by John Egerton
Myles Horton, on the other hand, had found his calling at Highlander, and it would remain his only mission in life. Through his ties to New York’s Union Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago, where he had studied, he persuaded several native Southerners to return and join the school’s staff, among them James Dombrowski of Florida and Tennesseans John Thompson and Ralph Tefferteller. Some women with close ties to the region’s rural laboring class also became early members of the Highlander family: May Justus, Vera McCampbell, Lucille Thornburgh, and Zilphia Mae Johnson, an Arkansas student who came recommended by Claude Williams in 1935 (and married Myles Horton a few months later). Horton rounded out the Highlander staff with a few of his Northern friends, principally Elizabeth “Zilla” Hawes, Franz Daniel, and Ralph Helstein.
Jim Dombrowski was the steadying influence among them, a quietly efficient and religious man in his mid-thirties whose reserved manner hid a passionate belief in social justice. While Horton and others were making as big a public splash as they could, Dombrowski served for almost ten years as Highlander’s dependable manager of day-to-day operations. A grandson of Polish Lutheran immigrants, he became a Methodist during his high-school years in Tampa, Florida, and went on to academic distinction in Georgia and New York, earning degrees at Emory, Union Theological Seminary, and Columbia. It was during his Union days that Harry F. Ward awakened him to the plight of miners and mill workers in the South, and his subsequent arrest during the 1929 textile strike in Elizabethton, Tennessee, marked the real beginning of Dombrowski’s career as an activist reformer. More of a Christian than Horton and most of the others, he was at the same time every bit as much a Socialist and idealist as they; the class-conscious and class-divided South would soon collapse under the weight of its own inequities, he believed, and a reformed society based on cooperation and equal opportunity would rise to replace it.
As Highlander struggled to make its presence felt in the early years, it sought support from various New Deal agencies—emergency relief, the TVA, subsistence homesteads. But the mainstream political parties, government bureaucracies, and institutions such as the university and the church soon came to see the school as an adversarial body not subject to their control, and one by one they chose to distance themselves from it. As time went by, Highlander became more and more closely identified with the embryonic labor movement in the South, and with radical methods of social change.
The basic operating philosophy of Horton and his colleagues—that ordinary working people, no less than the privileged, could find within themselves and their neighbors the solutions to whatever problems they faced—was generally interpreted by alarmed observers as an expression of populist radicalism, if not communism or anarchism. What kind of school was this, they wanted to know, that taught its students to walk picket lines and sing protest songs, that gave them reading lessons out of the polemical works of Socialists, that stirred them to a frenzy with raucous Saturday-night square dances? The all-white surrounding community could note with some relief that no black students were enrolled there, but blacks were invited to visit occasionally, and in 1934 a black professor from Knoxville named J. Herman Daves was hired as a part-time instructor. His arrival was followed quickly by anonymous threats of death and destruction.
Highlander didn’t aggressively challenge racial segregation in the thirties, as the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union did; its primary focus was on the rights of laboring people in the mountains, the vast majority of whom were white—and that alone was more than enough to keep the school in hot water. On those occasions when race did enter the picture, it was simply one more red flag flying in the face of those who saw Highlander as a disruptive force in their midst. With or without that flag, the school still suffered from sensationalized and distorted exposure, even in such moderately inclined newspapers as the Chattanooga News, the Chattanooga Times, and the Nashville Tennessean.
As small and resource-poor as it was, Highlander had a surprising degree of visibility during the depression. In November 1932, even as the school was enrolling its first students, Horton joined with Buck Kester, Alva Taylor, and others in support of coal miners at Wilder, Tennessee, who were striking in protest against shrinking wages and miserable living conditions. Horton was arrested during the long and sometimes violent strike, and Barney Graham, the miners’ leader, was shot and killed by company-hired gunmen. That was the first in a continuous chain of efforts by Highlander people to help organize coal miners, timber cutters, textile workers, and even local employees of the federally funded Works Progress Administration. Horton and his colleagues were also involved in an abortive attempt to convene the All-Southern Conference for Civil and Trade-Union Rights in Chattanooga in 1935; the biracial meeting of laboring people was broken up by an ad hoc posse of Chattanooga policemen and American Legion zealots, but the delegates eluded their attackers and reconvened at Highlander. Such exploits as these were given wider visibility in People of the Cumberlands, a Hollywood drama about Highlander and the unions produced by the noted filmmaker Elia Kazan.
Throughout the thirties, Highlander saw itself as far less traditionally academic than the usual run of colleges and schools, but also less doctrinaire than an institution like Commonwealth College. Horton’s way of avoiding an ideological tag (more precisely, Dombrowski’s way, adopted by Horton) was to extend a welcoming hand to one and all—Socialist, Communist, New Deal Democrat, Southerner, Northerner, or whoever would meet him halfway. Few except Highlander’s closest allies were satisfied with that stance, though; right-wing antagonists still equated the school’s radicalism with communism, while others on the left complained that Horton and his staff were either too close to, or too far from, the New Deal, the black minority, the labor movement, or the impoverished hordes of destitute Southerners. This was the same kind of constant political and ideological hairsplitting that kept the fragile network of liberal Southerners from coalescing in opposition to the dominant forces in the region.
In 1937, when the CIO underscored its breakaway independence from the American Federation of Labor by launching a major union-building campaign focused on the textile industry, the Highlander Folk School committed its meager resources to the effort. A half-dozen or more of its staff members and as many as forty of its former students were among the more than six hundred organizers who took part in the Southern phase of the two-year, $2-million campaign. After scoring some impressive gains in the early stages, the labor offensive was slowed by a national economic downturn, the so-called Roosevelt recession of 1938. There was an eventual payoff, though: the formation in 1939 of the Textile Workers Union of America, a potent new national organization in the industry that rose from the ashes of two failed attempts in the previous decade. It was an important victory for labor—especially Southern labor—on the eve of World War II.
But the triumph, following fifty years of frustrating defeats, still was only one battle, albeit a big one, in an ongoing war for the rights of working people. Most unions, North as well as South, were still functionally segregated by race—and, in spite of new federal laws covering collective bargaining, wage and hour regulation, and the employment of women and children, white and black workers alike still found themselves largely at the mercy of a laissez-faire employment system. What’s more, those like the Highlander people who voiced strong criticism of the status quo in labor relations and advocated reforms, whether modest or radical, soon discovered to their dismay that the price of advocacy was to be publicly condemned for disloyalty and branded with the rose tattoo of communism.
Before the New Deal, the American labor movement had done precious little for Southern workers, and virtually nothing for blacks—so little, in fact, that those who shaped black opinion were much more favorably responsive to the Republican capitalists in management than to the bosses of labor. Barely fifty thousand African-Americans nationwide were union members—one in a hundred of the rank and file—and half of them belonged
to the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which was unrecognized by the Pullman Company and treated as an unwanted stepchild by the American Federation of Labor. Big corporations and industries often recruited unemployed blacks as strikebreakers, and generally saw it as being in their interest to keep white and black workers segregated. Labor leaders North and South were slow to realize that by going along with that divide-and-conquer tactic they were blindly playing into the hands of the labor movement’s bitterest enemies.
Exceptions to the pattern of rigid segregation would first be seen in a small number of unions—some mine workers’ locals, the trowel trades, the longshoremen, timber workers in certain parts of the South, and the fledgling Southern Tenant Farmers Union—but by and large, organized labor in the early 1930s benefited only whites. It helped if you were a man and a Northerner, too; few women belonged to recognized unions, and men in the steel mills of Pittsburgh and the cotton mills of New England had more status and more security than their counterparts in Birmingham and Gastonia.
The initial recovery and reform programs of the New Deal necessarily and inevitably opened labor-management issues to careful scrutiny. Early in the new administration, passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 established the right of non-farm workers “to organize and bargain collectively” through their own chosen representatives. In the South, where unions were weak or nonexistent, this had the effect of exposing all sorts of labor problems. Wages were too low (barely two-thirds what they were in the North); the workday was too long; women and children were exploited; working conditions were often dangerous and unhealthy.
Efforts to address these inequities in the textile industry had been stymied repeatedly by imperious and dictatorial mill owners. The Gastonia strike in 1929 had shattered the National Textile Workers Union. As soon as the first New Deal labor legislation became law four years later, another organization, the United Textile Workers Union, launched an organizing drive in the mills. By the late summer of 1934, it had more than a quarter of a million members, most of them in the Southern piedmont region stretching from the Carolinas to Alabama and Mississippi. A general strike was called on Labor Day weekend, and it quickly spread throughout the industry; more than 375,000 millhands in the South and New England walked off the job. But industrialists brought in armed guards and pressured state authorities to send militia units into the mills. After more than two weeks of violent confrontations, during which at least seven strikers and a police deputy were killed and thousands of families were evicted from company housing, the strike was finally broken.
In the emotional aftermath, an air of failure bordering on disaster hung over the episode, but in the longer view, the strike served an important purpose. It helped to spark the 1937 CIO organizing drive, and it also gave inspiration for the passage of new federal legislation, particularly the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which regulated wages and hours and protected the rights of women and children in the workplace. What’s more, all of these events and initiatives brought to a head a monumental conflict within the labor movement that had to do mainly with strategy, politics, power—and, just beneath the surface, with race.
At the 1935 convention of the American Federation of Labor, the industrial unions led by John L. Lewis, head of the mine workers, clashed with the trade unions led by William “Big Bill” Hutcheson of the carpenters. The debate turned nasty; Hutcheson denigrated Lewis’s ancestry in crudely explicit language, and Lewis, who looked like a lion, roared and then struck like one, leaving the felled chief carpenter in a pool of blood. Lewis calmly straightened his tie, lit a cigar, and walked out of the hall, resigning from his AFL vice-presidency as he departed. The new Committee for Industrial Organization that he and others subsequently formed had in 1938 become the permanent Congress of Industrial Organizations, a fierce rival of the AFL.
One of the many ways in which the two warring factions differed was on the question of race. The AFL, despite its general pronouncements of nondiscrimination, was in practice overwhelmingly a white man’s family of unions. The CIO had a direct interest in Southern industries—mines, textiles, oil and gas, garment-making, tobacco—all of which employed a substantial number of black workers. John L. Lewis and his CIO allies, such as Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, knew from long experience that their effort couldn’t muster the necessary strength of numbers to succeed unless it was united across racial lines. From the beginning they pragmatically pursued a policy of racial equality, and though it took years for this monumental social change to be fully embraced and implemented by the rank and file, the CIO nonetheless became the first major institutional segment of American society to adopt such a philosophy.
The AFL continued in place as the conservative wing of the labor movement; they were the representatives of the crafts and trades, mainly Northern and overwhelmingly white. The CIO took its stance as the scrappy new liberal wing, serving as agents for industrial workers North and South, and they were openly interracial. By the end of the decade, the Young Turks had achieved some success in organizing the Southern textile workers—and in the process they had converted thousands of hostile and suspicious laboring people into committed allies. They were still a long way from achieving job and wage security and a place of genuine appreciation and respect in the larger society, but they had made a good start.
The richest elements of personality and human interest are scarcely accommodated in this brief account of organized labor’s New Deal renaissance and its march into the South in the thirties. The arresting image of John L. Lewis punching out Big Bill Hutcheson is enough to suggest that much more could be said to show how vigorous and colorful labor’s main characters of that time truly were. The contributions of Myles Horton and his Highlander associates in the textile campaign are illustrative. So, too, are the exploits of two remarkable individuals, both native Southerners: Lucy Randolph Mason of the CIO and Asa Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
Just as the CIO’s Southern organizing drive was beginning in June 1937, Lucy Mason conspired to get a personal audience with John L. Lewis and Sidney Hillman; in short order, she persuaded them that their labor confederacy should hire her as its troubleshooter and roving ambassador in the South. On the face of it, the idea was almost laughable: Into a clamorous arena where men’s emotions were bound to produce coarse and even violent behavior, the unions would be sending a prim, petite, fifty-five-year-old, white-haired little lady wearing pince-nez, hat and gloves, a gentlewoman’s proper suit, and sensible shoes. She was the unmarried daughter of an Episcopal clergyman, the epitome of blue-blooded Virginia refinement and gentility, a descendant of the Masons, Randolphs, Marshalls, and Lees who stood among the giants of history in the Old Dominion.
But what her disarming appearance concealed was crystal clear in her demeanor and in the performance of her duties. In more than twenty years as an executive with the YWCA in Richmond and the National Consumers League in New York, “Miss Lucy” had demonstrated a shrewd and analytical mind, an abundant reservoir of independence and self-confidence, and a deep commitment to the elevation of women, blacks, and working-class people in American life. She had courage and determination, boundless energy, an innate sense of justice and fair play, and a passion for grassroots democracy. Like a Helen Hayes movie character, she was a dynamo posing as a sweet little lady, and for sixteen years she gave the CIO a weapon its foes were powerless to repel. All they had to fight back with was men, just ordinary Southern men; they didn’t stand a chance. As one of them told her in utter frustration, “Whatever the CIO pays you, I’m sure you’re worth it.”
Driving thousands of miles a year in her black Chevrolet coupe, she prepared the way for organizers to land safely in countless small towns and mill villages. She could converse as easily with preachers, editors, sheriffs, and mill owners as with exploited workers, strikers, and the unemployed. She was a public-relations expert, a persuasive speaker, a mediator, and a valuable
liaison, not only to her union superiors but also to New Deal agencies in Washington and to other liberal groups operating in the South, including Highlander, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and the Southern Summer School for Women Workers in Asheville, North Carolina.
As a genteel Southern white lady who broke out of the confinement of her class to serve others, Lucy Randolph Mason was an inspiration to many women of similar station—writers and activists Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, Virginia Foster Durr, and Josephine Wilkins, to name a few. If these women approached the volatile subject of race with circumspection in the beginning—and most of them did—they eventually moved faster than the generality of white liberals to a rejection of Jim Crow segregation and a committed belief in racial equality.
For people like A. Philip Randolph, arbitrarily consigned by skin color to an inferior status in the society, the emotions of angry rejection and determined commitment came much sooner. Early in his childhood in a small north Florida town, he saw his father, an African Methodist Episcopal preacher, risk life and limb to rescue another black man from a lynch mob. The elder Randolph raised his sons in the nurture and admonition of Jesus and Shakespeare, both of whom they learned to read aloud with deep feeling and conviction. Young Philip went north to New York City as a teenager in about 1905, attended City College for a while, and then finished his education in the school of hard knocks. By 1917, when he was twenty-eight, he and a friend had started a magazine, the Messenger. They called it “the only radical Negro magazine in America.”