Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  Buck Kester’s odyssey in search of a more just and equitable South was destined to continue. From the days of his youth in Virginia and West Virginia, he had exhibited a deep revulsion to bigotry and discrimination. Under the auspices of the Presbyterian Church and the YMCA, he traveled widely in the United States and abroad, and while still in his early twenties he was involved in interracial conferences with numerous activists, including black leaders Channing Tobias, Mary McLeod Bethune, George Washington Carver, Mordecai Johnson, and Benjamin Mays. As a result of his views and actions, Kester was fired from his YMCA job at Vanderbilt in 1926; he and his like-minded bride, Alice Harris of Decatur, Georgia, then moved to New York, where he was hired as youth secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an organization of religious pacifists. Before he returned to Nashville in 1929 for graduate study in religion under Alva Taylor at Vanderbilt, Kester was a self-described “Norman Thomas Socialist,” and three years later he would carry the party banner in a brief and unsuccessful try for a seat in Congress.

  In the summer of 1934, Kester was in the forefront of a small group of religiously motivated Southerners who convened at Monteagle, Tennessee (where Myles Horton and Don West had established the Highlander Folk School two years previously). After hearing a rousing call to action by the Christian Socialist Reinhold Niebuhr, the group chartered the Committee of Younger Churchmen in the South—later to be renamed the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen. They took as their mission the preaching and practicing of brotherhood all over their sorely troubled homeland. “I had lost faith in the promises of politics, unionism, and the organized church,” Kester explained later. The kind of healing the South and the nation needed desperately, he felt, had to be “based on the teachings of Jesus and the principles of democracy.” Among those who joined him in the new fellowship (which he was to serve as a one-man staff for ten years) were some now-familiar names: Alva Taylor, Abram Nightingale, Gene Smathers, James Dombrowski of Highlander, and James Weldon Johnson of Fisk University, the former executive secretary of the NAACP.

  Buck Kester, then only thirty years old, was a fearless and passionate believer in racial and social justice—“an idealist with revolutionary tendencies,” as one of his admirers described him. It would be difficult to name any white Southerner of the time who had more contacts across racial lines than he did, or more of a clear-eyed vision of the crippling effects of segregation on blacks and whites alike. Throughout the thirties, in his post with the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen and in his work with the NAACP and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (the latter an Arkansas-based interracial cluster of field hands organized by H. L. Mitchell, the militant son of a Tennessee sharecropper), Kester never wavered from his commitment to Christian Socialism. Ironically, his bitterest battles were to be fought not against reactionaries on the right but against what he saw as a Communist threat from the left.

  Two more men in the meeting with Niebuhr at Monteagle in 1934 were Eugene Cox and Sam Franklin. Within two years they had used a financial stake from Sherwood Eddy of the national YMCA to buy more than two thousand acres of delta farmland in Bolivar County, Mississippi, and to begin planning an interracial cooperative farm there. The land proved to be unfit for cotton farming, so in 1938, Cox, a Texan, and Franklin, an east Tennessee native, managed to shift to another site of twenty-eight hundred acres near Tchula, Mississippi, in Holmes County. Before the Civil War, it had been a prosperous spread known as Providence Plantation; in the deep tracks of the depression, it was a fallow, desolate terrain of weed-choked fields and falling-down tenant shacks where black peasants who had missed the migration to Chicago and points north waited in stranded silence for any sign of hope.

  Providence Cooperative Farm was meant to be such a sign. Cox and his wife, Lindy, Franklin and his wife, Dorothy, and another couple, David and Sue Minter (he a physician with roots in North Carolina and Texas), formed the nucleus of the management team, with Franklin overseeing the farming operations and Cox running the commissary and credit union. They were six idealistic young Christian Socialists, backed by a board that included Niebuhr and Eddy, black educators Charles S. Johnson and F. D. Patterson, and two transplanted Texas populist cotton farmers, brothers John and Mack Rust, inventors of a cotton-picking machine that within ten years would symbolize the mechanical revolution that all but emptied the cotton fields of the black belt. Living and working with the white families for nearly twenty years—until their alarmed and fearful neighbors reacted violently against the rise of civil rights activism in the 1950s—would be scores of black families desperate for any chance to improve their miserable lot.

  There were numerous other endeavors launched by native Southerners to create cooperative schools and communities in the 1930s, places like Tom Alexander’s Springdale School at Cruso in the mountains of western North Carolina, and the Macedonia community, founded by Morris Mitchell near Clarkesville in north Georgia. Earlier, the Llano Cooperative Colony in Vernon Parish, Louisiana, spawned Commonwealth College, a radical labor school; it was moved in the mid-twenties to a new site at Mena, Arkansas. And still later, in 1942, a Georgia Baptist minister named Clarence Jordan would begin an idealistic effort to unite white and black farmers in a common quest for economic security. Their Christian community, called Koinonia, took root a few miles down the road from a large peanut-farming operation owned by the family of Jimmy Carter, another Georgia Baptist who would in time make his own niche in history.

  Religious and philanthropic motivations had generated by far the most educational ferment in the South for decades after the Civil War—so much so that even as late as 1930, Christians with Northern roots and capitalists of similar origin had given more to the cause of education in this struggling region than some entire states had managed to invest. The New England–based American Missionary Association and philanthropies created by Julius Rosenwald, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and George Foster Peabody, all northerners, often set the pace in spending for schools, students, and libraries. Rockefeller’s General Education Board, for example, invested over $125 million in Southern schools in the first four decades of this century (and spent many millions more, incidentally, in eradicating communicable diseases and creating networks of public health service systems in the region). It was the General Education Board, more than any other single group, that pushed and prodded the states to develop public schools.

  An obsessive preoccupation with race and class was the central cause of the South’s tragic neglect of public education. All too many of the white men who dominated political and cultural life in the region for decades after Reconstruction viewed education as a privilege reserved primarily for their sons and others of the same station; they had little concern for the schooling of women and almost no interest at all in the education of blacks or poor whites. Every Southern state was laggard in imposing taxes to support schools and in passing compulsory-attendance laws; as late as 1935, eight of the eleven ex-Confederate states had no laws providing free textbooks to schoolchildren. Then, to compound the neglect, when the states finally did accept primary responsibility for education, they did so within the rigid confines of segregation and “separate but equal” duality, imposing a costly double burden that was bound to leave them ever further behind the North.

  Colleges and universities more or less followed the same pattern. Private institutions generally got more attention and support than public ones (or at least enjoyed more freedom from political domination), schools for men were more privileged than those for women, and opportunities for whites were infinitely greater than for blacks. This ancient curse of race-class bias grew more intense as the level of schooling increased; many of those who conceded that elementary training for girls or blacks or the poor might be a social necessity were strongly opposed to its extension beyond high school, even though such institutions were always segregated by race, often by sex, and, as a practical matter, by economic status.

  All eleven Southern states eventually open
ed one or more public colleges for blacks (as did Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the six states bordering the South), but until the 1940s, most of those institutions—about three dozen total—were as much like high schools as colleges. Even the private colleges for blacks (most of them supported by Northern religious bodies) offered only limited instruction above the bachelors level. By 1930, fewer than fifty African-Americans nationwide had earned doctoral degrees (almost all of them at such schools as Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago), and even though the number quadrupled in the 1930s and doubled again in the 1940s, there were still no more than five hundred blacks with doctorates in the entire country. The South (which would have a black population of over ten million in the 1950 census) awarded only a small fraction of those degrees through such black institutions as Meharry Medical College in Nashville—and none at all, of course, through any of its white universities.

  The white schools of higher learning not only failed to serve blacks, women, and working-class people; they shortchanged their enrollees in a variety of ways, too. Political intrusions in the public colleges and religious dogma in the church-supported ones went hand in hand with the limiting preoccupations of race and class. Early in the 1900s, private colleges such as Trinity (now Duke) and Emory demanded a level of religious and social and racial orthodoxy that forced out independent thinkers, and the pattern they set was followed time and again by Vanderbilt, Tulane, and other top-of-the-line schools in the private sector.

  Public higher education was even more vulnerable to ideological and political manipulation. Back in 1913, the University of South Carolina’s president, Samuel Chiles Mitchell, had been pushed out of office by Governor Cole Blease for not toeing the political line. (Mitchell, a historian, was a vocal Southern religious and social activist of the early twentieth century, as his three sons, Morris, Broadus, and George, would also be in the next generation.) Thereafter, the governors seemed almost to dominate the academic campuses at will. Before he left the Mississippi governor’s office in 1932, Theodore Bilbo booted 179 faculty members and administrators out of the state’s colleges, put political hacks in top campus posts, and caused the University of Mississippi and four other institutions to lose their accreditation. Governor Eugene Talmadge did much the same thing in Georgia in the early 1940s, with the same disastrous result. In the wake of the Huey Long era, the president of Louisiana State University, James M. Smith, was one of several public officials who went to prison for malfeasance of office. J. William Fulbright, a former Rhodes scholar serving as president of his alma mater, the University of Arkansas, was fired by his governor in 1941 for exhibiting a generally uncooperative attitude on political matters. When a similar fate befell President Homer Rainey of the University of Texas five years later, he was even more roughly handled by the governor, the legislature, and his own trustees, some of whom tagged him an infidel and a Communist.

  Southern universities in the 1930s had precious little to commend them. A 1934 report of the American Council on Education found that only seven institutions in the region had even one department adequately staffed and equipped to produce doctoral candidates, and only two of those faculties (genetics at the University of Texas and sociology at the University of North Carolina) were classified as eminent. By 1938 the prestigious Association of American Universities had only four Southern members—the universities of Virginia, North Carolina, and Texas, along with Duke—in its selective ranks.

  The foremost of the black institutions often had some distinguished faculty members—Fisk, for example, had the noted sociologist Charles S. Johnson and a host of Harlem Renaissance and WPA artists and writers, including James Weldon Johnson, Arna Bontemps, and Aaron Douglas—but their financial and physical resources were so limited that their realistic status was at best only that of a small liberal-arts college. (Most black colleges did have one feature the white institutions lacked: integrated faculties. Charles Johnson’s mentor at the University of Chicago, Robert E. Park, was one of several white scholars who subsequently taught at Fisk; W. D. Weatherford was another. Indeed, the school didn’t even have a black president until Johnson himself was named to the post in 1946.)

  The single most glowing exception to broad-based mediocrity in the Southern academic world was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Over its long history (it was chartered in 1789), the university had acquired a level of independence and quality that kept it in the front rank of public and private schools in the region. It was during the administration of Frank Porter Graham, though, that UNC became the light of the South and a place of national significance. In a twenty-year golden age under his leadership, the institution established a record of productivity and a tradition of unfettered intellectual inquiry that was the envy of scholars throughout the nation.

  UNC’s singular eminence, though widely recognized, was puzzling to many people, and its success in deflecting the intrusions of politicians was also something of a mystery. The senators and congressmen, governors, legislators, and university trustees of North Carolina in the Graham years were not great statesmen by any means, nor were faculty salaries at the school particularly attractive, nor did any appreciable number of students, professors, or administrators come to Chapel Hill from distant and privileged backgrounds. On the contrary, the cast of characters there was not all that different from that to be found in Florida or Alabama or Texas. The school was small, too; only about 2,500 students and fewer than 250 faculty members were on the campus when Graham was drafted out of the history department in 1930 to assume the presidency. He took over an institution that seemed intent on steering a moderate and cautious course in perilous times. Paul Green and Howard Odum and a few others had already achieved a measure of literary and scholarly notice, but for the most part, UNC was probably closer to the model of a typical Southern university than it was to the fountainhead of American intellectual life.

  Under the steady hand of Frank Graham, though, it blossomed like a desert flower. Whatever the achievements and contributions of others, Graham was the single most significant factor in the university’s success. He set the tone, the productive climate; more than that, his own life was a largely admirable and inspiring blend of scholarly devotion, social commitment, personal integrity, and political shrewdness. To his legions of admirers, he was an exceedingly popular Mr. Chips. Along with his warm manner and liberal convictions, he was a Tarheel through and through, and he cleverly put his Southern credentials to use whenever they seemed called for. It helped immensely with all sorts of folks that he could claim with becoming pride and modesty to be a native of Fayetteville, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the university (class of 1909), an ex-marine, and a seasoned UNC staff member (YMCA secretary, then dean of students, then professor). The trustees quickly coalesced around him as an ideal choice for the presidency.

  Graham’s disarming friendliness, generosity, humor, and magnanimity were his greatest strengths. He and his wife, Marian, having no children of their own, more or less adopted the student body. Open house at their home on campus was a regular Sunday-night ritual, and “Dr. Frank,” who had an uncanny grasp of names and backgrounds, could make every student feel like his personal friend. The same mental filing system worked wonders at the legislature in Raleigh, where he navigated the halls of government with all the understated skill of a masterful lobbyist. Keeping well-mended fences on the political range gave the UNC president and his institution a degree of freedom that other universities could only envy—as, for example, in 1931, when two faculty members, playwright Paul Green and sociologist Guy B. Johnson, hosted the black poet Langston Hughes for a well-publicized reading and lecture before a packed house in the campus theater.

  To be sure, Graham’s well-known personal sympathies for laboring people, tenant farmers and sharecroppers, disadvantaged minorities, and underdogs in general outraged some people, and he had enemies who loathed him and longed to depose him. But he was no reckless radical; ever sensitive to lurking political danger
s, he managed twice in the 1930s to dodge the explosive issue of racial desegregation in the university student body. When Thomas R. Hocutt, a graduate of North Carolina College for Negroes at Durham, sought admission to the UNC school of pharmacy in 1933, he was stopped by a state court ruling that his application was technically invalid—and Graham stayed discreetly silent. Five years later, when North Carolina resident Pauli Murray presented her credentials from a prestigious New York City women’s college and applied for admission to the UNC graduate school, Graham became personally involved, pleading with her in a remarkable exchange of letters to give the state time to make segregated educational opportunities truly equal.

  In 1935, Thurgood Marshall, then an NAACP staff attorney, had won a state verdict ordering the admission of a black applicant to the University of Maryland law school. Another state bordering the South, West Virginia, acted voluntarily in 1938 to remove race as an automatic barrier of admission to state-supported graduate and professional schools, and soon thereafter the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Missouri must either admit an academically qualified applicant to the law school at its state university or establish a separate and equal law school for blacks elsewhere in the state. Missouri chose to attempt the latter course, quickly opening a small law college at all-black Lincoln University. Without addressing the “separate but equal” issue directly, the nation’s highest court had thus indicated for the first time that racial segregation might not stand a constitutional test in the light of mid-twentieth-century reality.

  Such momentous legal and philosophical questions were hardly in the forefront of any Southerner’s thinking in the late 1930s, though, and in those years Frank Porter Graham gave his university unexcelled progressive leadership without directly confronting the volatile issue of segregation. He was certainly a thorn in the hide of right-wing reactionaries—of which North Carolina had plenty, from the halls of Congress right on down—but the breadth and depth of his popularity kept him securely in office for two decades, and his faculty enjoyed the unique safety of having a leader who was more of an activist and a liberal than they were.