by John Egerton
It was the white masses that populated lynch mobs, he said, but it was the upper classes that inspired and protected them, and the failure of this “better sort” was the genesis of the South’s undoing, its original sin. The Old South planters, the textile barons, the politicians and bankers and cotton brokers who controlled the region and kept it in feudal backwardness were not really aristocrats but erstwhile dirt farmers just a step or two up from the frontier. The New South was really the Old South in spruced-up garb. The white ruling elite created the illusion of a class-free society by uniting all whites in dominion over the blacks—and the lowly whites, out of a misguided sense of gratitude and superiority, were willing to fight and die for a social system in which they had no real stake. Cash saw through the Rebel-rousing Old South myth perpetuated in literature and history; he saw the hand of the state and the church and the academy in it too, and Yankee acquiescence, if not outright chicanery. In Cash’s essentially tragic view of Southern history, the common mindset of the white South conformed to a “savage ideal” that bonded most of its citizens to a narrow interpretation of the past, the present, and the future. And there he left it:
Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible in its action—such was the South at its best. And such at its best it remains today, despite the great falling away in some of its virtues. Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism—these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today.
His friends in Charlotte loved Jack Cash, and out of a sense of loyalty if nothing else, they also loved his book. They were delighted when he married a vivacious divorcee, Mary Northrop, in December 1940, just two months before The Mind of the South was published. The friends were proud, too, and even their doleful colleague managed to smile, when strongly positive and favorable reviews of the book began to pour in from around the South and from the national press. They could not have foreseen, of course, that it would become the best-known and most influential book of nonfiction ever written about the South, never to be out of print in the first fifty years of its existence. All they knew was that it was important and good and true, and that was enough for them.
His friends could not have known, either, that Cash’s time was short, but some of them were aware that he was pursued by his own private demons, driven at times to hand-wringing depression and anxiety. He received a Guggenheim fellowship, and in June, he and Mary went to Mexico, where he hoped to begin work on a novel. Within three weeks he was an emotional wreck—paranoid, delusional, certain that Nazi agents were pursuing him. His pleading wife finally got him to see a psychiatrist, but there was no relief. With everything to live for, with so much to give, W. J. Cash could only hear the demons. In a Mexico City hotel room on July 1, 1941, he hanged himself with his own necktie.
There was a certain Southern poignance, a familial quality, to what happened after that. After Mary phoned Pete McKnight back at the News in Charlotte to get the tragic word to Jack’s parents and his other family and friends, she was left, alone and afraid, in the custody of the Mexico City police. Hours later, the American embassy sent a driver to police headquarters to pick her up and bring her to shelter, on orders of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico. It was more than an impersonal act of courtesy; it was what you would expect from an old Southern gentleman, a North Carolina patrician: seventy-nine-year-old Ambassador Josephus Daniels of Raleigh.
In good time, Cash’s ashes were given a proper Baptist burial in the Sunset Cemetery at Shelby, North Carolina, a short walk from the home of his parents and a stone’s throw from the spot where another Carolinian of note, the novelist Thomas Dixon, the propagandist of romantic racism, would soon be laid to rest.
Death, like politics, makes strange bedfellows.
6. The Fire This Time
The smoldering hostility of white toward black and black toward white finally burst into deadly flames on the sultry night of June 20, 1943. Against a backdrop of stifling, overcrowded urban tenements echoing with the verbal thunder of radio preachers shouting race hatred, white mobs of Kluxers and other Nazi-like aggressors clashed with street-toughened black men and boys determined to defend their tenuous escape hatch from the cotton fields. The police force, virtually all white and largely native Southern, gave almost no protection to the migrant blacks; on the contrary, patrolmen were seen and photographed assisting in the racial assault. When order was finally restored several days later, thirty-four people were dead, hundreds injured, thousands arrested; the cost of the riot was estimated in the millions of dollars.
Was this New Orleans, Birmingham, Atlanta? Responsible Southerners had been fearing for years that just such a disaster would eventually befall them. But the dubious distinction was not theirs to endure. Instead, this worst outbreak of urban racial violence in almost a quarter of a century was visited upon Detroit, Michigan, far north of the Mason-Dixon line and deep in the heart of the mythical Promised Land.
Within a matter of a few weeks during that sweltering summer, bands of lawless citizens in a blind rage blew the lid off America’s racial powder keg. At army camps from North Carolina and Georgia to Mississippi and Texas, and from New Jersey to Washington State, clashes between whites and blacks left more soldiers dead than either race dared to admit. In places as widely separated as Philadelphia and Beaumont (Texas), Mobile and Newark, Los Angeles and Harlem, deadly rioting spread like a virus. Even as the Allied forces were liberating Italy from the Fascists and driving Japanese soldiers from the islands of the South Pacific, thousands of our own people here at home were escalating racial friction to the level of a domestic catastrophe, a senseless and devastating civil war in the city streets.
Of all the racial clashes in the United States that year (more than 240, by some counts), the most destructive and frightening by far was the murderous rage that swept through Detroit, the nation’s fourth largest city. Three years of warnings had fallen on deaf ears. The automobile plants, converted to war production and running round the clock, were hotbeds of competitive racial friction; public and private housing units, symbolized by packed and fetid trailer camps, were a scandal; demagogic evangelists, including Huey Long’s old accomplice Gerald L. K. Smith and the fascistic Father Charles Coughlin, fomented violence so skillfully and so relentlessly that some people wondered aloud whose Axis payroll they were on. Reporters and government officials described the riot as “a frenzy of homicidal mania, without rhyme or reason,” and predicted that in the future, the nation would “face its biggest crisis all over the North.” Wrote Thomas Sancton, the Louisiana-born New Republic staffer, “The United States never needed more gravely than it does today a strong and intelligent federal policy on the race issue.” It had none.
Almost as disturbing as the riots themselves was the ominous prospect of still meaner times to come. People who remembered the bloody summer of 1919 as a postwar eruption feared that the same impulses were raging out of control again, well before World War II was over. The domestic landscape seemed infinitely more dangerous than before; attitudes of Southern white bigotry had migrated north with the workers (or emerged from the latent fears of Northern whites), and blacks, for their part, seemed no longer willing to abide discrimination without resisting. Vicious rumors of black uprisings and insurrection plots sped through white communities North and South (the most pervasive and absurd of these had the President’s wife secretly organizing “Eleanor clubs” among black servants to disrupt the tranquillity of white households). In numerous cases, it was unfounded rum
ors of some outrage or another, not anything that actually happened, that sparked the 1943 disorders.
But whether their origins were real or imagined, the clashes themselves were too costly and too lethal to be ignored. In the midst of its prosecution of a world war on two fronts across the globe, America was compelled to hear a painful warning that many of its own citizens were on the verge of war with one another. After Detroit, anyone who was watching and listening could have seen that our social, political, and economic problems at home were tearing at the national fabric, demanding attention.
From a Southern perspective, the catalog of pressing problems was long and confusing. So much was changing, and so much needed to change. The future presented a daunting challenge—and if that suggested a coming time of opportunity to some, it loomed as a time of great uncertainty and peril for the vast majority. Southerners had never been thrilled by the prospect of sudden change; they were conditioned to approach it warily, if at all. But now change was everywhere around them, crackling in the air and rumbling beneath their feet. The last two years of the war, from the riotous summer of 1943 to the A-bomb summer of 1945, were filled with traumatic events, with momentous unions and divisions.
To begin with, there was the war itself, with all its emotional and conflicting elements of triumph and sacrifice. Among other things, it ended the worst economic depression in American history—and also set the stage for massive readjustments in postwar employment. The near-total eclipse of the New Deal social agenda also came in this period, simultaneously and paradoxically with the fourth election of Franklin Roosevelt to the White House. Here began the rise of Harry Truman, too, and the fall of Henry Wallace—or rather his conversion from Vice President to Secretary of Commerce, after which he would mount a third-party challenge against Truman in 1948.
The mid-forties were an active time for splinter groups in American politics—Communists and Socialists on the left, countered by right-wing sects that got their inspiration from the Nazi and Fascist movements. In the broad mainstream, the Democratic Party revealed a deepening split along North-South lines over civil rights and other social issues, while Republicans had their own liberal-conservative differences to grapple with.
The labor movement tried to concentrate on its age-old conflict with management, but the unions were weakened by warring factions within their own ranks. That same divisive tendency plagued other groups that, like the unions, could ill afford internal strife—African-Americans, for example, and Southern white liberals. The black divisions ran in several directions: between accommodation and self-determination, between conservatives and radicals, between Southern and Northern leadership. To confuse matters further, conservative blacks were aligned with Southern white liberals—until the liberals had to take sides on the race issue. Those who moved away from defending segregation quickly lost their liberal credentials and were branded as radicals, in keeping with the Southern tendency to define almost any proponent of reform, white or black, as an enemy of the people. Gunnar Myrdal’s big study (itself a powerful sign of impending change) attempted to sort out some of these distinctions, but the effort was largely wasted in the very region where it was most needed, since few Southerners (and not all that many Northerners) ever made their way through An American Dilemma.
What the Southerners felt most acutely—whites in particular, but also blacks—was a continuing sense of inferiority in the national scheme of things, and a chip-on-the-shoulder defensiveness because of it. The Detroit riot showed that America’s race and class problems were national, not regional, but that didn’t relieve Southern anxieties at all; on the contrary, it almost seemed to make matters worse. The standard Northern slant on that turn of events was that low-life Southerners, Negro and white, had brought their feud to Michigan and spilled it out on everybody. In the eyes of self-righteous Northerners, the South was still the nation’s number one problem—and that galling assessment hovered like an accusation, a judgment, a curse. If there was anything that virtually all Southerners shared, whatever their race or class or ideology, it was some degree of dissent from and disgust with the uninformed and insensitive bias of judgmental Yankees. Nobody liked to be forever cast as a whipping boy, an object of scorn and ridicule, the butt of every joke—particularly by smug and arrogant strangers.
It was true: Southerners were different. Not necessarily better or worse, just different. Race and sex and other distinctions aside, Southerners were still unlike their upcountry brothers and sisters in many ways. Let Charles S. Johnson stand in illustration of the point.
When he turned fifty in 1943, he had already put in fifteen years as director of social science programs at Fisk University in Nashville, and before that he had worked in New York, studied in Chicago, and spent his boyhood and youth in Virginia. He was a Southerner with Northern refinements of sophistication and urbanity. He would remain at Fisk for the rest of his life, working with single-minded dedication toward the goal that beckoned to the vast majority of African-Americans: to end discrimination by race and caste and class in the South and throughout the nation.
What made Johnson different from his fellow blacks in the North was not the goal but his manner of seeking it. Rayford Logan classified him as “right of center,” and by most lights he was undeniably conservative, in his personal and professional deportment as well as in his strategic thinking. He knew instinctively that Southern reformers couldn’t get by on aggressiveness and iron will and a clear sense of direction; they also had to have Br’er Rabbit smarts—craftiness, sagacity, a smooth line, an instinct for survival. Johnson was a complex man—shy but ambitious, stiffly formal but persuasive, intense and humorless but always commanding respect. He kept a tight grip on everything under his hand—curriculum, research projects, budgets, faculty and staff in the social sciences, protégés and graduate students. To outsiders, white and black—and, indeed, to those nearest him—he came across as a deeply dedicated scholar and a Victorian gentleman, a man of dignity and quiet strength who seldom let his emotions show. Johnson had many acquaintances, said his biographer, Patrick J. Gilpin, “but few friends and almost no cronies.”
Almost from the start of his graduate studies under Robert Park at the University of Chicago, young Charles Johnson had stepped easily into the role of the detached and disinterested social scientist. He established close ties with Edwin Embree at the Julius Rosenwald Fund and Will Alexander at the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. While serving as editor of the National Urban League’s magazine in the 1920s, he formed lasting associations with James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and all the other stars of the Harlem Renaissance. As a sociologist, he worked hard to align himself with others in the discipline, from Howard Odum and the North Carolinians to the emerging network of black scholars across the country. In short, Johnson paid his dues, and earned thereby a wealth of dividends.
Throughout his long career, he raised money with relative ease—from Rosenwald, the American Missionary Association, the John Hay Whitney Foundation, the Field Foundation, and other philanthropies. His mostly white colleagues in the Southern Sociological Society, at the urging of Odum, threw segregation aside to elect Johnson president of the organization in 1945. His programs of scholarship and research at Fisk were second only to North Carolina’s in national prestige, and he had the publications, the faculty, the graduate students, and the outside support to confirm that lofty status. When in 1944 he founded the Race Relations Institute at Fisk—an integrated, three-week summer workshop and seminar for adults—the “conservative” Johnson took a bold but calculated step beyond his time and place. He had the stature to get nationally prominent blacks and whites to participate in the institute, and the courage to withstand local white criticism—even when his own exceedingly cautious president, who was white, nearly caved in to pressure.
More important, perhaps, than any of these accomplishments was the depth of Johnson’s involvement in organizations and initiatives to improve the lives of blacks and th
e poor in the South. He gave expert assistance to several New Deal programs; he served on national panels of education, labor, religion, and race relations; he was a respected leader in the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and its successor, the Southern Regional Council; he drafted the race-relations manifesto of a select group of Southern black leaders in 1943; he was active in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the Southern Policy Committee, and various professional associations in the social sciences. Beyond all that, he wrote a dozen books and served as president of Fisk for the last decade of his life. His visibility and influence continued to rise in the postwar years as the South struggled with its social problems. Throughout the thirties and forties and into the fifties, only a small number of black Southerners (and even fewer whites) were able to stay in the region and fight their way to national recognition in the long campaign for racial equality. Charles S. Johnson was one of them.
To be black and Southern in those perilous times, and to stake out a position at variance with the canons of segregation and white supremacy, required a mixture of conservatism and tactful independence that few non-Southerners could understand or appreciate. Patience and diplomacy and flank-covering caution were essential to survival. With rare exceptions, outspoken liberals and leftist radicals, black and white, found the Southern climate too stifling, and few of them lasted very long in it.