by John Egerton
The photographs, akin in style and quality to the Farm Security Administration collection, still evoke an emotional response after all these years. As for the essay, it is weakened by a hand-wringing conclusion devoid of fresh or imaginative proposals for breaking up the sharecropping system. But even so, Caldwell’s denunciation of that system—not of the victims, or of the South, but of the exploitation of both—is eloquent and powerful.
“The South has always been shoved around like a country cousin,” he began. “It buys mill-ends and wears hand-me-downs. It sits at second-table and is fed short-rations.” The South “works harder than anybody else, chopping its cotton and sawing its wood from dawn to dusk. In return for its labor it does not expect much, does not ask much, never receives much.” The South “is the place where anybody may come without an invitation and, before the day is over, be made to feel like one of the home-folks. Scientists with microscopes and theologians with Bibles come to the South to tell it what is wrong with it, and stay to buy a home and raise a family. Gaping tourists come to pick its flesh to pieces, and remain to eat fried chicken and watermelon for the rest of their lives.”
But, Caldwell wrote, “the South has been taking a beating for a long time, and the pain and indignity of it is beginning to tell.” He sketched a culture of profit-grasping plantation lords, rabble-rousing politicians, platitudinous preachers, and detached experts (sociologists, economists) whose actions—or inactions—had caused race and class discrimination to flourish. The South, he said, is “a retarded and thwarted civilization,” a “worn-out agricultural empire,” a reactionary land that has “purposely isolated itself from the world” and “taken refuge in its feeling of inferiority.” Supposedly, it has been cured of slavery, hookworm, high tariffs, and boll weevils, but it is “still sick,” still holding ten million people, white and black alike, in conditions “just short of peonage.” Mark against the South, he declared, “its failure to preserve its own culture and its refusal to accept the culture of the East and West. Mark against it the refusal to assimilate the blood of an alien race of another color or to tolerate its presence.”
It was a blistering indictment, the kind of attack that most white Southerners hated with a raging passion, particularly when it came from one of their own—and in the case of Caldwell, they found plenty to fire back at. His standing as a critic was compromised by his prior etching of bestial Southern characters whose greed, cunning, and sexuality were more evocative of comedy and ridicule than revelation and sympathy. Even in the broad middle range of Southern critics and writers, from Virginius Dabney to the increasingly reactionary Margaret Mitchell, there was a nose-holding dismissal of Caldwell for his “excursion into the cesspools of Southern crime, degeneracy, and lust.” (Faulkner often got the same harsh treatment.)
Furthermore, others charged, Caldwell was a “deserter to the North,” a “profiteer of poverty,” a radical with Communist leanings, if not party membership—and, worst of all, in the eyes of many, an adulterer. (He had left his wife and family to move in with Margaret Bourke-White at a Manhattan hotel, and she eventually became, for a few stormy years, his second wife.) He had the instincts of a reformer, but not the character, not the staying power, not the commitment. The words and pictures of You Have Seen Their Faces still have a resonant potency, but Erskine Caldwell, one of Georgia’s prodigal sons, couldn’t sustain his role as social critic, and in the crucial years to come, his was not an effective voice for change.
You Have Seen Their Faces is exemplary of a genre of books that emerged in the mid-1930s and found a permanent place in the literature: documentary combinations of essays and photographs conveying a face-to-face, you-are-there sense of contemporary life. The South was a popular theme and subject for such books, and they poured forth from resident and expatriate Southerners with steady regularity.
During a ten-year period beginning in 1933, at least a dozen volumes of illustrated regional interpretation appeared. Among them, in addition to the Caldwell and Agee books, were Julia Peterkin’s Roll, Jordan, Roll, a descriptive study (with Doris Ulmann’s photographs) of black residents on some old South Carolina plantations; Clarence Cason’s 90° in the Shade, a native Alabamian’s gentle but forthright call for social reform (photographs by James Edward Rice); H. C. Nixon’s Forty Acres and Steel Mules, an ex-Agrarian’s late-thirties acknowledgment of the necessity for modernization; Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, subtitled A Folk History of the Negro in the United States; and Arthur Raper’s Tenants of the Almighty, another account of the plight of sharecroppers. The Nixon, Wright, and Raper books all featured Farm Security Administration photographs.
Numerous other books of Southern introspection and analysis, without photographs, rolled from the presses in the same period. Raper, the North Carolina sociologists (Howard Odum, Rupert Vance, Guy B. Johnson), and Fisk’s Charles S. Johnson were among the most prolific authors, producing more than a dozen volumes among them. W. T. Couch edited a WPA volume of personal histories from the Carolinas and two other states called These Are Our Lives. J. Saunders Redding described the lives of black Southerners in No Day of Triumph. Jonathan Daniels (A Southerner Discovers the South) and Virginius Dabney (Below the Potomac) produced journalistic travelogues, Muriel E. Sheppard described mountain life in Cabins in the Laurel, Carl Carmer offered a transplanted New Yorker’s perspective in Stars Fell on Alabama—and W. J. Cash, of course, published what was destined to be the most renowned of these interpretive works, The Mind of the South.
And there was more. Considering all the books of fiction and nonfiction written by Southerners about the South in the New Deal era, it seems fair to say that self-examination of the region and its manifold problems was more advanced and more extensive than ever before—exceeding, perhaps, what any other American region’s writers had attempted. The historians had not yet accepted the challenge to reconsider and revise the Old South myth, and the politicians seemed hopelessly blind to the impending crises of race and class, but an appreciable number of the men and women who regularly put their thoughts and ideas on paper managed with varying degrees of specificity and clarity to give warning of the coming storms of change.
High among them was James Weldon Johnson, a renaissance man in the broadest sense of that term. He had retired from the NAACP leadership in 1930 and gone at age sixty to teach at Fisk University in Nashville, beginning yet another phase in his richly varied career. In light of his many contributions to music, theater, literature, diplomacy, and race relations, his relative obscurity in the late twentieth century is puzzling, even disturbing. Had he done nothing else at all, he should be favorably remembered for an essay he wrote at Fisk in 1934. Called Negro Americans, What Now?, it was first published as a softcover pamphlet and then in New York as a book. In essence, it was a candid assessment of the Southern/American racial dilemma and what must be done about it. Johnson was addressing the contemporary scene, but he had a keen sense of history and a clear vision of the future; his words even now echo with the bell-clear ring of prophecy.
Looking back on nearly half a century of active involvement in racial and social matters, he was less sanguine than he had been as a younger man. The twelve million African-American people of the United States faced a narrow range of options, Johnson said; he reviewed them one by one. Exodus to Africa—Marcus Garvey’s folly—or to some exclusively black state or territory on this continent was hopelessly impractical and unrealistic (“we and the white people may as well make up our minds definitely that we, the same as they, are in this country to stay”). Insurrection was equally futile, not for moral or pacific reasons but for practical ones; it was foolish to think physical force could liberate blacks from the “lawless, pitiless, brutish mob.” Revolution aided by Communists or other outside forces was a naive and dangerous idea, doomed to failure—and was, in any case, no assurance of freedom from racial prejudice.
Blacks had only two viable choices, Johnson concluded: acceptance of segregation, isol
ation, and perpetually inferior status, or an all-out effort to achieve integration. His deep commitment was to the latter: “The only salvation worth achieving lies in the making of the race into a component part of the nation, with all the common rights and privileges, as well as duties, of citizenship.” It would be a long and difficult struggle, he warned. In spite of centuries of striving, blacks were “still Jim-Crowed, discriminated against, segregated, and lynched,” still shut out of jobs, schools, politics; sometimes the most persistent integrationist grew weary and became resigned to isolation and separate development (he cited W. E. B. Du Bois as a prime example).
But separation, Johnson said, would not be easier or more feasible; it would require duplicating the basic economic and social machinery of the nation—and there would still be the racist white majority to deal with. No, he said, the best long-term option—for whites as well as blacks—was to “use all our powers to abolish imposed segregation, for it is an evil per se and the negation of equality.” He called on African-Americans to put aside their petty jealousies and rivalries and become a united force for across-the-board integration. “White America cannot save itself if it prevents us from being saved,” he said. “No self-respecting Negro American should admit even tacitly that he is unfit to be associated with by fellow humans. Each one can stand manfully on the ground that there should be nothing in law or opinion to prevent persons whose tastes and interests make them agreeable companions from associating together, if they mutually desire to do so.”
This quintessentially American believer in the democratic icons of justice and equality had emerged from a lifetime of struggle with his self-respect intact. He had an unassailable sense of dignity, as revealed in what he described as a “pledge to myself which I have endeavored to keep: I will not allow one prejudiced person or one million or one hundred million to blight my life. I will not let prejudice or any of its attendant humiliations and injustices bear me down to spiritual defeat. My inner life is mine, and I shall defend and maintain its integrity against all the powers of hell.” James Weldon Johnson, a largely unheralded prophet of America’s better self, would have made a persuasive elder statesman for the postwar nation’s journey toward union, but he was not to be there. On June 26, 1938, the author’s car was struck by a train at a crossing near his summer home in Maine. His wife, Grace Nail, was critically injured in the crash; Jim Johnson was killed. His funeral, at a Methodist church in Harlem, brought together more than twenty-five hundred people representing every tint and shade in the human rainbow.
10. Lightning on the Left
In its thirty years of existence up to the time of James Weldon Johnson’s death, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had never found an easy road to strength and influence in American life. From the beginning, its leaders had discovered how complicated it was to build an activist force for black uplift in a predominantly white culture; perhaps inevitably, there were always nitpickers on the left who judged the effort to be too weak and timid, and naysayers on the right who saw it as too aggressively radical. In his role as executive secretary, Johnson had led the NAACP through the twenties and into the depression years. As soon as he departed for Fisk in 1930, his successor, Walter White, and the editor of the Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, began to attack each other in what was to become a crippling internal battle for power and control.
White, speaking for what the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier called the black bourgeoisie, kept a single-minded focus on the problems of segregation and discrimination; Du Bois, representing the leftist intellectual elite to which he belonged—and bidding also to speak for the aggrieved masses of lower-class blacks—came to the more radical position that African-Americans had to have economic independence before they could achieve equality. Blacks must push for integration at every level of society, said White; no, Du Bois shot back, they must first unite as a race in voluntary segregation from the white majority and build an economic defense against discrimination and inequality. (James Weldon Johnson had tried not to take sides in the debate, saying that either option would be acceptable to him, as long as there was steady progress toward one or the other; if not, he predicted in 1934, the African-American minority eventually would resort to “the making of its isolation into a religion and the cultivation of a hard, keen, relentless hatred for everything white.”)
Here was the classic and perpetual schism within black America, the basic conflict from which no escape seemed possible. Walter White expressed one side as official NAACP policy; Du Bois contradicted it in the pages of the Crisis. Worse yet, the two men could barely contain their personal dislike for each other, and that made their differences over philosophy and strategy all but insurmountable. Du Bois said White was “absolutely self-centered and egotistical”—and too light-skinned in any case to identify with the victims of racial discrimination. (Marcus Garvey had issued a similar put-down of Du Bois a few years earlier.) Finally, in 1934, with White in firm control, Du Bois resigned from the NAACP staff and accepted a teaching and research post at Atlanta University, whence he had come in 1910; he steeled himself for what he referred to sardonically as “the cold douche of a return to life in the South.”
Notwithstanding his dread of reentry, Du Bois was extraordinarily productive in the years that followed. Between 1934 and 1940, he founded Phylon, a social science research journal focusing on race, and published three of his most important books: Black Reconstruction in America, a pathfinding revisionist history; Black Folk, Then and Now, a study of the African role in world history; and Dusk of Dawn, an autobiographical perspective on America’s racial problems.
Others within the NAACP, notably Howard University professors Ralph Bunche and Abram Harris, kept up the criticism of White’s administration after Du Bois departed. But it was the association’s expanding presence in the courts that made it increasingly a force for change, and the man most responsible for that was the dean of Howard’s law school, Charles Hamilton Houston.
Raised in an upper-middle-class Washington family (his father was also a lawyer) and educated at Amherst College and the law school of Harvard University, Charles Houston accepted the Howard deanship in 1929, when he was thirty-four years old. Within five years he had guided the law school to full accreditation with the help of such bright young faculty members as Tennessee-born William H. Hastie and James M. Nabrit, Jr., a native of Atlanta.
From the days of his youth, Houston had bristled under segregation, and he had grown to adulthood with an angry determination to fight it—not physically but mentally, with the Constitution and American jurisprudence as his sword and shield. In the law school, he looked for bright young students to be his spear-carriers. Thurgood Marshall of Baltimore turned out to be one such candidate. Houston thought he detected a good mind that was largely undisciplined and unchallenged; by the time he signed the lanky young man’s law diploma in 1933, he had stoked him with anti–Jim Crow zeal. And, to make sure the fire was lit and burning, the dean took his star pupil on a driving trip into the South that summer. Marshall never forgot the shock of their constant confrontation with raw prejudice.
A year later, just as W. E. B. Du Bois was heading back to the South himself, Houston agreed to help the NAACP set up an activist legal program focused on fighting segregation in court. Soon after he was settled in the association’s New York office, he brought Thurgood Marshall and a New Deal lawyer, William H. Hastie, up to join him. Their long-range objective, Houston wrote in a Crisis article, was “the abolition of all forms of segregation in public education.” Their initial strategy was to compel the states to equalize educational opportunity for blacks and whites in graduate and professional schools, either by establishing expensive new programs in the black colleges or by desegregating the white institutions.
Marshall had come a long way in a hurry. Born in Baltimore in 1908, the year before Du Bois and others founded the NAACP, he had gone to Lincoln University, an all-black, all-male school in Pennsylvania, as
a fun-loving, seventeen-year-old freshman in 1925, and emerged five years later as a slightly more serious but still uncommitted young man. (One of his classmates at Lincoln was Kansas-born Langston Hughes, six years older than he and already a poet with exposure to Africa and Europe and the Harlem Renaissance; it was Hughes who prodded Marshall into joining a student campaign to desegregate Lincoln’s all-white faculty.) Though he entered Howard’s graduate program with the thought of becoming a dentist, Marshall soon came under the influence of Charles Houston, and thereby found the discipline and motivation that would characterize his long and distinguished career in law.
While briefly engaged in private practice in Baltimore, Marshall in 1934 took the case of Donald Murray, a Maryland native and Amherst graduate whose application for admission to the University of Maryland law school had been denied because he was black. Charles Houston served as co-counsel with Marshall at the trial in a courtroom in Annapolis; he listened with pride as his former student told the judge that the case involved not just the right of his client but “the moral commitment in our country’s creed.” They won a directed verdict, later to be affirmed by a state court of appeals. In the fall of 1936, Donald Murray entered the University of Maryland School of Law; he graduated three years later in the top third of his class.
Thurgood Marshall became chief legal counsel of the NAACP in 1938 after Houston, his mentor and friend, returned to private practice. Before parting, they marked the rite of passage with another significant victory: The U.S. Supreme Court, in the Gaines v. Missouri case, said the state law school must admit Lloyd Gaines or set up a “separate but equal” law school to serve black students. Marshall and the NAACP had crafted a simple but effective strategy that the association would follow for more than a dozen years: If the states insisted on keeping opportunity separate, they would be pressed to make it equal—and pay a punishingly high price in the process.