by John Egerton
Consider what a destructive loss this drain of talent was for the South: scores of black musicians and other creative artists, and a substantial number of whites too, leaving in search of the simplest of pleasures—a chance to sing their songs, to play their music. Add to these the exodus of writers, scholars, and athletes, and you have a diminution of gifted contributors that even the richest of societies could ill afford.
Because the community of jazz artists cut across racial lines, there was within that community a greater effort to remove racial barriers than could be found in any other segment of society, save for a few labor unions and other ventures on the fringes. The musicians were far from solving the segregation problem, but they did at least show signs of trying. It was in 1935 that clarinetist Benny Goodman formed a jazz quartet with drummer Gene Krupa and two black musicians, Texas-born pianist Teddy Wilson and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, a native of Louisville. And it was a black composer and arranger, Fletcher Henderson—yet another Southerner—who created most of the swinging arrangements for Goodman’s big band. Later, Duke Ellington added white drummer Louie Bellson to his band, and Louis Armstrong paired his trumpet with Jack Teagarden’s trombone, and Lena Home sang with Charlie Barnet’s orchestra, and Billie Holiday was the vocalist for the Artie Shaw band.
In the entire pantheon of jazz greats, Ellington towers to the sky. Born into the middle-class black culture of Washington, D.C., in 1899, he was well launched in a life of music by the time he was twenty. During most of the turbulent decade of Manhattan ferment highlighted by the Harlem Renaissance, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, Prohibition, gangster mobs, and the Wall Street crash, Ellington and his rapidly improving dance band were entertaining whites at two famous night spots: the Kentucky Club at Forty-ninth and Broadway, and the Cotton Club on the fringe of Harlem. For years to come, the Ellington band would remain among America’s finest, justly renowned for such classics of swing as “Satin Doll” and “Take the A Train.” “Duke plays piano, but his real instrument is that orchestra,” his arranger and close friend Billy Strayhorn once said, and the man himself liked to confess that his only mistress was “Madame Jazz.”
Music may have been the only thing about which Ellington was unambiguous. By turns charming and manipulative, generous and selfish, fun-loving and moodily withdrawn, he showed little outward interest in politics, religion, or social issues (including race)—and yet his musical compositions revealed how deeply he cared about the heritage of African-Americans and the mysteries of the human spirit. His defense against the racial brutality of the South was to ignore the region and refuse to go there. Finally, in 1933, when his fame had spread across the United States and abroad, Ellington agreed to play a string of engagements at theaters and dance clubs in Dallas, and for the first time in his life he ventured below the Potomac. So wildly successful were the band’s segregated appearances in Texas—some for whites, some for blacks—that the suave and confident bandleader began to dream of exerting his considerable influence in behalf of black people in the South and beyond.
While critics hailed the unexcelled quality of the Ellington band but debated whether the music should be called jazz or swing—the new thing—Ellington himself called it “Negro music,” and said what he was striving for was “unadulterated Negro melody” that captured “the wealthy heritage of the man of color.” He took the band to New Orleans in 1934 (traveling this time in two private railroad cars that served as their hotel), and reveled in the Creole culture so celebrated for its jazz and food. And then, over the next decade, Duke Ellington composed and produced much of the music that stands now as his social statement about racial discrimination in American culture.
In 1939 the last of Thomas Dixon’s twenty-two novels, The Flaming Sword, was published in Atlanta. He called it, with typical Dixonian hyperbole, “an authoritative record of the Conflict of Color in America.” In fact, it was a doomsday screed about an attempted overthrow of the U.S. government by Communist armies of blacks, Mexicans, and other “alien forces.” As if to duel Dixon with the rabid white supremacist’s own choice of weapons, Ellington promptly answered by composing and recording an instrumental tour de force that he also called “The Flaming Sword” (a phrase that Dixon found, incidentally, in the writing of W. E. B. Du Bois). The book and its author faded into obscurity with the ranting dogma of Old South demagoguery, but the Duke and his music were of a higher dimension. They endured.
Within a few years, Ellington had completed such major compositions as “Black, Brown and Beige” (a fusion of jazz and classical idioms), “New World A-Coming” (borrowing the title of journalist Roi Ottley’s “inside black America” book), and “Deep South Suite,” a concerto that might be called a complex expression of the composer’s deepest fears and hopes about race.
In 1941, while staying on the West Coast, Ellington joined with others to produce an all-black musical revue built around a satirical funeral for Uncle Tom and Jim Crow. Jump for Joy, as the production was called, featured Ellington and his band, a big cast headed by Dorothy Dandridge, and a wealth of great tunes and lyrics written by the Duke and more than a dozen others. The fast-paced show seemed to change night by night as new songs and skits bubbled from the minds of the creative staff. It was all hip and humorous, but hard-hitting. “I’ve got a passport from Georgia,” went one tune, “and I’m going to the U.S.A.” Another pictured Uncle Tom’s cabin as a drive-in eatery at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Critics and audiences in Los Angeles liked the show—its music, at least, if not its “social significance”—but it closed after three months and never made it to Broadway, let alone to the South. Its backers apparently decided that the theatergoing public wasn’t ready for a stage production—even a lighthearted and funny one—that supported the idea of social equality for black Americans.
There are those who say that creative artists, more than philosophers and other intellectuals, are the first to discover the spirit of their age, and the first to define the future. Listen to Ellington’s “Deep South Suite,” or the pointed lyrics in “Jump for Joy,” or Paul Robeson’s moving rendition of “Ballad for Americans,” or Billie Holiday’s haunting vocalization of “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching, and you can believe it. In these and other outpourings and lamentations from that not-too-distant time, you can hear urgent messages to a diverted and unheeding nation, pleas for attention and help.
In every culture, a wise person once observed, there are leaders and followers—and then there are scouts, the ones who go out to the frontier alone and return to warn us of the dangers and opportunities that lie ahead. Duke Ellington and all his musical companions, along with the novelists and other creative artists in this era of transition, played such a role for us. They were our scouts.
When the Daughters of the American Revolution barred famed contralto Marian Anderson (right) from singing in their Washington auditorium, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes (left) joined Eleanor Roosevelt in arranging a concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Anderson sang there to a throng of 75,000 on Easter Sunday, 1939. (Illustration Credit 15.1)
With his thumb on a passage in the Bible promising justice to the poor and afflicted, former Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina was sworn in as a justice of the Supreme Court in July 1941. Witnessing the ceremony were his wife, Senator Carter Glass of Virginia (left), and President Roosevelt (seated). (Illustration Credit 15.2)
Some Southern Democrats in the Senate before the end of World War II: (Illustration Credit 15.3)
Hattie Caraway of Arkansas
Pat Harrison of Mississippi (Illustration Credit 15.4)
“Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, voting with his wife at their polling place near Lynchburg, in rural Lee County (Illustration Credit 15.5)
Lister Hill of Alabama (Illustration Credit 15.6)
Harry F. Byrd of Virginia and his dog Arno (Illustration Credit 15.7)
Mississippi-born Richard Wright, author of Native Son
and Black Boy (Illustration Credit 15.8)
Soon after Alfred A. Knopf (left) published The Mind of the South, he went to North Carolina for a visit with author W. J. Cash. (Illustration Credit 15.9)
Richmond Times-Dispatch editor Virginias Dabney read part of his 1943 editorial advocating desegregation of the city’s public transit system on a segment of the motion picture newsreel, The March of Time. (Illustration Credit 15.10)
Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal directed the six-year study of race in the United States that was published as An American Dilemma in 1944. (Illustration Credit 15.11)
Before and after he wrote about the South for The New Republic and The Nation, Thomas Sancton was a journalist in his native New Orleans. (Illustration Credit 15.12)
Will W. Alexander (right), receiving the 1940 Thomas Jefferson Award of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare from conference leaders Frank Porter Graham and Louise O. Charlton (Illustration Credit 15.13)
Labor leader A. Philip Randolph (Illustration Credit 15.14)
When Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge (seated, left) testified as a character witness at a 1941 clemency hearing for several Ku Klux Klansmen convicted of flogging, prosecutor Daniel Duke brandished the terrorists’ lash in front of the startled governor. (Illustration Credit 15.15)
After white Democrats barred them from participating in state politics, these men and women, led by Osceola McKaine and John H. McCray (third and fourth from left, front row), formed the South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party in 1944 and sought recognition at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. McKaine ran for the U.S. Senate that fall. (Illustration Credit 15.16)
Atlanta University sociologists Ira De A. Reid (left) and W. E. B. Du Bois on Georgia Tech radio station WGST in Atlanta in 1941 (Illustration Credit 15.17)
Mary McLeod Bethune (center), president of the National Council of Negro Women, with novelist Lillian Smith (left) and Eleanor Roosevelt, two of sixteen women honored by the council at a February 1945 reception in Washington (Illustration Credit 15.18)
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s body arrives by hearse at his funeral train, Warm Springs, Georgia, April 13, 1945. (Illustration Credit 15.19)
4. Dancing in the Dark
Newspapers in the United States have always displayed a split personality: servant and master, watchdog and fat cat, defender of the voiceless and voice of the establishment. To understand them at all, you have to take them for what they really are: an oddling hybrid of free expression and free enterprise. In their glory days before the audio-video revolution, they were virtually the sum and substance of that bedrock institution we call The Press. In smoky, ink-smudged newsrooms, as in no other arena, softhearted idealism and cynical, hard-eyed realism met like awkward partners at a nightly dance, and it was hard to watch them straining to stay in step without feeling a surge of admiration.
Southern newspapers in the Roosevelt era seemed at times to stand out in vivid exaggeration of those contrasts. More of their owners and publishers voiced support for FDR over his Republican opponents than did their fellows in the North, but that was an anomaly explainable by the fact that practically all Southerners were yellow-dog Democrats, and had been since the Republican Mr. Lincoln freed the slaves and preserved the Union. By temperament and status and force of habit, Southern publishers were privileged lords of the press as surely as were their counterparts in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or London. When they gathered to confer in posh resorts around the region, they talked far more about paper and ink, ad lineage and circulation, unions and profits, than they did about social issues, economic reforms, service to the reading public, or compensation for their editors and reporters (who were, along with schoolteachers, generally the poorest-paid of all professionals; before the war, even the best of them were making do on fifty dollars or so a week). The prevalent tone and substance of Southern news and editorial columns tended to reinforce and confirm, not challenge, the authority of pillar institutions such as the church, the university, the Democratic Party—and, of course, the press itself.
And yet, even among the colonels and majors of Southern journalism (some of whom actually went by those titles), the noble tradition of idealism was vigorous and pervasive. The most reactionary publishers, such as James G. Stahlman of the Nashville Banner and Tom Hederman, Sr., owner of two dailies in Jackson, Mississippi, shared a reverent devotion to public service with such moderately progressive owners as J. N. Heiskell of the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock and the Daniels brothers, who succeeded their father, Josephus, at the helm of the Raleigh News & Observer. One and all, they aspired to guide and direct what Heiskell once called “a moral and intellectual institution,” not just a mindless industry mechanically recording the news. Perhaps inevitably, some found their intellectual and moral duty in a paternalistic defense of social and economic privilege, while others felt their calling was to serve a much larger public. The result was a surprisingly diverse array of styles, philosophies, interests, and emphases among the papers—and workaday journalists—in the post-depression South.
If it were possible to pinpoint the forty or fifty largest papers in the region on a left-center-right spectrum in the mid-forties, chances are they would divide about evenly into three groupings. Several were generally regarded as liberal and progressive for their time and place; Richmond and Norfolk, Raleigh and Greensboro, Atlanta, and Little Rock and Greenville, Mississippi, had such papers. In some other cities—Jackson and Jacksonville, Charleston and Columbia, New Orleans and Houston—the prevailing character of daily journalism was decidedly conservative. But then there were cities such as Nashville, Chattanooga, Macon, and Dallas, where both ends of the spectrum were represented, and still others—Birmingham, Montgomery, Memphis, Miami, Tampa, Charlotte—where competing dailies gravitated toward the center. Along the border of the South, in St. Louis, Louisville, Washington, and Baltimore, and in Charleston, West Virginia, and Wilmington, Delaware, the papers proudly claimed a progressive tradition.
In virtually all these places, the broad central avenue of moderation was far more visible than were the narrow peripheral paths of radical or reactionary expression. That is to say, the liberal papers were not as far to the left or the conservative ones as far to the right as they were to become subsequently, when the social reformation took root in the generation after the war. No Southern daily paper had spoken out against racial segregation by 1945, and it would be almost another decade before any of them did. Nevertheless, most of them generally made an effort to be fair; even the aggressively right-wing Banner in Nashville gave straightforward coverage to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare when it met in the Tennessee city in 1942.
The relatively moderate complexion of the mainstream Southern press remained more or less intact throughout the war years, even though changes in leadership caused some papers to slide to the right and others to slip to the left. George Fort Milton’s Chattanooga News lost a long and bitter takeover struggle with an extremely conservative rival, the Free Press, in 1940, and Milton himself shortly left for a government post in Washington after trying unsuccessfully to start a new paper. He never again lived in the South, but he remained active as a journalist and historian until the early 1950s. As the years passed, his views on social issues became noticeably more conservative. Back in Chattanooga, the reactionary News–Free Press (guaranteed to be news-free, said its critics) still had a well-heeled adversary in the Times (an older but much smaller relative of The New York Times), which was ably edited from 1935 to 1942 by the well-traveled and prizewinning Julian L. Harris, and after that by another liberal Southerner, Alfred Mynders. The guard was changing; both Milton, who had left the region, and Harris, who remained, were out of the picture by war’s end, their influence on public opinion appropriated by younger men.
Louis I. Jaffé of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot was in the twilight of his career too, and Lenoir Chambers, his longtime associate and a native North Carolinian, would eventually
replace him. In Richmond, Virginius Dabney ran the editorial pages of the Times-Dispatch with the authoritative detachment he had come to be noted for (and with an occasional hint of his diminishing liberalism), while his counterpart at the News Leader, Douglas Southall Freeman, looked forward to retirement after the war so he could concentrate on his real love, history. At the Montgomery Advertiser, Grover Hall, Sr., died and was succeeded by his son and namesake—after which, complained some of the old man’s admirers, the paper seemed to lose its liberal edge and become duller and more narrowly provincial.
A similar tone crept into the columns of John Temple Graves II at the Birmingham Age-Herald. An old-school patrician who often came across as a moralistic and self-righteous elitist, Graves was a classic pre–New Deal liberal who opposed the Klan, Prohibition, religious fanaticism, and racial intolerance (all of which he blamed on the lower class of whites), but who also believed the only way the South would change was glacially and of its own free will. By 1943, when he wrote a book called The Fighting South, he was so put out with FDR and Eleanor and social reformers and “pushy” Negroes and Northern leftists that he sounded for all the world like a latter-day apologist for the Old South.