Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  There are those who say that the late 1930s in the South—or, more precisely, the last months of 1938 in Birmingham—represented a fleeting moment of opportunity for regional deliverance from the grip of the feudal past. To be sure, the depression was slowly winding down, and the New Deal had raised the hopes of many, and labor unions were finally gaining a measure of respect, and blacks were perhaps a little less besieged than they had been in the twenties or earlier, and the attitude of white resistance to social change was not as hostile and hardened as it would in time become.

  But the euphoria that filled Municipal Auditorium when Frank Graham welcomed the Southern conference delegates on November 20 and when Eleanor Roosevelt thrilled a turn-away crowd two nights later obscured the hard reality of conservative and reactionary power that had controlled the South from one end to the other for generations. Nothing that happened in those four days in Birmingham altered that imbalance of power in any significant way.

  Those who took part in the conference were the most visible segment of a liberal and progressive minority of undetermined size and strength. It’s conceivable that behind them were hundreds of thousands of like-minded Southerners waiting for constructive leadership to emerge; it’s also possible, and perhaps even likely, that the Municipal Auditorium crowd was the heart and soul—and most of the body—of progressive opposition in the region. What marked them as liberal, in comparison with other Southern leaders, was their willingness to appear in public and acknowledge that the South had problems, and to accept some responsibility for addressing them. And yet, even among those in attendance, there were deep disagreements and animosities.

  No one waved militantly anti-labor banners in the hall, but some parlor Democrats were shocked to see so many union members in attendance—and that note of class division was minor compared to the bitter feelings that separated the AFL partisans from the CIO. Blacks were treated respectfully by the organizers until someone decided to make segregation an issue, and then the conference split into quarreling factions, one that resented the enforcement, and the other that resented the resentment; neither side, though, offered any challenge to the “separate but equal” philosophy that perpetuated black inferiority to whites and Southern inferiority to the North.

  The Democrats who controlled the conference (there being no admitted Republicans present) looked on the handful of Communists and Socialists as a single bothersome faction to be courted or tolerated or hated; few could grasp or appreciate the political and ideological differences that made the Socialists and Communists despise each other. Most of the women in attendance wanted government at every level to guard against sex discrimination in the workplace, but some of the ladies and a good many men disapproved of the very notion that a woman’s place was anywhere but in the home.

  John Temple Graves of the Birmingham Age-Herald chipped in with a tongue-clucking put-down of those who strayed from the prevailing racial orthodoxy. Writing in praise of Tuskegee Institute President F. D. Patterson for his failed effort to halt debate on the segregation ordinance, the patrician columnist declared: “With all that needs to be done for our Southern Negroes, those who raised this question of seating practice rendered no service to improved race relations and cast a damper on the whole conference.”

  And so it went. Governor Bibb Graves, for all his New Deal credentials and his CIO support, declared himself “surprised and shocked” when the conference passed resolutions against segregated seating and in favor of a federal anti-lynching law. He was also embarrassed and angered by another motion, this one urging him to pardon the five Scottsboro boys still in prison—less than two weeks after he had emphatically refused to take such action.

  On the last day of the conference, a nineteen-member committee on permanent organization chaired by W. T. Couch (and including only one black delegate) put forth a plan of organization that called for a slate of general officers and a council made up of seven representatives from each of the thirteen member states. When it became obvious that all of the general officers would be white, the plan was amended to add several delegates at large, to ensure that at least a few blacks would be included.

  Debate on the structure and the various nominees was lengthy and rancorous. Frank Porter Graham, though he was not present and had begged not to be nominated, was elected permanent chairman over Judge Louise Charlton, who also asked that her name be withdrawn (she was given the ceremonial post of honorary chairman). Mollie Dowd was chosen secretary, though she complained of manipulative shenanigans in the nominating caucuses and told the bickering conferees that she “would not consider it an honor to serve in that office.” Clark Foreman was named treasurer and H. C. Nixon was chosen to be executive secretary—the only full-time, salaried post in the organization. Representatives of religion, education, labor, industry, government, the press, and nonprofit agencies made up the larger council.

  As the final session of the conference approached—the Wednesday-night finale honoring Justice Black—the weary delegates seemed at least as divided among themselves as they were from the conservative society around them. On one point, though, they appeared to be united, and that was in the selection of Frank Graham as their leader. “Of all the people in the South,” Lucy Randolph Mason declared in a subsequent letter to the University of North Carolina president, “you are the one first choice to lead any progressive southern movement.” The only way the Southern Conference for Human Welfare could hope to succeed, she said, was with Graham at the wheel. With deep reservations but an abiding sense of duty, he would eventually agree to assume the responsibility.

  Finally, just as the last session of the conference was about to begin in the half-filled auditorium, one more sensational incident was played out behind the stage curtain. Seventy-year-old William E. Dodd, noted historian and former U.S. ambassador to Germany, had to be escorted forcibly from the backstage area after his invitation to present the Jefferson Medal to Justice Hugo Black was rescinded and Dodd was told at the last minute that John Temple Graves would speak in his place. The late-night postmortem sessions buzzed with two conflicting rumors about the reason for Dodd’s removal: One was that his pro-war stance displeased the Communists; the other was that his anti-liberal views displeased Hugo Black. The official reason given in the press was that Dodd was ill. No doubt, by the end, he was.

  Senator John Bankhead introduced Graves (“a liberal Southerner and a helpful thinker in a troubled age”), and the journalist presented Justice Black with a plaque honoring him as “the Southerner who has done most to promote human and social welfare in line with the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson.” A quotation from Jefferson’s 1801 inaugural address was also inscribed on it: “Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion.” (The same words were chiseled in stone above the main entrance to the Jefferson County Courthouse in Birmingham.)

  The justice tried his best to recapture the spirit of the previous nights. He focused on Jefferson and his ideals, and drew deeply from the Virginian’s own words (rendering the pertinent quote as “equal and exact justice under the law to all men of whatever race or persuasion”). But after so much high drama and controversy and excitement, the remaining delegates, in a state of near exhaustion, could only muster perfunctory applause. The evening was an anticlimax, and when it ended, no one hung around to talk much longer.

  The Southern Conference for Human Welfare, a four-day call to service that gently but insistently shook the South to consciousness from decades of slumber, was far and away the most significant attempt by Southerners, up to that time, to introduce a far-reaching agenda of change and improvement to their native land. It would long be remembered, not for what it achieved, but for what it aspired to and what it attempted.

  In the early morning hours after the delegates had departed, a frigid blast of winter air plunged temperatures in north Alabama into the twenties, and large, heavy snowflakes blanketed Birmingham with its first white Thanksgiving in memory. The forecast was alread
y written: It would be a long, cold winter in Dixie.

  II

  1938–1945:

  Road of Hope

  We black folk, our history and our present being, are a mirror of all the manifold experiences of America. What we want, what we represent, what we endure is what America is. If we perish, America will perish. … The differences between black folk and white folk are not blood or color, and the ties that bind us are deeper than those that separate us. The common road of hope which we all have traveled has brought us into a stronger kinship than any words, laws, or legal claims. Look at us and know us and you will know yourselves, for we are you, looking back at you from the dark mirror of our lives.

  —RICHARD WRIGHT,

  12 Million Black Voices

  1. A Liberating War

  It lingers still, in the memory of many, as the last “good war”—a justified pursuit of a noble cause by “the Allies,” a heroic aggregation of Yanks (pardon the expression) and their fighting pals. As America stood on the threshold of World War II, “We the People” were far from united in our support of the undertaking—and yet, even then, the moral imperatives seemed clearly to outweigh the practical reservations. All over Europe and Asia, we saw innocent victims being ground under the boots of marauding imperialists. It would be ethically indefensible for us to ignore such wanton slaughter—and careless in any event, since we would surely be the next prey of the aggressors. And, not least to be considered, it was apparent long before the shooting started that the war would also be an economic, political, and social shot in the arm for “the patient”: the sickly American nation, afflicted with chronic anemia and depression.

  Nowhere was that inoculation more beneficial than in the South. The New Deal, for all its blessings, had barely scratched the surface of Southern need, and the region was still the mudsill on which the rest of the nation stood. World War II ushered in an economic boom that not only ended the Great Depression in Dixie but finally blew away eighty years of stagnation dating all the way back to the beginning of the Civil War. For the first time in its history, the South experienced a genuine bloom of economic opportunity, a broad-based and sustained flowering that brightened virtually every corner of the society. Industry, agriculture, and government fed this surge with new facilities, new crops, new services. The war effort opened up millions of new jobs for both uniformed and civilian personnel; more than that, it transported hundreds of thousands of them out of the narrow confines of their native environment and into a wide world of exotic people, places, and ideas. At last, Southerners were no longer hopelessly stranded, isolated, idle, and broke; they were on the move, and the general direction was up.

  It would have taken no persuasion at all to convince me that it was a good war; I was a pint-sized GI Joe commando from day one. Three months after my formal education commenced at Cadiz Graded School in my Kentucky hometown, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and burned the “day of infamy” forever in my memory. In my eyes, this was no far-off conflict; it struck home in numerous ways. My father went to sea with the navy for the second time (he had also served in World War I), and others I knew and loved also left, some never to return. A new army base, Camp Campbell, was rising swiftly along the Kentucky-Tennessee border just thirty miles from Cadiz, and convoys of soldiers in battle dress passed frequently through our town. Twice, in fact, I remember watching in openmouthed awe as war games filled the horizon with paratroopers, and men with hand grenades and rifles and drawn bayonets dashed from house to house in a grand display of mock combat. No bombs fell, no blood was spilled, no enemy threatened our comfort and safety. When it’s sanitized like that, war can be a very uplifting and unifying experience.

  It wasn’t long before surplus equipment became available, allowing boys like me to wear helmet liners, carry ammo belts and mess kits, pass spy messages in homemade code, and imagine waves of enemy soldiers falling like flies in the withering sweep of our machine-gun fire. The Kentucky Theater, across the street and two doors up from my house, kept us amply supplied with blood-and-guts battle movies throughout the war—Gary Cooper as Sergeant York, John Wayne and Errol Flynn as courageous leathernecks and dogfaces, scores of other Hollywood heroes as fighter pilots and down-with-the-ship sailors. Charging out into the Saturday afternoon sunlight from that dark, cavernous propaganda pit, we could almost see the hated Nazi and Nipponese minions caught in our crosshairs, begging for mercy. In the gloriously uncomplicated vision of the pre teen soldiers who made up my little circle of allies, it was a good war, a very good war indeed.

  I had no sense of the economic impact back then, of course, but I realize now that the war was like a huge relief check for my county, a continuation of the New Deal economic recovery plan that had been ongoing since 1933. The signs were all around us: Camp Campbell, with its huge construction force and operational workers, as well as the soldiers themselves; a new Cadiz post office, built by the Federal Works Administration in 1941; a network of concrete streets provided in similar fashion prior to that; a unit of the Civilian Conservation Corps; money for the school system; agricultural assistance agencies with letter names like AAA, FSA, and SCS; a wildlife refuge under the auspices of the Interior Department; a massive TVA dam being built on the nearby Tennessee River, after which a rural electric cooperative would bring power and light to hundreds of previously lantern-lit homes. And an exotic twist: German prisoners of war working in the tobacco fields in our county, so casually guarded as to be almost like trusties, or even regular farmhands.

  So much was new and different that there was no way to sort it all out. What it seemed to come down to, though, was this: Practically every program that breathed economic life into rural communities like ours had originated within a ten-year period in the White House or the Congress of the United States in Washington. In the war no less than in the depression, the long arm of the federal government was straining to free the nation from its economic paralysis. Even in a little political jurisdiction like Cadiz and Trigg County, Kentucky, the impact of the New Deal and the Second World War amounted to a one-two punch against hard times. Our community was a microcosm of the revitalization of America, and especially of the rural South.

  The military aggression of Germany in Europe and of Japan in Asia in 1939 demanded international attention just as the second Roosevelt administration was floundering in a sea of conservative opposition on the home front. The Southerners who controlled both houses of Congress were in the vanguard of resistance to FDR, joining with the resurgent minority of Northern Republicans to stifle New Deal reforms and set the stage for a conservative return to power after Roosevelt’s expected retirement in 1940.

  But the threat of war, filled as it was with both peril and promise, compelled all the players to rethink their positions and strategies. For his part, Roosevelt could turn with a certain sense of relief and rekindled vigor to the pleas of France and Britain and other nations for help. Southern senators and congressmen, on the other hand, could proudly lead the call to arms with eloquent orations extolling their region’s long heritage of patriotic volunteerism and military valor. And besides, they were tired of fighting each other; the President needed the Southerners’ help overseas, and they wanted a diverting issue to foreclose on his domestic reforms—and so they all made a big show of putting aside their differences for the duration.

  With each new conquest, the Nazis and the “Japs” grew more menacing to the United States. By the fall of 1940, France was in Hitler’s grip and Britain was under daily bombardment; Japan had seized control of China and all of Southeast Asia; and the two aggressors, with Italy, had signed a pact of mutual protection that was widely interpreted as a union of war-mongers.

  A substantial minority of Americans preferred, for a variety of reasons, to steer clear of these alien troublemakers. The so-called isolationists, a motley assortment of pacifists, anti-Semites, pro-Nazis, and laissez-faire capitalists, included such prominent figures as Charles Lindbergh, Joseph P. Kennedy, and John Fos
ter Dulles. They lobbied for a “fortress America” that would resort to military action only in response to a direct attack.

  They got nowhere in the South. Isolationist detachment was denounced as cowardice, if not outright treason; few public figures in the region, aside from “Our Bob” Reynolds, the xenophobic North Carolina senator, dared to associate themselves openly with the movement. Carter Glass of Virginia and Claude Pepper of Florida, poles apart on social issues, stood shoulder to shoulder in the Senate for every military measure FDR proposed—and even thought up a few themselves. The Southern bloc led the way in pushing through a selective-service draft, a major buildup of the national war machine, an offshore defense against German submarines, and a lend-lease plan to supply the British and others with arms. Most of them even went along with Roosevelt’s surprise decision to run for a third term in 1940, and he breezed to the nomination over his vice president and chief rival, John Nance Garner of Texas. FDR’s choice of Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace as a new running mate didn’t sit well with the party-bound Dixie Democrats, but they held their noses and helped boost the ticket to a five-million-vote victory—another landslide—over New York industrialist Wendell Willkie and the Republicans. As usual, fewer than a fourth of the Southerners old enough to vote actually cast ballots—but of those who did, three-fourths stood by Roosevelt.

  For months before the Japanese surprise attack on Hawaii in December 1941, the United States teetered on the brink of war with Germany. In October, German U-boats in the Atlantic torpedoed two U.S. destroyers, killing more than a hundred sailors, but still the President and Congress held back from a formal declaration of war. The December 7 bombing at Pearl Harbor claimed more than 2,400 lives. Within four days, Roosevelt had declared and Congress had affirmed that we were in a state of total war with Japan, Germany, and Italy.