of whom wanted the executions to be carried out. None of the youths were ever electrocuted, but it took until 1950 to win final release from prison for the last of them.

  A year after the Scottsboro arrests, trouble caught up with Angelo Herndon, a nineteen-year-old black youth from Ohio. A member of the Communist Party, he was arrested in Atlanta in June 1932 and charged with insurrection for organizing an interracial protest demonstration by a group of unemployed people. Herndon was convicted and given a sentence of up to twenty years in prison. Again, diverse factions of defenders and detractors carried on a battle in the case (among the former: Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., a black Georgia Republican who subsequently became a Communist; Elbert P. Tuttle, a white Georgia Republican who later became a federal judge; and C. Vann Woodward, a young professor at Georgia Tech who went on to become the South’s most prominent twentieth-century historian). Finally, in 1937, the Georgia law under which Herndon was convicted was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, and he was freed.

  In all of these cases and causes and clashes that rumbled like distant thunder through the South in the years after World War I—the intellectual conflicts, the strikes, the trials—the most notable new development was the emergence of a legitimate inside voice of dissent (albeit sometimes selective, faint, and ineffectual) against the political-economic-social status quo. H. L. Mencken and Howard Odum and their followers led the way, moving forward from the modest beginning of W. D. Weatherford and others before him. To theirs were added the voices of academicians, journalists, novelists, ministers, women, labor leaders, blacks in exile, and some regionally based black lawyers and educators.

  Not only was it tolerable for people to show an interest in communism; it was also acceptable—even intellectually fashionable—for people to speak positively of themselves and others as liberals. (One of the most notable books of 1932 was Virginius Dabney’s Liberalism in the South, published by the University of North Carolina Press.) In a multitude of ways, the new progressives were calling on their homeland to abandon the myths of the Old South, to surrender false pride and complacency, and to begin the task of self-renewal that could finally restore it to its rightful and equitable place in the nation.

  It must be acknowledged that this dissenting expression was hardly more than a faint echo in the beleaguered South of the early 1930s. The sober reality was that political demagogues retained their power not in spite of the church and the press and the universities, but because of them; it was the folks in those institutions, after all, who made up a substantial part of the truncated electorate, and who were so instrumental in the shaping of public opinion. The mainstream churches leaned heavily in favor of Hoover and Prohibition and segregation, and so did most of the newspapers. The universities—North Carolina notwithstanding—were too much under the thumb of their political or religious guardians to stake out a position of their own. And as for the politicians themselves, they were conspicuously absent from the thin ranks of the critics and the reformers; in fact, when I try to think of senators or congressmen or governors of the period who were advocates of or spokesmen for or even followers of social reform, Hugo Black of Alabama is just about the only one who comes to mind.

  Whether or not they acted consciously and deliberately, most white Southerners effectively sought to expel the black minority from every station of life except menial jobs in the fields and kitchens. The primary intent and consequence of segregation was to retain black manpower and womanpower for the hard and heavy work, the essential labor. In almost every other dimension of daily life, from neighborhoods to schools and from politics to history, African-Americans were slowly receding from view.

  Black historians were too few in number and their audiences too small to have much impact. Carter Woodson, foremost among them, was a Virginian educated at Berea College in Kentucky (before it was segregated), at Chicago and Harvard, and at the Sorbonne. He wrote The Negro in Our History in 1922, and at about the same time founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and the Journal of Negro History. Overshadowing his influence was that of the preeminent white historian, Georgia-born Ulrich B. Phillips. Though he received his doctorate from Columbia University and enjoyed a long tenure at universities in the North, he was one of the last of the Old South mythologists, a benevolent paternalist whose view of blacks as an inferior race was apparently as acceptable at Wisconsin and Michigan and Yale as it would have been at any university
in Georgia or Mississippi. In an essay summing up his understanding of the central theme of Southern history in 1928, Phillips declared that one thing above all else permanently united and bonded white Southerners of every class and station: a deeply rooted conviction that the region would always be “a white man’s country.”

  Without a doubt, Phillips spoke for the vast majority of the white South. Two and a half centuries of slavery and seventy years of segregation, broken only briefly and ineffectively by Emancipation and Reconstruction, had conditioned them to believe that the ideals and principles spelled out in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were by some mysterious interpretive twist meant to apply only to them, the white majority. But language is an independent force, having within itself the power to instruct and inspire and exhort. The African people who endured slavery, who took hope from Emancipation and Reconstruction, who resisted segregation, found in the language of America’s cherished documents some immortal words that energized them and gave them the will to fight on: liberty … freedom … union … justice … equality. During and after the time of slavery, there were blacks who attached the aspirations of their race to these exalted ideals.

  In the twentieth century, the words of those visionary African-Americans reached beyond the grave to inspire new generations. W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and a host of others carried the light from the old century to the new, and lit the way for the ones who would come later, still looking for the South and the nation to fulfill the promises of American life. Some few would pursue total assimilation into the dominant white culture of America; others, celebrating their Africanness, would follow a separatist route based on an exclusive black heritage and culture; and all the rest, like every other element in the polyglot culture that has always defined and described the people of the United States, would eventually insist upon political, civil, and social equality in every dimension of their lives. For blacks most especially, Du Bois defined the split identity in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. “Twoness,” he called it—the African and the American in one body, inseparable, the one incomplete without the other.

  Not every white Southerner was comfortable with U. B. Phillips’s vision of the region. The social critics inspired by Mencken and Odum took mild or extreme exception to the various manifestations of status-quo conservatism that retarded the region and kept it in a perpetual state of dependence and poverty. But with only a few exceptions, the critics stopped short of any outward hint that the prevailing racial mores needed to be reexamined. The black prophets of a new social order spoke in the main from exile in New York and elsewhere, and soon they would embolden a few men and women in the black churches and schools of the South to stand and deliver a similar message of change. It was almost as difficult—though not as dangerous—for white Southerners to espouse radical notions about the human worth of the descendants of Africans who lived among them. The social and cultural proscriptions were as deep as they were broad, and for thirty years they had been reinforced by written laws affirmed all the way to the top of the federal government; it took a special kind of courage—or madness—to speak and act against such overwhelming force.

  And yet, some did. Mildly radicalized by their religious and educational experiences, a handful of young people born within five years or so of the turn of the century stepped forward in the twenties to advocate a new course of action in the South, a way of living that would uplift the poor, unite the races, and bring peace and prosperity to the region, the nation, and the world. Coming as they did at the tail end of the social gospel movement, this activist remnant was a spontaneous and unexpected phenomenon, a delayed germination and sprouting of seeds sown years earlier.

  Even in its most radical form in the North, the social gospel had paid scant attention to racial discrimination, and by the time the movement finally reached into the South, its advocates in the mainline churches seemed more concerned about the pros and cons of evolution theory and Prohibition repeal than they did about matters of color, caste, and class. But a few people, driven by an evangelical Protestant impulse to give missionary aid to the exotic poor—in the South no less than in, say, China—did begin to think and speak and write about racial matters before World War I. Through the YMCA and its counterpart, the Young Women’s Christian Association, or in some cases through their denominations, such people as W. D. Weatherford, Will Alexander, Mabel Katherine Howell, and Sara Estelle Haskin took the first small steps. These four, coincidentally, were all Methodists, and their careers in religious work were either launched or boosted forward in Nashville in the beginning decades of the twentieth century. And, to take the coincidence of proximity one step further, there were in Nashville and elsewhere in Tennessee by the early 1930s no less than a dozen white social activists who turned out to be prophets of Southern social change—and at least half of them were contemporaries (though in no sense compatriots) of the reactionary Agrarians on the campus of Vanderbilt University.

  The School of Religion at Vanderbilt had appointed to its faculty in 1928 a fifty-seven-year-old Disciples of Christ minister and social gospel reformer from Iowa named Alva W. Taylor. He had been a lecturer in the schools popular summer workshop for ministers of rural churches, and his skill at raising money (including a sizable sum from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) had allowed the Vanderbilt chancellor, James H. Kirkland, to be persuaded that Taylor would make a fine addition to the permanent faculty. Kirkland found the Fugitives and Agrarians too unorthodox for his tastes, but he soon grew downright alarmed and alienated by Taylor, a gentle and mild-mannered social activist who saw the role of the church as a reconciling force serving, among others, those who occupied the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. It took the chancellor eight years to get rid of the popular and respected professor, but before that, numerous of Taylor’s students went out into the South with an urgent sense of mission to change the social order.

  Four in particular, all of whom were in his classes in 1930, just as I’ll Take My Stand made its appearance, were destined to be key figures in the coming battles for regional reform: Howard A. Kester, a Presbyterian from Virginia, a YMCA stalwart with interracial interests, a budding Socialist, an organizer of left-wing activists, an investigator of lynchings for Walter White of the NAACP; Ward Rodgers, a Texan come east by way of Oklahoma, a Methodist, later to be a parish minister, an organizer of tenant farmers, also a Socialist; Don West, a mountain boy from Georgia, a radical young poet, a preacher in the fundamentalist tradition, a labor activist, a cofounder of the Highlander Folk School, a man who would be branded a Communist because of his perception of Jesus as a working-class revolutionary; and Claude C. Williams, a Tennessee sharecropper’s son, a God-haunted teenage preacher in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, a World War I veteran, later a labor organizer, educator, and preacher in Arkansas and Alabama and, like West, accused of being a member of the Communist Party.

  Other native or adopted Tennesseans were contemporaries and occasional allies of the Alva Taylor disciples. Three of them—Myles Horton, James Dombrowski, and John B. Thompson—first met at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where they were immersed in Christian Socialism by two noted theologians, Harry F. Ward and Reinhold Niebuhr. Horton, a son of west Tennessee tenant farmers, had been guided to Union by a Congregationalist minister named Abram Nightingale; he returned to Tennessee and teamed up with Don West to establish the Highlander Folk School, an unorthodox center for adult education, soon after Will Alexander brought the two young men together. Thompson, another Tennessean and a Presbyterian, and Dombrowski, a Methodist from Tampa, Florida, followed Horton to Highlander.

  To this list could be added H. L. Mitchell, a radicalized west Tennessee poor white farmer’s son, who went from high school almost directly into a lifetime of organizing work with tenant farmers; and three remarkable young women—Alice Harris, Constance Adams, and Joyce King—who joined with the men they married (Howard Kester, Don West, and Claude Williams,
respectively) to form partnerships based on full equality more than a generation before that principle took root in the South. (Zilphia Mae Johnson was another, before and after she married Myles Horton in 1935.)

  All of this social ferment in one state before the end of 1930 suggests the probability, if not the certainty, of similar underground currents flowing elsewhere in the South. But by their very nature, these were the dissenting voices of such a small minority that they could barely be heard in the vast wilderness of social inertia. Most of the mainline Protestant churches in the region (indeed, in the entire country) had been for Herbert Hoover in 1928 when his opponent was a Catholic, and would be for him again in opposing Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 (and for Roosevelt’s next Republican rival, Alf Landon, in 1936); many newspapers displayed the same loyalties, except for those dyed-in-the-wool partisans with their unshakable devotion to the Democratic South and its segregationist convictions. Almost all of the universities were bastions of social rest, pillars of devotion to the status quo, and such administrators and faculty members as dared to contemplate a more active posture could look about them and see enough casualties to make them think twice. Even the renowned Howard Odum was so circumspect in his personal commitments that he studiously avoided joining the Commission on Interracial Cooperation for eight years, until his friend and admirer Will Alexander more or less shamed him into it (ten years later, in 1937, Odum would become chairman of the organization).

  These were the institutions that gave the South its identity and its stature, such as it was, in the pivotal election year of 1932—the church, the press, the universities, and three more: the Democratic Party, the planter class, and the barons of industry. Together they ruled a colony shot through with contradictions—a land saddled with the burden of military defeat, and choosing in spite of it to live with a self-delusive myth of moral superiority; a land rich in natures bounty, but living hand-to-mouth with imported food, building materials, tools, and even cotton clothing; a land so desperate to retain racial segregation and white supremacy that it was willing to accept regional segregation and inequality in the bargain.