by John Egerton
There has never been such a gathering as this in the South, such a diverse convocation of progressives from every stratum of the society. As dissimilar as they are, the people who comprise this racially and economically and professionally variegated multitude are all seeking ways to make their region a healthier, better educated, better paying, less violent, more charitable, more equitable, more democratic place. Are they a symbol of hope a-borning, a harbinger of the much-debated and long-awaited New South? Most of them want desperately to believe that.
Inside the cavernous hall, about two thousand seats are set up on the main floor facing the stage, and thirty-five hundred more are tiered in a horseshoe around them. Custom still has its heavy hand on the crowd; it dictates that whites move to claim the best seats from the floor up, leaving the blacks to take what’s left—the notorious “crow’s nest,” remote and removed from the action. But this is not a customary event; this is a happening, and there is a subtle relaxation of the old rules. The racially mixed crowd gravitates to the auditorium floor, filling the seats there and spilling over into the rim of the horseshoe. The segregation protocol breaks down; people sit wherever they find empty seats. No one seems distressed or uneasy in the informal, friendly atmosphere.
This first session of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare is billed as a “devotional service.” Judge Louise O. Charlton presides. A local minister opens with prayer, and several stirring songs by a local industrial high school chorus warm up the crowd; the revival mood continues as H. C. Nixon introduces the featured speaker for an “inspirational address.” Frank Porter Graham, the charismatic North Carolina educator and spear-carrier for Southern liberalism, steps to the podium. Dignified, handsome, articulate, compelling, he sounds the trumpet of dedication and sacrifice and service.
We have so much work to do, he declares. We must catch up with the nation. We desperately need the aid of the federal government—to equalize educational opportunity, to improve wages, housing, and health care, to allow full political participation, to close the economic, social, and cultural gaps between the South and the nation.
These are dark times in the world, he tells the raptly attentive throng. Dictators strut with impunity, persecuting Jews, Catholics, Negroes. Frank Graham’s voice quivers with power and passion and sincerity: “In this day when democracy and freedom are in retreat everywhere in the face of totalitarian powers and their regimentation of youth and persecution of minorities, let us raise the flag of freedom and democracy where it counts most,” here in our own land. Driving the point home to his listeners and to the South, he is electrifyingly specific: “The black man is the primary test of American democracy and Christianity. The Southern Conference for Human Welfare takes its stand here tonight for the simple thing of human freedom. Repression is the way of frightened power; freedom is the enlightened way. We take our stand for the Sermon on the Mount, the American Bill of Rights, and American democracy.”
Ovations, spontaneous and thunderous, punctuate his words. Blacks lead the cheers and applause, but they are not alone. At the end, Graham and his idealistic Christian-Democratic vision inspire a prolonged and vociferous standing tribute. Not everyone joins in, but most do—the academics, the laborites, the Communists and Socialists, the ministers and priests and rabbis, Southern Democrats of almost every stripe and tint, and even some of the hard-bitten cynics in the press.
More than half a century later, there would be a few still living, like Eula McGill and Stanton Smith, who remembered that night as a singular moment of Southern hope and promise. For Virginia Durr, one more in that surviving remnant, the memory was vivid and indelible. “It was a love feast,” she said. “We had a feeling of exhilaration, like we had crossed the river together and entered the Promised Land. It was one of the happiest experiences of my life.”
The Birmingham newspapers gave extensive advance notice of and continuing coverage to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and favorable editorial comment as well. Like the delegates themselves, the papers seemed to take the Report on Economic Conditions of the South as an accurate summary that called for a constructive and cooperative response from within the region. The conference was, in effect, a Southern answer to the report. With a friend in the White House and Southerners in many positions of importance throughout the federal government, declared the Birmingham Post, the South must seize the moment: “If ever we are to make progress, now is the time.”
Muted warnings were voiced against labeling the SCHW a political movement, yet most acknowledged that nothing short of massive and sustained political action was likely to lift the South out of the morass of poverty. If the involvement of so many Southern Democrats and New Deal figures in the conference and the presence of Mrs. Roosevelt on the program were not enough to underscore the political dimension, FDR himself did the job with a message read to the delegates at the opening session Monday morning. The long struggle by liberal leaders of the South for human welfare had borne fruit in the New Deal, the President said, but the battle for parity with the rest of the nation was far from over; many interrelated human and economic problems remained. “You know from years of trying the difficulties of your task,” he concluded, “but if you steer a true course, and keep everlastingly at it, the South will long be thankful for this day.”
More than twelve hundred registered delegates from all eleven former Confederate states plus Kentucky and Oklahoma paid the conference registration fee of one dollar and took part in the three days of discussions; countless hundreds more attended the sessions that were open to the public. Blacks made up about a fourth of those who registered, and several of them took part in the program as panelists or speakers. Working through more than a dozen committees (on education, housing, labor relations and unemployment, farm tenancy, capital and credit, constitutional rights, prison reform, voting rights, race relations, problems of youth, and other topics), the delegates quickly set out to make their generally liberal feelings known.
But in the very breadth of their liberalism were the seeds of their own undoing, for then as now—as always—such political labels as liberal and conservative could not adequately accommodate the multiplicity of special interests or the shades of opinion and commitment within the group. Some were eloquent in condemning discriminatory freight rates affecting Southern businesses, but weren’t opposed to wage differentials between Northern and Southern labor markets. Some wanted federal action to outlaw lynching and poll taxes and to open up the political process, while others thought these were reforms best left to the states. Some wanted more government control of wages and hours, child labor, and opportunities for women and blacks in the workplace, but others felt these economic matters should be worked out by management and labor. The delegates were introduced to some visionary ideas—“birth spacing” clinics, public defenders to represent the poor in court, inclusion of Negro history and culture in school textbooks—but few seemed ready to implement these farsighted notions.
Some notable and quotable statements rang out. Virginia Durr launched what one newspaper called “a witty and caustic attack” on big business, the press, and the House Un-American Activities Committee for their efforts to “smear and destroy” the labor union movement. John P. Davis of the National Negro Congress presented detailed and damning proof of racial inequities in education (black schools in the region getting eleven cents for every dollar spent on white ones, and over four hundred counties having no black high schools at all). And Aubrey Williams, never one to speak guardedly, had to call a press conference to clarify a flippant remark he had made about “class warfare” that Congressman Martin Dies, listening from Washington, branded as a subversive statement. (Even before the SCHW conference began, Dies told reporters he had inside information that the Communists were trying to convert black Americans to their cause in Birmingham and other cities of the South, and he vowed that his committee would go there soon to investigate. Later he claimed that one of his undercover agents had attended the
SCHW meeting to gather evidence on Communist activities.)
These were just a few of the emotions generated by the Southern liberals who showed up in Birmingham; equally as complex and intriguing were the feelings of those who stayed away. Ralph McGill and Virginius Dabney were originally listed among the sponsors of the conference, but neither of them came, in part because Communists were to be present. Several other well-known journalists, including W. J. Cash, Jonathan Daniels, Louis I. Jaffé, Gerald W. Johnson, and Hodding Carter, also skipped the event; so did Lillian Smith, editor of the progressive North Georgia Review, and P. B. Young, editor of the influential Journal & Guide, a black weekly in Norfolk, Virginia. Don West, the radical leftist who had helped to start the Highlander Folk School, was another no-show. Walter White and W. E. B. Du Bois were absent too, apparently uninvited; their outspoken hostility toward segregation no doubt made them too hot to handle, even for the bravest liberals.
Jessie Daniel Ames, still an official of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and a leader in the anti-lynching movement, was disdainful of the SCHW, calling it a “lunatic fringe” harmful to race relations; her absent leader at the CIC, Will Alexander, three years gone from the organization and never to return, was not openly critical of the Birmingham effort, but he too declined to participate. Both Ames and Alexander may have taken their negative cue from their colleague Howard Odum (as two of Odum’s Chapel Hill faculty associates, Guy Johnson and Rupert Vance, surely did). Whatever the case, it would have been awkward at best for any of them to have gone to Birmingham after the eminent sociologist had made disparaging remarks about the conference and its aims.
The journalists had a variety of reasons to be suspicious of the SCHW. Though in general they had applauded the report on Southern economic conditions, they were outraged by FDR’s bumbling attempt to purge his Dixie detractors in Congress, and most of them saw the conference as another example of behind-the-scenes manipulation by the President. They also reacted negatively to the choice of Hugo Black to receive an award named after Thomas Jefferson—whether because of the jurist’s right-wing past as a Klansman or his left-wing record as a senator, it’s hard to say. And, too, the participation of Communists and Socialists certainly influenced some of the newspapermen to stay at home.
Odum’s motives were also multiple and complex. His long-term effort to create a Southern regional research and planning council was clearly jeopardized by initiatives such as the SCHW—“it and twenty other groups that are literally taking the lead to do what the council ought to do,” he complained—and he stood back in frustration from it. He shrugged off W. T. Couch’s involvement, but found Frank Graham’s hard to take, and it widened the breach between them. “As usual,” observed the historian Michael O’Brien, “Odum and Graham had diametrically opposed views of social reform.”
No doubt the Southern Conference for Human Welfare provided all sorts of critics, right and left, with a large and stationary target. One hostile sharpshooter who fired on it early and often was Birmingham’s police commissioner, forty-year-old Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, then in the early years of a long and controversial career in local politics. As one of the conference committees was meeting in the Municipal Auditorium on Monday afternoon, Connor and a contingent of police officers walked in and told the startled group that they were sitting in violation of a city ordinance banning racially mixed meetings, and they would have to move or face arrest. H. C. Nixon was presiding. After conferring with others, he reluctantly and apologetically asked the participants to separate, whites to the right side of the aisle and blacks to the left, and they did so.
Within minutes the word had spread to other committee meeting sites and to delegates elsewhere. At a session later that evening, local participants said police enforcement of the Jim Crow law at recent public meetings had been selective, arbitrary, and punitive. The angry conferees then adopted a resolution condemning the action and expressing “regret that local laws and ordinances seriously inconvenience the conference, which is interracial in its approach to the problems of the South.” They would affirm their indignation twice more before the conference adjourned, finally instructing their elected officers not to book future meetings in cities where segregated seating would be required.
Eleanor Roosevelt arrived in Birmingham before dawn Tuesday morning, on a train from Atlanta. Her speech to the League of Women Voters in the Georgia capital had prompted an admiring Ralph McGill to call her “a grand person” who had “done more for the cause of democracy and patriotism than all the patriotic associations rolled into one.” (The First Lady also had gently chided Atlanta’s official censorship board for voting to ban a stage production of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, and McGill used even stronger words to condemn the board’s decision. What was truly profane, vulgar, and dirty, he wrote, was not the theatrical fantasy but the economic reality of the South’s many Tobacco Roads, including those in Fulton County—Atlanta—where “8,000 people are living on less than $3 a month.”)
In addition to lengthy reports on the welfare conference and editorials praising Mrs. Roosevelt, Birmingham’s Tuesday papers carried several stories of interest to the delegates: The city commission had sent the President a telegram of thanks for his condemnation of Nazi persecution of the Jews; fund cutbacks were forcing the Works Progress Administration to drop at least 400,000 workers from its rolls nationwide; in Birmingham and Jefferson County, more than four thousand families with no employment and no job prospects were “facing starvation” unless emergency relief could be found; a front-page feature told of a family of ten living on about a dollar a day in a lean- to shack made of sawmill slabs. Too bad they can’t make it over to the welfare conference, the writer opined; they could give the scholars there some fine points on economic distress.
A story from Washington analyzing the heavy Democratic losses in the 1938 elections showed that the defeats were all in the North and West, so Southerners would actually increase their already firm control of the party machinery in both houses. And from Wiggins, Mississippi, came a grim reminder of the ancient curse of racist violence: There, the day before, a mob of two hundred white men had tracked down and lynched a twenty-four-year-old black laborer they suspected of attacking and robbing an elderly white woman.
Aubrey Williams spent the morning whisking Mrs. Roosevelt from one stop to the next on a crammed schedule of appearances. In midafternoon they hurried to the First Methodist Church, where the conference committee on youth problems was in session and a heated debate was raging over the decision to enforce the city’s segregation ordinance. Not noticing that the assembled crowd was racially divided, Mrs. Roosevelt walked to the front row with Williams and sat down, as she later put it, “on the colored side.” When someone hesitantly brought the new protocol to her attention, she was reluctant to move. “Rather than give in,” she explained, “I asked that chairs be placed for us with the speakers facing the whole group.”
Criticism of the ordinance inevitably focused on Bull Connor and the city commission. “They praise FDR for speaking out against persecution of the Jews in Germany,” said one delegate, “but what about persecution of blacks here, such as yesterday’s lynching in Mississippi?” Others declared that there should be a federal anti-lynching law, and Congressman Luther Patrick jumped to his feet to explain why he opposed such legislation. Only the Southern mob slayings would be targeted, he said, not the urban gang killings in the North; the South always gets singled out.
Mrs. Roosevelt challenged Patrick. “I’m wondering why the solution doesn’t lie in the hands of the people of the South,” she said. “Why isn’t it at your door to frame a law that you think meets the needs and is satisfactory to the people of the South? Has there ever been a real effort by Southern lawmakers to pass an anti-lynching law that would apply everywhere?”
There was a burst of applause; when it subsided, Patrick replied in a low voice, “As far as I know, there has not been.”
Mr
s. Roosevelt’s part in that afternoon episode would be talked about for years to come, and the story of her seating would be so embellished in the telling and retelling that the truth would slip away and myth would replace it. Most accounts would paint a stirring picture of a boldly rebellious First Lady—some even had her defiantly placing her chair astraddle a chalk line in the aisle between the white and black segments of the audience. In point of fact, however, she didn’t seize upon the opportunity to make an issue of local laws and customs; in general, it was not her inclination to challenge segregation directly. After she spoke in the Municipal Auditorium that night to a massive crowd (divided racially), she took a question from the audience on the subject, and gave this answer:
“What do I think of the segregation of white and Negro here tonight? Well, I could no more tell people in another state what they should do than the United States can tell another country what to do. I think that one must follow the customs of the district. The answer to that question is not up to me but up to the people of Alabama.”
It was not her diplomatic skirting of the issue that people would recall, though, but rather her plea for equal educational opportunity, for “oneness in America,” and for a society in which “no one is pressed down by his brothers.” The auditorium was filled to overflowing with more than six thousand people (about equally divided, white and black), and another thousand or more had to be turned away. In a dramatic gesture, Mrs. Roosevelt first went out to the main entrance to greet those who couldn’t get in. Then, back on the stage with Congressman Patrick, Senator Pepper, and Judge Charlton, she captured the audience with her warmth and sincerity. Even after listening to her thirty-minute speech and an hour of responses to questions, they were reluctant to let her go.
Finally, by midnight, eighteen hours after she had arrived, Eleanor Roosevelt was back on a train bound for Warm Springs and the Thanksgiving holiday with her family. Birmingham had been cheered and charmed by her presence—but the glow that lingered in her wake was no panacea for what ailed the city, the South, or the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.