by John Egerton
Lillian Smith, an unconventional Southern white woman if ever there was one, published South Today until 1944, when her novel, Strange Fruit, propelled her into the center of public debate on the race issue in the South and the nation. An explosive drama about a secret love affair between a white man and a black woman in a small south Georgia town, the book leaped to the head of the best-seller list, topping 140,000 copies in two months. It was barred from the U.S. mail, banned in Boston, and panned over most of the South. It knocked over all the traces—race, sex, language, ideology. Some Communists, and even some blacks, including Walter White, took offense at the novel (although White’s daughter Jane played the female lead opposite Mel Ferrer when Strange Fruit opened on Broadway in November 1945).
At the age of forty-seven, Lillian Smith awoke to the realization that her novel had made her a conspicuous advocate of racial justice and equality. For almost a decade, she and Paula Snelling had been working quietly for those objectives—producing their magazine, writing for other publications, even hosting biracial social gatherings at their north Georgia mountain home. Now, suddenly, she was listened to, quoted, talked about—she was influential—and calmly, without missing a beat, she went on declaring publicly what she had been saying all along to her invited guests, most of them Southern men and women, white and black: Segregation is “cultural schizophrenia,” it is “spiritual lynching,” it is “unendurable to the human spirit.”
Strange Fruit—by which Smith meant all Americans who were products of the culture of segregation—was a phrase used earlier by lyricist Lewis Allan and vocalist Billie Holiday as the chilling symbol of a lynch victim hanging in a tree. The Allan-Holiday image prevailed, not only because of the song but because the dramatic climax of the book also focused on a lynching. Strange Fruit was to be Smith’s only major work of fiction, but not her only book; later in the forties, in a personal, almost confessional analysis of segregation’s crippling effects, she would contribute to the literature of the South one of its most memorable and enduring works, Killers of the Dream.
Numerous other imaginative volumes appeared in the war years, adding to the South’s luster as a fertile spawning ground of novelists, poets, and playwrights. The reputation would continue to grow into the fifties and beyond, in curious and paradoxical contrast to the continuing scourge of ignorance and illiteracy in the region. Even as Faulkner and his trailing file of compatriot scribes drew widespread praise and admiration from critics, the South continued to languish in the backwaters of intellectual stagnation. It still had the poorest schools, the fewest and least-equipped libraries, the fewest readers of magazines and books, the fewest publishers, the fewest bookstores. Glancing about the South in, say, 1940, you might well have concluded that there would be precious few literary oases anywhere in the region, were it not for the presence of a vital strand of bookstores (many of them owned by Jewish families: Mills and Zibart in Nashville, Gottlieb in Birmingham, Zimmerman and Liebschutz in Louisville). Atlanta’s largest outlet for new books was in Rich’s Department Store (also Jewish-owned); at the opposite extreme in terms of size and setting was the cluttered and cozy Intimate Bookshop in Chapel Hill. Though they were largely isolated from one another, the enterprises glowed like a string of lanterns in the Southern darkness.
Nonfiction from the South—or about it—was likewise impressively rich and voluminous in the forties. The journalists—Dabney, Daniels, Carter, Graves, Milton—were productive as usual. Joining them was Ben Robertson, a New York Herald-Tribune writer and native South Carolinian, who wrote Red Hills and Cotton in 1942 (and died soon thereafter in a plane crash over the Atlantic). In New York, James Agee finished his later-to-be-acclaimed Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Roi Ottley, a reporter for the Amsterdam News, wrote perceptively of life inside black America in New World A-Coming. A rising generation of historians that included Bell I. Wiley, Thomas D. Clark, C. Vann Woodward, and John Hope Franklin—sons, respectively, of Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Oklahoma—took the first tentative steps toward realism and revision in chronicling the Southern past.
From Greenville in the Mississippi Delta came Lanterns on the Levee, a nostalgic defense of Old South values by the quintessential planter-aristocrat William Alexander Percy. A shy, gentle, benevolent patrician, the Harvard-educated lawyer-poet showed why his friend Hodding Carter characterized him as “a soft touch for every sharecropper and tenant farmer down on his luck.” Percy’s prose was all grace and charm; it’s hard to imagine anyone putting a kinder face on a planter’s noblesse-oblige regard for his dependent workers (“like a man for his dog,” said one reviewer). He was no bigot; in 1931 he went to a black church in Greenville to give a gracious introduction to visiting poet Langston Hughes, and over the years the two men stayed in friendly contact. But even in 1941, when Lanterns on the Levee appeared, it seemed curiously anachronistic, an old-fashioned brief for upper-class supremacy and privilege. Lillian Smith dismissed it as “a tasteless expression of white arrogance,” and even Virginius Dabney regarded Percy as an outmoded paternalist. More significant than his book was the kindly gentleman’s personal commitment to raise and nurture three of his young cousins whose father had committed suicide. One of the boys, Walker Percy, would later be acclaimed as a distinguished American novelist.
Howard Odum, Charles S. Johnson, H. C. Nixon, Arthur Raper, and Ira Reid—familiar names to university scholars by this time—kept up their prolific pace. In Sharecroppers All, Raper and Reid concluded that the South was “handicapped less by the sharecroppers than by the heritage of the plantation system, less by outside opposition than by inside complacency, less by the presence of the Negro than by the white man’s attitude toward him, less by the spectre of class uprisings and Negro domination than by the fear of them.… The South’s bogeys! What have they made us do to ourselves?” Two years earlier, another white-black team of scholars, economist George S. Mitchell and sociologist Horace Cayton, produced a revealing study of race and organized labor called Black Workers and the New Unions.
The war, far from stemming the flow of new books of social inquiry, seemed almost to quicken it. Odum wrote one of his better books, Race and Rumors of Race, an up-to-date analysis of heightening wartime tensions between whites and blacks. Georgia-born social scientist Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin produced The South in Progress in 1940. Two years later, in No Day of Triumph, J. Saunders Redding of Hampton Institute in Virginia vividly reported his impressions from a journey through the Southern states. In 1944, Edwin R. Embree, the Rosenwald Fund executive, profiled some of black America’s leading figures in 13 Against the Odds. Autobiographies by Langston Hughes (The Big Sea) in 1940 and Zora Neale Hurston (Dust Tracks on a Road) in 1942 provided further evidence of the productivity of black writers in this period.
The acerbic and irreverent Hurston wrote in a highly original and direct style that made her readers laugh and squirm all at once. She condemned race and class prejudice as “scourges of humanity,” and praised “the richer gift of individualism.” Earlier, she had poked good-natured fun at the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance (the “Niggerati”) and at urbane blacks like James Weldon Johnson, who had tried hard but without success, she said, “to pass for colored.” As for those who were considered “race spokesmen,” said Hurston, “Anyone who purports to plead for ‘what the Negro wants’ is a liar and knows it. Negroes want a variety of things, and many of them diametrically opposed.” Asserting that “race pride is a luxury I cannot afford,” she dismissed racial solidarity as a destructive goal for blacks as well as whites—and impossible besides, in a country with as much ethnic diversity as the United States.
No black writers—and not all that many whites—were more highly regarded in this time between the depression and the war than W. E. B. Du Bois, whose autobiographical Dusk of Dawn appeared in 1940, and Richard Wright, who caused a sensation in the literary world with Native Son that same year. Du Bois, seventy-two years old and still in his prime, was turning out essa
ys, articles, and books with the acumen and energy of someone half his age; Wright, as it happened, was less than half his age—only thirty-two—but his fame after Native Son was almost instantaneous, proving once again the dominance of popular fiction over scholarship.
Dusk of Dawn was widely reviewed and praised in the Northern press but virtually ignored in the South, even though Du Bois was by then six years into his second long stint on the faculty of Atlanta University. As always, his egotism illuminated the pages, but some critics thought they detected signs of a mellowing in his assessment of old adversaries. He seemed more objective in his handling of Walter White and the NAACP, more accepting of FDR and the New Deal, more critical of the Communist Party, and more resigned to the inevitability of continuing segregation in the South. In fact, it was his call for a black strategy of “deliberate and purposeful segregation for economic defense” that kept him at odds with the NAACP and gave a controversial tone to his book.
No matter what you might have thought of his pronouncements or his personality, you could not have been a fair-minded person and fail to appreciate and admire W. E. B. Du Bois for his longevity, his assertiveness, his intellect, and his devotion to the cause of equality for disadvantaged minorities. In a career that had spanned almost half a century by 1940 (and would continue, incredibly, for twenty-three years more), he had pounded away relentlessly at the evils of discrimination based on color, caste, and class. He was the preeminent black scholar of the twentieth century—“the founding father of the black intelligentsia,” as Arthur Spingarn of the NAACP called him—and on top of it all, he was an incisive and compelling writer, as Dusk of Dawn clearly showed. Dozens of younger scholars, as well as some contemporaries (of whom few remained), looked to him for advice and counsel; he was their fountainhead of scholarship and activism.
He was also a prickly burr under many a saddle. His old friend and colleague John Hope had lured him back South in 1934 to head the sociology department at Atlanta University, but Hope died two years later, and Rufus E. Clement, his successor as president, had a much harder time accommodating Du Bois. By 1944, Clement and his board had had all they wanted of the abrasive and cantankerous scholar, and he was retired involuntarily. Turning away offers from Fisk and Howard, Du Bois accepted another call from the NAACP to serve as “director of special research.” If they intended to use the old warhorse as window dressing, they miscalculated; he was nobody’s mannequin—not then, not ever—and his reunion with Walter White and the association’s leadership was destined to be short and stormy.
Richard Wright’s education in the hot fields of Mississippi and the mean streets of Chicago and New York gave searing intensity and a ring of truth to Native Son, his starkly realistic 1940 novel about the violent life and death of Bigger Thomas, a Mississippi manchild trapped in a Windy City slum. This is what racism and bigotry do to the human spirit, Wright was saying dramatically, and the message resonated throughout the North (though Southern critics, once again, hardly took notice). The enormous success of the book threw new light on Wright’s past—his migration from the South, his apprenticeship in the Federal Writers’ Project, his former job with the Communist Daily Worker, his membership in the American Communist Party. Now, for the first time, he had the attention of a large number of whites, and like no novelist before him, he let them know in blunt language just how devastating racial discrimination was.
Over the next few years, Wright was often in the news. He left the Communist Party, disillusioned by its failure to offer a realistic alternative to American blacks; he was married, divorced, and married again, both times to European women; he gradually became alienated from the black literati and their liberal, elite, upper-class camp followers, black and white. On a few occasions he went again into the South, once to visit his mother and brother in Mississippi (and ride a Jim Crow coach back to Chicago), another time with Orson Welles to the University of North Carolina, where they worked with Paul Green on a stage play of Native Son (eventually to become staged on Broadway). By the time his next book, Black Boy, came out in 1945, Wright was widely perceived as an angry, troubled young man, a brooding genius tormented by personal problems. He would shortly move to France and spend most of the remaining fifteen years of his life in exile from America, searching in vain for a harbor of peace and contentment free of racial bias.
If Richard Wright felt alienated from all of America, imagine how profoundly estranged he must have felt from Mississippi and the South. And yet, even as he railed against the evils of white supremacy—an inescapable burden wherever he went—he seemed at times to sense that an unbreakable bond of history encircled all Southerners. “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,” he wrote in 1941—and in a further word addressed to white listeners he added, “Look at us and you will know yourselves, for we are you, looking back at you from the dark mirror of our lives.” And, in the concluding passage of Black Boy, he recalled his thoughts as he left Memphis for Chicago in 1927:
I was not leaving the South to forget the South, but so that someday I might understand it, might come to know what its rigors had done to me, to its children. … So, in leaving, I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently. … And if that miracle ever happened, then I would know that there was yet hope in that southern swamp of despair and violence, that light could emerge even out of the blackest of southern night. I would know that the South too could overcome its fear, its hate, its cowardice, its heritage of guilt and blood, its burden of anxiety and compulsive cruelty.
Even the most well-intentioned Southern whites found it altogether too easy to dismiss Du Bois and Wright as radical extremists. It was bad enough that the two writers were favorably inclined toward the Marxist-Communist philosophy (an acceptable stance for liberals as long as the United States was allied with the Soviet Union against Hitler). But then they had the temerity, the audacity, to lash out at discrimination in words that echoed anger and hostility! To disapproving whites—the vast majority, no doubt—there was something rude and disrespectful, or worse, about such behavior; it was simply too jarring, too unsettling, too unappreciative. They compared it to the boorish extremism of the Bilbos, Rankins, and Talmadges. No solution to racial problems would ever come from the extremes, they said; it would only be found closer to the center, among moderates of goodwill.
The same judgments were applied to numerous other prominent black figures of the forties, from Langston Hughes and Walter White to A. Philip Randolph and Paul Robeson. It was not their race, the white critics insisted; it was their militance, or their ideology, or their Northernness. In point of fact, none of these six black spokesmen—Du Bois and Wright, Hughes and White, Randolph and Robeson—could be called Southern in the present tense (though three of them were born there), and most if not all of them had flirted with or embraced the philosophy of communism at some time, and all were certainly as hostile to the laws and mores of white supremacy as anyone in America. Little wonder that most of the South’s white liberals shied away from them.
If they were too extreme, then, who would the liberals find more acceptable? Edwin Embree may have been trying to address that question when he selected his subjects for 13 Against the Odds. He included all six of the militants, plus seven more unmistakably moderate to conservative men and women: Mary McLeod Bethune, Charles S. Johnson, George Washington Carver, Marian Anderson, Mordecai Johnson, composer William Grant Still, and boxing champion Joe Louis. (It’s hard to see how anyone could have disliked Louis. The humble and benevolent Brown Bomber, a citizen of Chambers County, Alabama, by way of Detroit City, was the pride of all black Americans and many whites, and had been since that magic night at Yankee Stadium in June 1937, when he crunched an Aryan citizen of Nazi Germany, Max Schmeling, to win the world heavyweight crown.)
But the questions remained: Who, if anyone, could speak with authority for
the more than thirteen million African-American citizens of the United States, and in particular for the ten million who lived in the South? Who could be their advocate, commanding their respect and that of the whites who claimed that the South would, of its own free will, do right by its citizens of color? And who could say exactly what changes needed to be made?
In the atmosphere of heightened racial tensions that marked the war years in the United States, such questions were heard frequently, and many people attempted to respond to them. Langston Hughes, in a 1941 issue of Common Ground, supplied seven explicit answers in an essay titled “What the Negro Wants.” (His list: a chance to earn a decent living; equal educational opportunity and an end to segregation in public schools; decent housing; full participation in government; a fair deal before the law; public courtesy; and open access to public accommodations and conveyances.)
Guy B. Johnson, one of Howard Odum’s colleagues in sociology at the University of North Carolina, showed the article to William T. Couch, director of the UNC Press, with a suggestion: Why not get a dozen or so prominent blacks of liberal, moderate, and conservative persuasion to write essays on Hughes’s theme, and commission Rayford W. Logan, the Howard University historian, to compile them in a book that would sharpen the debate on racial questions? Couch was attracted to the idea. Like numerous other early liberals who held to the belief that segregation was a fixed condition in Southern society, he thought the proper objective of social reform was to make separate truly equal—and, further, that responsible Southern blacks shared that goal. But the foremost black spokesmen were calling for deeper and more far-reaching reforms, and Couch concluded that the best way to counter them was with more restrained and conservative arguments by other blacks. In the spring of 1943 he proposed the book to Logan, who quickly accepted the assignment. They signed a contract for What the Negro Wants, and tentatively agreed to aim for publication in the spring of 1944.