by John Egerton
The blue-ribbon task force, which was called the Committee on Economic Conditions in the South, included only a few known liberals: Frank Porter Graham of the University of North Carolina, Barry Bingham of the Louisville Courier-Journal, H. L. Mitchell of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and the sole female, Lucy Randolph Mason. All of the members were white. In July they delivered to President Roosevelt the Report on Economic Conditions of the South, a lean (sixty-four pages), dry, dispassionate summary of the region’s chronic and crippling poverty.
The South, the report stated, was richly endowed with natural and human assets, yet it was perpetually at the bottom of almost every indicator of national productivity. Its topsoil was eroding away; its people were either leaving in search of greater opportunity or abiding on starvation wages; its education and health care and housing were not even remotely adequate to meet minimum needs. Southern people worked just as hard as their fellow Americans, but earned only half as much (on average, only $315 a year); they desperately required the most basic things: food, fuel, clothes, housing, jobs, schools, transportation, medical attention.
There was barely a mention of the beleaguered black minority, and none at all of labor unions or land redistribution or political participation. All the emphasis was on the region’s acute disadvantage in comparison with the rest of the nation. The facts were undeniable, yet no fingers were pointed at the perpetrators of Southern economic distress.
When Joe Gelders and Lucy Mason visited the Roosevelts, the report on economic conditions was nearing completion, and FDR was loading his guns for the coming duels with Walter George, Cotton Ed Smith, and other Dixie naysayers. When he heard Gelders talk of calling a regional conference to discuss civil liberties, the President deftly reshaped and enlarged the idea. How about a conference of Southerners responding to the report on economic conditions? he asked. And not just an elite white male response, his wife added—there should be some women and blacks and union members among the delegates, and tenant farmers too, and the agenda ought to include such topics as the poll tax, lynching, equal justice, and the rights of laboring people.
At the time, Eleanor was showing People of the Cumberlands, Elia Kazan’s new movie about Appalachia, to White House visitors, and she was filled with enthusiasm for the Highlander Folk School and its services as a cultural center and labor college. People like Myles and Zilphia Horton and James Dombrowski should take part in this conference, she said—and for her part, she would be glad to come and speak herself.
Gelders and Mason floated into Washington on cloud nine. They met briefly with Mellett and Foreman, with Cliff and Virginia Durr, and with Mrs. Durr’s brother-in-law, Justice Hugo Black, who tentatively agreed to make a major address at the Southern conference. Back in Birmingham, Gelders arranged a preliminary meeting with members of the Alabama Policy Committee, and they showed enthusiasm. One of them was H. C. Nixon, who was winding up a six-month project in Birmingham while on a leave of absence from the Tulane University faculty. Nixon’s new book, Forty Acres and Steel Mules, published by the University of North Carolina Press, was an impassioned call for equal opportunity and economic security for the Southern working class, white and black, and it placed him squarely in the forefront of what was shaping up as a generally positive and constructive response to the government report on economic conditions in the South.
As he listened to Gelders’s expansive description of the proposed conference—a huge affair, probably taking place there in the Alabama industrial capital and drawing from all walks of Southern life—Nixon may have finally decided on a course of action he had been contemplating for some time. Soon thereafter, he resigned his Tulane post (where he had been under fire from President Rufus C. Harris and local right-wing elements for his liberal involvements) and threw in with Gelders to help plan and organize the conference.
There followed a summer flurry of committee meetings at which some basic decisions were made: The event would take place in Birmingham after the November elections; it would be called the Southern Conference for Human Welfare; U.S. Commissioner Louise O. Charlton of Birmingham, a member of the Alabama branch of the Southern Policy Committee and also a state Democratic Party official, would preside as temporary chairman; the three most prominently featured speakers would be Frank Porter Graham, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Hugo Black; and subcommittees would be established to respond to each section of the economic-conditions report.
In many ways, Birmingham was an ideal location for an all-Southern summit meeting on social issues. Delegates from such far-flung places as Richmond, Miami, and San Antonio would see it as a central crossroads, but it had more than geography to recommend it; from its violent and explosive birth as an industrial hub, the city had evolved into something resembling a continuous production of socioeconomic drama, a morality play throbbing with heroes and villains, victims and perpetrators, and a cast of thousands.
In its short life—less than seventy-five years—Birmingham had risen in a burst of flame and fury befitting a city watched over by an iron statue of Vulcan, the Roman fire god. It was at once everything Henry Grady dreamed of and everything the Agrarians feared in their conflicting visions of an industrialized New South. Rich deposits of coal, limestone, and iron ore were there for the taking, and the railroads had come to get them, running on rich Northern capital and cheap Southern sweat. By the early years of the twentieth century, huge enterprises manufacturing steel and iron products filled the valley with a rosy furnace glow and a perpetual pall of smoke.
Nothing was small-scale in Birmingham. The population climbed from almost zero to nearly forty thousand in the thirty years before 1900; in the next thirty years it ballooned to more than a quarter of a million, and continued to grow rapidly in the depression years (Jefferson County would have almost a half-million people by 1940). Absentee capitalists, itinerant speculators, resident entrepreneurs, and calculating politicians held a tight grip on the city; together, they voraciously consumed the natural and human resources—the latter a voiceless multitude, desperate for paying jobs, flowing in a steady stream from the ravaged Alabama outback. This volatile combination begat all sorts of excesses—pervasive deadly violence, political reactionaryism, extremes of wealth and poverty, moral certitude, religious intolerance, racial and ethnic bigotry.
The barons of Birmingham industry, soon to be dubbed the “Big Mules” by Alabama populists and the press, were masters of consolidation. They may have damned Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution, but survival of the fittest was a notion that warmed their hearts. Repeated attempts to organize workers in the mines and mills had yielded little except blood and frustration for more than half a century, but finally, with the coming of the New Deal and its support for organized labor, the contest between Mules and men evened out a bit.
John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers, under the organizing rights granted by the National Industrial Recovery Act, built their Alabama membership to about twenty thousand by the end of 1934. The massive national textile strike that same year started in Alabama and spread across the South. The Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers had some success in the Birmingham area, and so did the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. By 1938, with leadership from people like William Mitch of the mine workers’ union and numerous white and black organizers in the union locals, the Birmingham labor force, some fifty thousand strong, had established a beachhead within the barony.
It was nothing revolutionary, to be sure; they weren’t about to cause an outbreak of democracy. Only about sixty thousand people—one-fifth of the voting-age population—were registered in Birmingham and Jefferson County (including no more than three or four hundred blacks), and less than half of them bothered to vote regularly, in part because of the punitive poll tax. There was also a nagging friction in the workplace between whites and blacks, and the corporations worked overtime to turn white workers against both blacks and the Communist organizers who had surfaced among them.
And yet, against the
most formidable opposition, organized labor did make some inroads. The Birmingham unions, operating from a pragmatic and democratic belief in the strength of numbers, made a start toward racial integration; they raised the level of political involvement (and gave liberals a little backbone); they helped to reduce wage disparities (regional, racial, and sexual); they led the way to improvements in the administration of justice and in the recognition of civil liberties. No other organization in Alabama showed as much of a willingness to take on the colonial lords—or as much promise of success—as did the CIO unions. And, compared to other institutions in the South in the late 1930s, labor unions clearly showed the most interest in racial accommodation and in across-the-board participation in the political process. For all these reasons, labor was bound to be a key player in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and Birmingham was thus a good choice as a meeting site.
In addition to H. C. Nixon and Louise Charlton, several other members of the Alabama Policy Committee played an active role in the SCHW preparations, among them Birmingham Congressman Luther Patrick and Postmaster Cooper Green, labor leaders Mollie Dowd and William Mitch, industrialist Donald Comer, and columnist John Temple Graves II of the Birmingham Age-Herald. Clark Foreman was active behind the scenes as chief liaison between the conference and the Roosevelt administration.
And Joe Gelders was there too, of course; he, more than anyone else, had persuaded the Southern Policy Committee members, the New Deal Democrats, and leaders of labor, the press, academia, and the religious community to cooperate in this venture. If any of them were nervous about working with a notorious left-winger like him, they didn’t show it. Either they disbelieved the rumors that Gelders was a card-carrying Communist, or they didn’t care, because they knew him, liked him, trusted him. As the planning proceeded, it was clear that the SCHW hierarchy viewed itself—Gelders included—as a Southern progressive movement, neither radical nor reactionary but essentially moderate in its aims and purposes.
As the time for the conference drew near, enthusiasm was high all across the South. One ominous note that preceded it, however, was President Roosevelt’s failure to defeat Walter George and Cotton Ed Smith and their reactionary colleagues in the primaries. Worse still, he had seen more than six dozen Democrats in Congress lose their seats in the general election, and now even his former supporters in the Southern press were lambasting him for his clumsy purge attempt. Just as the Birmingham gathering was about to convene, FDR was packing for a train trip to Warm Springs and a somber Thanksgiving retreat in the Georgia backcountry, there to lick his wounds and ponder what the Dixie demagogues had done to his cleverly crafted Southern strategy.
12. Revival in Birmingham
Picture yourself as an observer in the midst of this scene: It is Sunday evening, November 20, 1938, in Birmingham, Alabama. The South has baked through a seemingly endless, bone-dry summer, only recently relieved by just enough rain to settle the dust. Birmingham and all of Alabama, indeed all of the South, still lie prostrate and exhausted in the smothering embrace of the Great Depression. Here in the South’s Pittsburgh, its scruffy, brawling industrial vortex, the steel mills and coal-burning enterprises once spewed so much soot and smog into the air that you could barely see well enough to read the street signs; now the primary atmospheric color is a dingy shade of gray, and an eerie, muffled stillness hovers over the city.
From somewhere in the downtown darkness, a belltower clock tolls seven times. The opening session of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare is just half an hour away, and upwards of fifteen hundred delegates from thirteen states, progressive sons and daughters of the Mother South, are expected to come here to take up a monumental task. On the broad Eighth Avenue sidewalk and the lawn in front of the Municipal Auditorium, a swelling throng of men and women is moving slowly toward the open doors. There is energy in the very air around the eager delegates; they feel it and show it with a nervous hum of excitement that suggests anticipation, uncertainty, dread, anxiety, hope. Some in the crowd are dressed as if for church or the theater—the men in dark suits and hats, the women in dresses and coats with ankle-length hems and fur throws at the shoulders. Others seem shy and uncomfortable in their ill-fitting Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. A few wear simple print dresses and faded bib overalls and brogans—the uniform of factory workers and farmers across the South.
Aside from this noticeable and rather curious blend of social classes, there is something else unusual about the crowd: Though most of them are white, a substantial minority are Negroes. As they move toward the doors, the two races feign nonchalance while they discreetly steal fleeting glimpses of one another. The doors marked COLORED ENTRANCE are up a flight of stairs on the Twentieth Street side of the auditorium, and most of the blacks are moving in that direction. But the main portals are standing open to the lighted foyer, and no ticket-takers are there, no guards, and so some of the arriving nonwhites are simply filtering through with the rest of the throng.
Pulling up at the curb is a limousine with a little Alabama flag on the fender. Out steps Governor Bibb Graves with his wife, Dixie. (Graves and James H. Price of Virginia have been called the only two bona fide New Deal governors in the South.) And here come Alabama’s two senators, John H. Bankhead and Lister Hill, and Birmingham Congressman Luther Patrick, and Florida Senator Claude Pepper, and the governor-elect of South Carolina, Burnet R. Maybank. Maury Maverick, the recently defeated congressman from Texas, is also present. Numerous state and local officials from Alabama, with their wives, are among the hosts here; earlier in the afternoon, the women led a motorcade of visiting dignitaries on a tour of Birmingham “beauty spots.”
This is also an Alabama homecoming for such New Deal officials as Aubrey Williams, once a Birmingham store clerk, and Helen Fuller, a local schoolgirl who grew up to become a Justice Department lawyer. In a couple of days the conference spotlight will fall on the nation’s First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, when she appears for a major address, and after that another celebrated native son, Supreme Court Justice and former Alabama senator Hugo Black, will be here to receive the conference’s Thomas Jefferson Medal. Other Southerners in the administration who are expected to take part in these deliberations are Will W. Alexander, Brooks Hays, Mary McLeod Bethune, George S. Mitchell, and Clark Foreman.
But public officials make up only a fraction of the delegates. Southern newspapers are represented by such well-known editors and publishers as Barry Bingham and Mark Ethridge of Louisville, George Fort Milton of Chattanooga, Jennings Perry of Nashville, and Birmingham’s own John Temple Graves. George C. Stoney, a young North Carolinian, is here on assignment for Survey Graphic magazine in New York. The numerous emissaries from organized religion range from Rabbis Jacob Kaplan of Miami and Julius Mark of Nashville to Father T. M. Cullen of the Catholic archdiocese of Mobile and the Reverend F. Clyde Helms, pastor of a large Baptist church in Columbia, South Carolina.
The labor movement may have the most delegates of all. John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers is not present, but most people here have heard the story that his union is the largest financial backer of the conference. William Mitch of the UMW and Mollie Dowd of the Women’s Trade Union League, two Birmingham-based labor officials, are among the principal organizers of the conference. Also here are Lucy Randolph Mason and Witherspoon Dodge of the CIO, H. L. Mitchell and Howard Kester and other members of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, Stanton E. Smith of the American Federation of Teachers, and Manuel Garcia of the Cigar Makers Union in Tampa. Not just leaders, either, but rank-and-file stalwarts like Hosea Hudson, a black foundryman and organizer from Birmingham; twenty-seven-year-old Eula Mae McGill, an Alabama textile mill worker recently fired for her union organizing efforts; and eighty-two-year-old Brush Smith, a longtime Tennessee coal miner.
The Socialists are here in the person of Mitchell and Kester and a few others, like Frank McCallister of the Southern Workers Defense League, and there are a handful of Communists too, including Dona
ld Burke of Virginia and Rob Hall of Alabama. Myles Horton and Jim Dombrowski have come from the Highlander Folk School. Francis Pickens Miller of the Southern Policy Committee is on hand, as are native Alabamians Clifford and Virginia Durr of Washington. Also present are John P. Davis of the National Negro Congress; a South Carolina labor lawyer, John Bolt Culbertson; the Birmingham industrialist Donald Comer; and even Prentiss Terry of the arch-conservative Southern States Industrial Council.
The university community is represented by a host of people, including Cortez Ewing of Oklahoma, H. C. Nixon of Tulane (until recently), Charles W. Pipkin of Louisiana State, W. T. Couch of North Carolina, F. D. Patterson of Tuskegee, Charles S. Johnson of Fisk, C. Vann Woodward of Florida, Arthur Raper of Agnes Scott, Benjamin Mays of Morehouse, nineteen delegates from Alabama Polytechnic Institute (better known as Auburn), and at least as many from the University of Alabama. Another scholar in the crowd is the Swedish social economist Gunnar Myrdal, who is beginning work on a massive research project concerning race relations in America.