Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  Within the black as well as the white community, religious institutions before midcentury consistently proved to be less courageous and less prophetic than the scattering of selfless individuals in and out of their ranks who kept on trying, at whatever risk or sacrifice, to promote social change. It was preachers and teachers standing alone, not their churches or schools or colleges, who did the most to pass on hope and encouragement to the multitude of besieged citizens at the bottom of the economic heap; it was black shopkeepers, entertainers, skilled craftsmen, undertakers, even bootleggers—people with a modicum of independence—who often showed by word and deed the scriptural spirit of faith and endurance.

  The Northern-based and liberally inclined Federal Council of Churches initiated a modest effort to bridge the North-South and white-black chasms in the 1930s, but it found little receptivity in the South. Too many white ministers—even those who were sensitive to racial injustice—found it impossible to buck the tide of white supremacy, and too many black pastors had seen enough terror face-to-face to know that it was dangerous and radical to be a dissenter. An attitude of benevolent paternalism, such as the white Baptist minister M. Ashby Jones of Atlanta exhibited in his longtime involvement with the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, was just about as far as white men of the cloth felt willing or able to go in those years—and cautious ventures outside the walls of the church by Jones and others stopped far short of any semblance of equality.

  Benjamin Mays, a black Baptist minister and president of Morehouse College, was elected vice president of the FCC in 1944, and he was influential in guiding the organization to a more activist role in social issues affecting the South. Mays, a South Carolina sharecropper’s son who earned a bachelor’s degree in New England and a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, was typical of numerous Southern-born black ministers who seemed to gain effectiveness as critics of segregation with each step they took away from the South or the institutional church—or both. The black colleges, the YMCA, and the NAACP were the most widely traveled routes to non-church-based public service for black ministers from the South. Some left the region; Georgia-born Channing Tobias, to name one prominent example, served as a national leader of both the YMCA and the NAACP. Others chose to stay, among them Robert E. Jones, who developed a YMCA conference center for blacks in Mississippi, and James M. Hinton, an organizer and leader of the NAACP in South Carolina.

  As president of a private college in Atlanta, Benjamin Mays could say and do things that no black church pastor in the Deep South—not even men like Martin Luther King, Sr., of Ebenezer and William Holmes Borders of Wheat Street, Atlanta’s foremost black Baptist congregations—would have considered prudent in, say, 1941. (Just two years before that, when the movie version of Gone With the Wind premiered in Atlanta, Reverend King had run into a hornet’s nest. He drew sharp criticism from many blacks for allowing the Ebenezer choir to put on aprons and Aunt Jemima bandannas and sing for an all-white audience that pointedly excluded, among others, the black actress Hattie McDaniel, who played the role of Mammy in the film). Within the protective circle of the YMCA and other nondenominational groups, Mays and other black leaders could interact with whites in ways that would have been impossible inside the institutional church.

  Black ministers who found platforms outside the church for their critical comments on Southern race relations were occasionally echoed by a few whites who left the pulpit for more activist roles. In the late thirties and early forties, Witherspoon Dodge, a wellborn South Carolinian who had held pastorates in two Protestant denominations, found a new calling as a labor organizer and advocate of racial justice. A man of eloquence as well as courage (on more than one occasion, he suffered beatings for his liberal views), Dodge told an audience in 1939 that the South was isolated from the rest of the United States “by mountains of pride and rivers of prejudice and valleys of ignorance and swamps of reactionary stupidity, and every now and then washed out with floods of lawlessness.”

  It would take a fanciful imagination to think of the South in those dark years just before World War II as a society awakening from decades of social slumber; in fact, you could probably make a stronger case for the argument that a deep-rooted conservative reaction to Roosevelt liberalism had taken hold, and the direction of regional movement had shifted back to the right. But even so, the tiny seeds of American idealism—democracy, freedom, justice, opportunity—that had been scattered across the South for decades were still alive in the dreams of some people, and now and again they sent up little shoots of hope. However faintly the pillar institutions of Southern society seemed to show it, an atmosphere of impending change did nonetheless hover over the region in those lean years of almost imperceptible transition—years dominated by the war, but also marked by a quietly intensifying consciousness of race and class divisions.

  To be as isolated as the South was in the early years of the twentieth century was to be handicapped by short rations of economic and cultural nourishment and imprisoned by an ignorance of greater possibilities beyond the magnolia curtain. But the physical separation couldn’t last forever; cars and trucks appeared, and after them such marvels as paved roads, radio, talking pictures, phonograph records, washing machines, electric iceboxes, and even airplanes. With each new technological advance, the outside world drew closer. In contrast to the sacred traditions preserved by institutions such as the church and the academy, these profane innovations disrupted the established patterns of a rigidly orthodox society.

  Throughout the golden years of radio, from about 1925 to the end of World War II, the South could claim barely more than a tenth of the nation’s broadcasting stations (and a similar fraction of the home sets). But among the meager portion were half a dozen or so fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel stations in New Orleans, Atlanta, Nashville, Memphis, San Antonio, Richmond, and Louisville. Others in places like Cincinnati and Chicago also reached into Dixie, and together they brought news, music, entertainment, and offers of commercial products every bit as enticing as the Sears, Roebuck catalog.

  The same pop tunes, classical compositions, jazz, and swing that enthralled listeners in New York and Philadelphia now rode the magical airwaves into the South—and for good measure, the folks in Dixie also got homegrown cowboy music, blues, and gospel (to be fused in the mid-forties into two main channels: country music, mainly for whites, and rhythm and blues, mainly for blacks). Franklin Roosevelt entered by that marvelous new sound-transmitting device, too, and his sonorous voice touched people’s minds and hearts as no printed appeal ever could. Broadcasting networks tied local stations to central headquarters in New York, and from these came national news—the same for Pennsylvanians and Californians and Carolinians alike. And, at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, citizens stared in wonder and amazement at an exhibit of something called television, a box with a window that showed moving pictures transmitted electronically from another place. Someday, went the spiel, you’ll have one of these miracles in your own home. Yeah, sure.

  Irresistibly, but ever so slightly and gradually, the South’s padlocked doors and shuttered windows were easing open. Bits and pieces of the larger world were filtering in through the cracks. “Your Hit Parade” went on the radio in 1935. By then, big dance bands were touring the country—including the South—and their audiences everywhere seemed to know instinctively that “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” Racial segregation prevailed—in the North almost as strictly as in the South, or so it sometimes seemed—but the bands and their listeners cared more for the music than for social custom, and gradually they improvised ways to get around the gatekeepers.

  The movies, too, brought change. Hollywood proved during the depression and confirmed again during the war how skillfully—and willingly—it could make propaganda films to support government policies. It could also blend myth into history quite effectively, as witness all those Westerns, about cowboys and Indians, and the “Southerns,” about plantation colonels and docile
slaves. Most movies about the South up to the mid-forties perpetuated these moonlight-and-magnolia stereotypes—but along the way, there were some notable exceptions.

  The same silver screen that had presented anti-black provocations like The Birth of a Nation and So Red the Rose also featured Paul Robeson as a black colossus in The Emperor Jones. Claude Rains starred in They Won’t Forget, a film indicting Deep South racism, and Humphrey Bogart played the lead in The Black Legion, an anti–Ku Klux Klan picture. New Orleans–born writer Lillian Hellman’s play-turned-movie The Little Foxes represented an awakening quest for honesty in new Southern fiction; so did In This Our Life, a film drama with a racial theme based on Ellen Glasgow’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by that name. Depression realism and New Deal propaganda made a potent and sometimes volatile combination, too—not just in the movies but in stage productions, on the radio, in books, and in other forms of artistic expression. The WPA Theater Project’s focus on social issues, more than any other single factor, caused enraged Southern members of Congress to lead the attack that finally succeeded in killing the project in 1939.

  Classical music in the thirties was barely known to the great mass of Southerners. Even its three leading black artists—tenor Roland Hayes, contralto Marian Anderson, and baritone Paul Robeson—were considered Northern (and therefore superior to Southern blacks) by their admirers. Still, they weren’t spared the slights and indignities of white racism. Despite her enormous talent and a quiet dignity befitting her middle-class Philadelphia background, Anderson was barred from singing in Washington’s Constitution Hall in 1939 by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who owned the building. Angered and offended, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her membership in the DAR, and federal officials, taking her cue, promptly arranged an Easter Sunday recital for Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial. A vast and enthralled audience of all races attended the outdoor event. The symbolism of the gathering under the granite gaze of the Great Emancipator was powerfully apparent—and it would be invoked again in years to come.

  Roland Hayes had long since left his boyhood in the South and finished his education at Fisk by the time he achieved international fame as a concert singer. In 1926 he went back to Gordon County in north Georgia to buy the farm where his mother had worked as a slave, and he and his family visited the property regularly for over fifteen years. But on a sojourn there in the summer of 1942, he was painfully reminded of the region’s abiding hostility to blacks. In the nearby town of Rome one humid afternoon, Hayes’s wife sat down to rest and cool off in front of a fan in a store where she had gone to shop. She was promptly insulted by an angry white clerk, who ordered her out. Hayes, a gentle and sweet-tempered man, came rushing in and tried to calm the situation with conciliatory words, but for his trouble he was cursed by the clerk, punched and pummeled by two town policemen, and dragged off with his wife and daughter to jail. They were finally released on bond after calmer heads intervened, and the charges were eventually dropped, but Hayes had had enough. Soon thereafter, he sold the farm and put Georgia and the backward South behind him for good.

  Paul Robeson was a native of Princeton, New Jersey, and a two-time all-American in football at Rutgers University, but his father, a Presbyterian minister, had fled slavery in North Carolina as a teenager. A genuine celebrity before he turned thirty in 1928, the younger Robeson attained such stature as a stage and screen actor and concert singer that in his professional life he could usually stand aloof from racism. But the day-to-day indignity of social and economic discrimination against minorities and the poor in the United States enraged him, and he never shrank from attacking it. By the mid-1930s he was an avowed Marxist who supported Communist causes in various parts of the world, and for a time he lived in Russia.

  The Soviet Union’s wartime alliance with the United States shielded the actor-singer from severe criticism, and his fame grew each time he starred as the Emperor Jones or Othello, or sang “Ol’ Man River” (written by Jerome Kern with him in mind), or recited the enormously popular “Ballad for Americans,” an inspirational “sermon” on brotherhood and unity written by poet John Latouche of Richmond and set to music by composer Earl Robinson. In the postwar years, Robeson would suffer greatly for being red and black and blunt—but before and after, he acted and sang and championed the rights of the disinherited with a booming voice and a biting tongue. White Southerners were aghast; even Northerners who considered themselves liberal sometimes fidgeted uneasily at the sight and sound of black militance coming from a classical and artistic genius—and a fellow Yankee at that.

  Meanwhile, back in the South, it was popular music, above all the creative arts, that most expressively and impressively characterized the region at the beginning of the forties. Here was the one positive index in which the South clearly led the nation. It may have been too impoverished to produce much else of genuine excellence, but it did give birth to the three most original forms of American music—the blues, jazz, and the strains of mountain and rural music that came to be called country and Western, or just country. All three now enjoy universal prestige and appeal (having long since overcome the initial resistance of elitists, including many on the home front who at first recoiled from them with disgust and embarrassment). Most of the leading composers and performers of these musical styles in the 1930s were no more than one generation removed from the South, if at all; the fact that so many of them lived and worked outside the region was damning proof that poverty and racial discrimination had forced them to leave.

  Country music wasn’t exiled from the South, but it was shunned early on by many highbrow purists as crude and primitive “hillbilly” music. But when Mississippi’s Jimmie Rodgers played his guitar and sang, and when the A. P. Carter family of Virginia performed, they generated an indigenous blossoming of musicians from the rural hills and valleys of the South whose recordings and radio programs would soon bring them lasting popularity. “The Grand Ole Opry,” on the fifty-thousand-watt station WSM in Nashville, was their primary showcase, reaching as it did to most of the states of the union, and phonograph records also added greatly to their success. Country music was a phenomenon with the staying power to become a permanent institution in American culture.

  In a parallel vein, black musicians from the Mississippi Delta and other parts of the Deep South—gifted instrumentalists and singers like Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, Huddie Ledbetter (known as Leadbelly), Ma Rainey, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson (and, a little later, Josh White, B. B. King, and Mahalia Jackson)—were creating and unleashing a basic mix of gutbucket blues and hymns of faith that avid listeners could feel in their bones. W. C. Handy, the cornet-playing composer of “Memphis Blues” (originally a campaign song for E. H. “Boss” Crump) and “St. Louis Woman,” earned his title as the “Father of the Blues” by starting early—in the 1890s—and staying active for sixty years.

  This was not overt social protest music—that would have been suicidal—but it certainly spoke to the lowly condition of blacks in the social order, and to their endurance in those bleak times. It struck a resonant chord with black listeners—and, as the years passed, with an increasing number of whites. No major radio outlet was available to blues musicians in the early years, but they did make recordings that helped to spread their popularity.

  Right after World War II, another fifty-thousand-watt Nashville station, WLAC, would introduce countless thousands of new listeners to rhythm and blues, gospel, and other variations of the soul music that black Southerners had brought to life. A quartet of white disc jockeys at the station—Gene Nobles, Bill “Hoss” Allen, “John R” (John Richbourg), and Herman Grizzard—were so adept at pitching the music, the commercials, and the jive chatter that few people were aware of their racial identity. One summer night in the early fifties, a young Georgia soul singer, James Brown, showed up at the station with his first recorded song (an old hymn, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow”), hoping to get a boost for his budding career with some airplay from the “Negro d
eejays.”

  It was also from the African-American communities of the South that jazz sprang into being, and as the 1940s began, jazz and its derivative, swing, represented the main current of popular American music. Rising on a base established in New Orleans by such early artists as Buddy Bolden, “Jelly Roll” Morton, “King” Oliver, and “Kid” Ory, the music got its modern impetus from Louis Armstrong, a twentieth-century Southern American in the most symbolic and authentic sense: born in New Orleans on the Fourth of July, 1900.

  Following the river of migrants to exile in the North, Armstrong added immeasurably to the burgeoning popularity of jazz in the thirties and forties. He got plenty of help from some Northern blacks, including Count Basie, Cab Calloway, “Fats” Waller, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Art Tatum, and Lena Home. There were whites from the North whose contributions to the music were likewise enormous—people like Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and the brothers Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. Even some whites from the South were important to the movement—Harry James, Tex Beneke, Jack Teagarden, Johnny Mercer, Ray McKinley.

  But it was the amazing number of black instrumentalists and vocalists from the South who helped carry jazz and swing to the pinnacle of popularity—and if you include such border jurisdictions as Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and the District of Columbia in the Southern orbit, the list lengthens considerably. In the same wave with Louis Armstrong came such notable artists as these, all born in the region between 1899 and 1918: Duke Ellington, Lucky Millinder, Fletcher Henderson, Coleman Hawkins, Barnie Bigard, Trummy Young, Jimmie Lunceford, “Hot Lips” Page, Jonah Jones, Jimmie Rushing, Louis Jordan, Milt Hinton, Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, Erskine Hawkins, “Dizzy” Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Pearl Bailey (the last two born within a month of each other in Newport News, Virginia, in 1918).