by John Egerton
Out in the precincts, signs of philosophical consensus were likewise hard to find. Even in Chapel Hill, the path ahead looked rocky. As he sat on the platform with Mr. Roosevelt, Frank Graham might well have been preoccupied and troubled with thoughts of the file of correspondence he had left on his desk back at the office. The fallout from the Southern Conference for Human Welfare was hot and heavy—exhortations and admonitions and angry outbursts from a wide range of people, including some who curried his favor and others who longed to see him driven from office. Two of his own UNC colleagues, Howard Odum and W. T. Couch, were anything but happy with the conference’s outcome, or with Graham’s continuing leadership role in the SCHW.
To add further to his worries, the UNC president was about to be drawn into a racial controversy over Pauli Murray’s application for admission to graduate study in the social sciences. No one could question her academic qualifications. Born in Baltimore and raised in Durham, she was a graduate of New York’s Hunter College. A young Socialist radical in the early thirties, she had gravitated in time to FDR and the New Deal and, through correspondence, had established a long-distance friendship with Mrs. Roosevelt. Now, at twenty-eight, Pauli Murray epitomized the mature, intelligent, accomplished student around whom Howard Odum had built his reputation. Only one thing stood in the way of her certain admission to his program: She was black—café au lait, actually, with Caucasian features, but black according to the finely calibrated Southern color detector—and therefore ineligible under the law. Even if some of her forebears who were white alumni, trustees, and patrons of the university could have spoken from the grave on her behalf, she would not have been welcome.
Neither Odum nor the dean of the graduate school gave any serious thought to taking a stand in Murray’s behalf; her application was quickly and routinely rejected in mid-December. Undaunted, she appealed to President Graham—and his private attention to her file eventually became a matter of intense public interest when news of her application and some of her letters to university officials found their way into the newspapers.
Graham squirmed uncomfortably. He admired Murray’s determination, her courage, her perception. Somewhere else she had written, “The testing ground of democracy and Christianity in the United States is in the South,” and “it is the duty of Negroes to press for political, economic, and educational equality for themselves and for disinherited whites.” Those were Graham’s beliefs, words he might have written himself. Furthermore, Murray was keenly aware of the Gaines case, and she would come to see her admission to the South’s most liberal university as a logical application of that ruling, as well as a powerful sign of Southern liberalism and democracy at their best.
But Frank Graham, as pragmatic as he was liberal, feared an altogether different outcome. State law explicitly mandated segregation; to defy the law would be to court disaster. He watched and listened as debate raged on the campus (graduate students in an opinion poll favored Murray’s admission by about two to one, while the student newspaper voiced editorial opposition). Finally, early in 1939, Graham gave his answer. This is not the time for “a popular referendum on the race issue,” he wrote to Murray; if she would be patient while he and others worked for genuine equality of educational opportunity, he would, he promised, start searching for “the next possible advance.” Not even Eleanor Roosevelt was keen on pushing for that advance just now. “The South is changing,” she wrote to Pauli Murray, “but don’t press too hard.” Later that spring, the North Carolina legislature passed an enabling act to allow graduate and professional courses at the state’s black colleges, but no funds were appropriated. And at UNC, it would be another dozen years before a single black student could gain admission.
Such were the realities of segregation and legalized white supremacy as the 1930s wound down. In this Southern citadel of academic liberalism, a serious challenge to Jim Crow segregation could not be advanced past the talking stage. It followed, then, that the issue was effectively closed almost everywhere in the South—and would remain closed, by and large, throughout the war years. Only in a few border-state institutions, some labor unions, parts of the religious community, the military, and a scattering of other arenas would occasional exceptions to this rule come to public notice.
There is no way to measure how much the South’s inferior position in the nation was made worse by its mindless devotion to the “separate but equal” myth. In the field of higher education alone, however, you can get some idea of the extent of the problem by looking at a profile of the leading institutions. Virginius Dabney did that in his 1942 book, Below the Potomac, and it seems safe to say the numbers he cited would not have changed appreciably until after the war. What he found, overall, was that Southern colleges and universities were woefully underfinanced, overburdened with political and religious intrusion, and seriously deficient in library holdings, Ph.D. programs, and research activities. In other words, they were pretty much where they had been back in the early years of the depression.
Only eight institutions in the region had endowments of $10 million or more, and only three of them—Texas, Duke, and Vanderbilt universities—were in the $25-million-plus range. Texas and Duke were the only schools with more than a half-million library volumes, and Texas alone had a five-figure enrollment (eleven thousand students). None of these totals were in the same ballpark with the country’s leading institutions. There was only one Southern university press of national stature (North Carolina’s). There were schools of law or medicine or engineering in several of the ex-Confederate states—some even had all three—but Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and South Carolina had no Ph. D. programs at all, and three or four other states were only a thin notch above that rock-bottom level.
Even the best of the universities left a lot to be desired. W. J. Cash, writing in the American Mercury, described Duke’s student body as “one of the most inert in the country,” and went on to explain why old Buck Duke, the tobacco baron, had spent a fortune “to transform an obscure Methodist college in a North Carolina mill-town” into a university that bore his name. “What he wanted was a Babbitt factory,” Cash declared, “a mill for grinding out go-get-’em boys in the wholesale and undeviating fashion in which his Chesterfield plant across the way ground out cigarettes.”
A few highly regarded colleges for women, public and private, were scattered about the region—places such as Randolph-Macon in Virginia and Agnes Scott in Georgia—and an equally small number of good institutions (Howard, Fisk, Tuskegee, Hampton, Atlanta University, Morehouse) served a black elite. By far most Southern colleges and universities, though, were meant for the primary benefit of a relative handful of high-born white males—and with rare exceptions, those schools, too, tended to be narrow-gauged, orthodox, and mediocre.
With all their manifold shortcomings, most of the institutions had no realistic hope of attaining parity with the average run of colleges and universities elsewhere, much less with the finest. And still, the crippling strictures of racial separation compelled both public and private interests to guard the ramparts against integration and to go through the charade of supporting black schools in the name of separate-but-equal white supremacy, as though there were resources enough to fund two systems.
And on top of all that, some of the state schools were subjected to such outrageous acts of political harassment that their integrity and character were stained for years to come. Much as the Mississippi public colleges had suffered under Governor Theodore Bilbo in the early 1930s, the Georgia public institutions under Governor Eugene Talmadge in 1941 were devastated by a series of political appointments and arbitrary dis-missals that caused the institutions to be disaccredited. Then, in 1944, the regents of the University of Texas dismissed the president, Homer P. Rainey, on trumped-up charges that he was an advocate of communism and racial equality—one and the same, in the view of some regents. Congressman Martin Dies was a principal instigator of that purge, but reactionary regents appointed by governors P
appy O’Daniel and Coke Stevenson needed no encouragement from outsiders. Rainey—an ordained Baptist minister, a Mason, and a Rotarian—admitted to being a liberal Democrat and “a friend of the Negroes”; he sealed his fate when he accused the regents of sixteen specific violations of their trust. The richest state university in the country (its coffers stuffed to overflowing by oil-well income) thus entered the postwar era intellectually crippled, politically compromised, and leaderless.
Homer Rainey’s courageous and dignified defense of intellectual freedom and the added eloquence of such illustrious Texas faculty members as Walter Prescott Webb and J. Frank Dobie were not enough to save the university from self-inflicted harm. Likewise, in North Carolina, even if Frank Graham could have persuaded every member of the university family to accept Pauli Murray, he would still have had to answer to the states reigning political-economic-social majority—and that formidable force, Graham instinctively felt, was far more than he and the university could hope to overcome.
These were the two most prestigious state universities in the South, both with progressive leadership at the top administrative level—and yet their limitations and weaknesses and their vulnerability to attack were all too painfully apparent. If UNC and Texas couldn’t lead the way to educational and social improvement in the region, how could anyone expect Georgia or Arkansas or South Carolina or any of the other lesser institutions to break free from their political shackles and become forces for regional betterment?
Southern universities, it’s true, did occasionally provide a platform and some protection for individual expressions of social criticism by members of the faculty or student body. It was not uncommon in the 1930s for advocates of socialism or communism to speak out on the campuses. At the University of Florida, for example, former student Stetson Kennedy of Jacksonville and a handful of others organized a campus chapter of the leftist American Student Union in 1937, and though it remained small and lasted less than two years, the group did openly identify with the radical “united front” and international peace movements, and even held some meetings with students at black colleges nearby. Similar expressions of student political radicalism surfaced on some other campuses around the region.
Faculty members and administrators from every state had taken part in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare—but some, like C. Vann Woodward of Florida, would be stunned to learn years later that as a result of their participation, they bore a cautionary tag as “security risks.” Woodward had finished his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina in 1937, and his dissertation on Tom Watson, the mercurial Georgia populist, would soon be published as the young historian’s first book and as the portent of a new wave of revisionist writing about the Southern past. UNC continued to point to Howard Odum, Rupert Vance, Guy Johnson, Paul Green, W. T. Couch, and numerous others as exemplars of its traditions of freedom and diversity.
Universities of less distinction were by no means devoid of independent thinkers; Alabama, for example, proudly claimed Hudson Strode, a popular and colorful English professor who was a highly regarded travel writer himself but was best known for his classes in creative writing. Two professors at Tuscaloosa in the mid-1930s produced acclaimed volumes of social and cultural criticism: Carl Carmer (Stars Fell on Alabama) and Clarence Cason (90° in the Shade). Cason, deeply anxious about how people in Alabama would react to his book, committed suicide just before it was published. At Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, economist Broadus Mitchell resigned in 1938 to protest the university’s refusal to admit a black applicant to its graduate school.
But these were, for the most part, individual expressions of mild criticism or sharp dissent, against which many opposite examples of intolerance for independent thought could as easily be cited (think of H. C. Nixon’s forced departure from Tulane, and Alva Taylor’s from Vanderbilt, and J. William Fulbright’s from Arkansas). At best, the picture was mixed and conflicting. As for the institutions themselves, however, no such ambiguity characterized their collective behavior. They were ponderous, impersonal, deeply conservative; they cautiously shied away from controversy of any kind, and rarely addressed themselves to social problems in any activist or partisan way—which meant, of course, that on the volatile issue of segregation and white supremacy, they upheld the status quo.
To the extent that there was any sense of social mission at all in the engine rooms of the South’s higher-education institutions, it was most evident in those few schools devoted to serving the least advantaged offspring of racial minorities and the poor. Berea College of Kentucky was one example; it was founded in part on the principle of racial equality, only to be forced by law to abandon it. Some of the private black colleges and universities were similarly committed, among them Fisk, with its activist social science programs headed by Charles S. Johnson; Morehouse, under the forceful presidential leadership of John Hope and Benjamin Mays; and Howard University, during the thirty-four-year reign of President Mordecai Johnson.
Howard was little more than a Negro high school and an instrument of social control in the late nineteenth century, but it blossomed under Johnson’s leadership in the 1930s. As a university, it defied classification. It was both public (created and supported with federal appropriations) and private (endowed by philanthropists); it was Southern and Northern, by virtue of its location in the District of Columbia; it was religious and secular, segregated and biracial, a bootstrap institution and an elite community of scholars. Johnson himself seemed a perfect embodiment of all those contrasts; born in Tennessee, descended from black and white forebears, educated in the South, ordained a Baptist preacher, and possessed of urbane sophistication and great oratorical skills, he was passionately devoted to the education and elevation of the African-American minority.
The roster of outstanding faculty members and students at Howard in Johnson’s years reads like an honor roll of black distinction. No university in the nation, black or white, could boast a more productive lineup of activist scholars across the board than the likes of Charles H. Houston in law, Charles R. Drew in medicine, Ralph J. Bunche in political science, E. Franklin Frazier in sociology, Rayford W. Logan in history, Sterling A. Brown in English, and Alain Locke in philosophy. It was Mordecai Johnson’s genius that he could attract such people, heighten their zeal for social change, and foster a climate of intellectual freedom in which they could stretch themselves to the limit.
The organized church—like the university, like the mainline political parties—was another institutional pillar that shook and trembled as the South tried to find its equilibrium in the tumultuous years of depression and war. On the positive side, religiously motivated individuals worked separately and in groups to improve life in the South, as witness the efforts of the YMCA and YWCA, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, and a host of ordained ministers and lay leaders who served in higher education, home missions, charitable service organizations, and even labor unions.
But the influence of the church as an institutional force on such prevalent conditions as unemployment, hunger, homelessness, and racial discrimination was limited and largely ineffectual. In the houses of worship that dominated the architectural landscape of every Southern town and city—and from there right on up to the top of the denominational hierarchies—there was a marked tendency to separate social problems from worship and evangelism. All through those crucial years before the beginning of the postwar era, neither the white nor the black Protestant churches moved to the forefront as advocates of a modern social reformation, and neither did the much smaller Catholic and Jewish bodies. One and all, they seemed more concerned with the past and the future—with venerable traditions and with salvation in the hereafter—than with the urgent physical and social needs of their least fortunate neighbors.
Structurally, the major denominations still reflected the old North-South divisions left over
from the Civil War. The Southern Baptist Convention was for whites only, leaving black Baptists to find interchurch fellowship among themselves or in a token few alliances in the North. The mainline Methodist Church in the South had black members, but they were segregated both administratively and congregationally in an all-black “central jurisdiction.” Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Catholics, and almost every other branch of Christendom found similar ways of maintaining the color line.
The overwhelming majority of black Protestants belonged to one or another of the independent bodies of Baptists and Methodists that vied with each other and among themselves for whatever power and influence the segregated culture left to them. These all-black denominations, having no latitude to protest discrimination, tended to focus their energies inward and upward rather than outward; not until the mid-1950s would they become the primary moral and institutional force for civil rights in the South.
In The Negro Church in America, E. Franklin Frazier delineated the institution’s religious and moral influence and its role as “a refuge in a hostile white world”; he also saw it as an economic, political, and educational force among African-Americans. But, he concluded, “on the whole, the Negro’s church was not a threat to white domination” before the 1950s; on the contrary, it “aided the Negro to become accommodated to an inferior status.” Another student of black social history, C. Eric Lincoln, further noted that although the church had always been “the symbol of freedom” for blacks, its leaders seemed unable to agree that it should also be “the instrument of freedom.” Traditionally, said Lincoln, the churches of black America—until the fifties—had courted a conservative image, and thus were “seldom considered a threat to prevailing social values.”