by John Egerton
Academia provided the base for most Southern black leaders. Along with Johnson, several other presidents figured prominently in the race-relations initiatives of the forties—Benjamin E. Mays of Morehouse College, Rufus Clement of Atlanta University, Horace Mann Bond of Fort Valley (Georgia) State, Frederick D. Patterson of Tuskegee, Mary McLeod Bethune of Bethune-Cookman in Florida, Charlotte Hawkins Brown of Palmer Institute in North Carolina, Albert W. Dent of Dillard University in New Orleans, and many more. Scholars and ministers were almost as numerous as administrators in these ranks. Charles Johnson’s place in the circle derived initially from his stature as a sociologist; the same was true of Gordon B. Hancock of Virginia Union University, Charles G. Gomillion of Tuskegee, and Ira De A. Reid of Atlanta University, and other disciplines were also well-represented.
A few black lawyers were active in Southern race-relations efforts, men like A. T. Waiden of Atlanta, Oliver W. Hill of Richmond, Z. Alexander Looby of Nashville, and Arthur D. Shores of Birmingham, who was for a time the only black practicing attorney in the entire state of Alabama. Editors and publishers of black newspapers, notably P. B. Young of Richmond and Carter Wesley of Houston, were sometimes identified with reform efforts, too. Several people who headed local units of national organizations were likewise involved, including Grace Towns Hamilton of the Atlanta Urban League, James E. Jackson of the Southern Negro Youth Congress in Birmingham, Emory Jackson of the Birmingham NAACP, and Ernest Delpit, president of the carpenters’ union local in New Orleans. These tireless advocates and a few others were the ones whose names were always prominent whenever a public effort was made to address the racial and social problems of the South. These were the ones the white moderates and liberals referred to as “responsible Negro leaders” (not a designation they sought, necessarily, but one they kept for just so long as they refrained from direct and pointed attacks on the laws and customs of segregation). They differed among themselves, of course, in their approach to the issues, but by and large they shared certain characteristics that clearly defined them as the Southern black intelligentsia.
By the yardsticks of education, experience, and socioeconomic status, they were middle-class or above. Much of their undergraduate work and virtually all of their graduate training had been done in the North. Decorum, dignity, and good manners defined their relations with others; discipline, order, and personal control characterized their style of leadership and management. They were, for the most part, deeply religious—some were ordained ministers—but their base was the academy, not the church. They avoided confrontational exposure in such organizations as James Farmer’s Congress of Racial Equality in Chicago and A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement. They sought and welcomed white allies in all efforts to reform the South. Instead of challenging the insistence of white leaders that there could only be Southern solutions to Southern problems, without interference from outsiders, they quietly pressed for those internal reforms. Using whatever tools they could get their hands on, the black pragmatists chipped away at the mighty rock of segregation.
Consider Charles Gomillion. As a young professor at Tuskegee in the early 1930s, he looked around and saw that even though blacks constituted a majority of the population there in Macon County, Alabama, only thirty-two of them were registered to vote. Gomillion went to work. He spearheaded the formation of a black civic association committed to political equality. In the face of danger and discouragement, they coached new voters over the registration hurdles one and two at a time. It took Gomillion and his allies twenty years to get six hundred blacks on the voter rolls, but they never gave up—and eventually, in the 1960s, they would witness a “one man, one vote” revolution. Only the Southerners seemed to have the patience, the stubborn persistence, to measure out success in teaspoons.
Slightly more aggressive were a few of their collaborators in the North, including Lester Granger of the National Urban League, Mordecai Johnson of Howard University, and Channing Tobias, first a YMCA executive and then director of the Phelps Stokes Fund, a philanthropic organization. All three had Southern roots—but then so did Walter White and A. Philip Randolph and Richard Wright, whose abrasiveness was in sharp contrast to the gentlemanly Southern approach, and who, like Du Bois and Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes, were anything but deferential in their manner. Even Ralph Bunche, later to gain international fame as a United Nations diplomat, often sounded assertively radical in comparison with his more cautious Southern compatriots.
The NAACP had chapters in every Southern state by the early 1940s. In the North, the New York-based organization was often criticized for being too middle-class, too hierarchical, too conservative, even too Southern and too white. In the South, though, hardly anyone shared those assessments; the very notion that the NAACP was somehow a moderate or right-of-center group was simply ludicrous. For decades it had been an uncompromising adversary of the segregationists and had been looked upon by most Southern whites as an alien force—even though numerous members of its staff were exiles from the Southern and border states and the District of Columbia. None of the biracial regional organizations concerned with social issues, including the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, openly sought a close working alliance with the NAACP until after the war.
In the 1940s, most Southern black social reformers channeled their energies into organizations, but a few chose to follow a rockier and lonelier path as independent critics of the established order. J. Saunders Redding was one. Besides teaching English at Hampton Institute near Norfolk, he wrote books and articles that cut to the heart of racism in the South and the nation. John Henry McCray took a similar tack with his small South Carolina weekly, the Lighthouse & Informer. And the inimitable Zora Neale Hurston, back among the common folk of Florida after her years of glory in the Harlem Renaissance, at Barnard College, and in the Guggenheim fellowship program, had a singular gift for colorful invective and unsettling truth. As a folklorist for the Florida Federal Writers’ Project and in her own highly original creative work, she put her finger on the essence of blackness and Southernness. “Negroes are just like everybody else,” she observed in 1942. “Some soar. Some plod ahead. Some just make a mess and step back in it—like the rest of America and the world.”
When Rayford Logan classified the black essayists he was considering as exponents of What the Negro Wants, he put F. D. Patterson over on the “extreme right.” The Tuskegee president was as Southern and conservative as any of the historians prospective writers. But as it turned out, his views were not very different from those of Randolph, Du Bois, and Hughes. “Any form of segregation based on race, creed or color is discriminatory and imposes a penalty inconsistent with the guaranties of American democracy,” Patterson declared, and he added:
The more conservative element of Negroes differ from those who hold the most radical views in opposition to segregation only in terms of time and technique of its elimination. In any statement which attempts to speak unequivocally in terms of ultimates, all Negroes must condemn any form of segregation based on race, creed or color anywhere in our nation.
Here was the proof, if any more was needed, that African-Americans everywhere were unified in their opposition to segregation. Nonracist Southern whites, on the other hand, ranged across the spectrum on this fundamental issue. Between Lillian Smith, an outspoken integrationist, and John Temple Graves, an uncompromising segregationist, stretched a chasm too wide forbridging—and yet they had all described themselves as liberals or progressives, and some were considered radicals, and others wore the age-old self-styled mantle of “the Negroes’ best friend.”
If Northerners had trouble figuring out the thought processes of black Southerners, imagine how puzzled they must have been by the words and actions of Southern white liberals. Graves merely voiced the most radical expression of segregationist sentiment among them; numerous mainstream journalists, academicians, ministers, and other public figures were only-slightly more restrained in their articulation of the
code. (In fairness to them, it could be noted that they almost always took pains to speak in terms of what “white Southerners will not stand for,” rather than what they themselves believed in their hearts to be right and true, but the bottom line was the same: For the foreseeable future, segregation is non-negotiable.)
These were not fire-breathing bigots; these were middle- and upper-class men and women who responded in kind to the decorum, dignity, and good manners of the Southern black leaders, and who spoke from Christian charity or other well-meant motivation in favor of elemental fairness and decency toward blacks, and who lashed out at the violent acts and intolerant attitudes of Klansmen and kooks and demagogic politicians. These were the Virginius Dabneys and Mark Ethridges and Ralph McGills of the South—decent, sensitive, thoughtful, kindly individuals, not hate-mongers or character assassins. The time was coming when they would be compelled to choose whether to cling to segregation or let it go, and most of them would let it go. Whatever Northerners thought of these “conservative liberals,” they certainly were not reactionary racists of the Bilbo-Talmadge school.
To the left of them in the peculiar Southern panorama of liberalism was a yeasty collection of New Dealers, laborites, and other activists—including a handful of Socialists and Communists who were as hostile to each other as they were to the sworn enemies of social change. The Socialists included H. L. Mitchell, whose Southern Tenant Farmers Union was losing steam in the post-depression period; Buck Kester, who left the STFU and spent most of the war years in a futile effort to enlarge the little network of radical Christians he called the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen; and Frank McCallister, who worked for the Socialist Party in Atlanta as regional director of the Workers’ Defense League. All three of them were completely alienated from everyone they knew or suspected were Communists—the doctrinaire party reps like Donald Burke of Virginia and Rob Hall of Alabama, the Christian radicals like Don West and Claude Williams, and the leaders of such organizations as the Highlander Folk School and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.
Mitchell and Kester may have been the first white Southerners to act on the principle of racial equality—back in the early 1930s, long before most of their fellow liberals had even begun to think about it—and some people credited McCallister with devising the strategy by which Georgia’s reform governor, Ellis Arnall, rescued his state from the grip of anti-black terrorist groups. But race cut one way and ideology another; not until Lillian Smith came along was any white Southerner as committed to openly fighting segregation as Mitchell and Kester, and yet these so-called radicals were just as opposed to Southern blacks with Communist ties (John P. Davis, Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., James Ford, Hosea Hudson) as they were to their white comrades. (Smith, too, turned out to be both pro-black and anticommunist, but she was likewise skeptical of the ideological motivations of Kester and Mitchell, as well as of Kester’s religious aims, and she never developed a close working relationship with them.)
The militantly anticommunist Southern Socialists were also guilty of making uninformed and irresponsible charges against some of the men and women who labored with them in the search for regional reform. They cast suspicions, if not direct accusations, on Myles Horton, Alva Taylor, James Dombrowski, Clark Foreman, Claude Williams, and Don West, but none of these assertions of disloyalty were proven to be true.
Horton continued in place as director of the Highlander Folk School, working closely with the Congress of Industrial Organizations to broaden the base of politically liberal and racially mixed labor unions in the South. The CIO also kept a working relationship with Taylor, the former Vanderbilt University professor who became a labor mediator in the later years of his career. Dombrowski left Highlander in 1942 to join the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and Foreman became that organization’s president soon thereafter. All of these men would be viciously red-baited by right-wing anticommunist forces in later years—and those attacks gained a certain ironic reinforcement from the deep-seated enmity of Southern Socialists like Kester and Mitchell.
Don West and Claude Williams stood apart from all the left-of-center Southerners of their time. Not only were they never proved to be card-carrying Communists; in more than a quarter-century of peripatetic activism, they defied characterization in anybody’s camp except the one they found in their reading of the New Testament. To them, Jesus was the first guerrilla Christian, and they were soldiers in His revolutionary army. West bounced from one job to another as a preacher, teacher, laborer, and farmer. In the war years he was superintendent of a small school system in the mountains of rural north Georgia, his home section; a little later on, he would make a brief public splash again with a series of radical poems.
Claude Williams roamed from Commonwealth College and the Arkansas cotton fields to Alabama and elsewhere, preaching an offbeat message of Marxist-Christian radicalism that kept him constantly in hot water with his Presbyterian superiors. Finally, in 1942, they shunted him to Detroit to work as an “industrial chaplain” among displaced Southern whites and blacks vying for war-production jobs in the industrial plants. There, a year later, Williams found himself in the unaccustomed role of peacemaker when the worst race riot in a generation exploded right in front of him. Later, his dreams of a far-reaching movement called the People’s Institute of Applied Religion would draw him once more into the center of a sensational controversy.
Odd ducks, these Southern liberals and progressives and radicals. Even as Virginius Dabney and Ralph McGill and Hodding Carter were trying to defend—or at least to explain—the peculiarities of the South to national magazine audiences, the dean of Southern liberals, sixty-year-old Will W. Alexander, was going on record against racial bias in the January 1945 issue of Harper’s. Segregation is a national problem, he declared, not only inconsistent with the American creed (Myrdal’s main point) but also doomed to failure when postwar pressures bear down upon it.
In Washington, Southern anomalies were everywhere. While the Bilbos and Rankins raved on through the war years, to the eternal embarrassment of many citizens of Dixie, Alabama native Aubrey Williams was still rattling the cages of the Old South politicians with his egalitarian views, and North Carolina’s Jonathan Daniels was loyally serving and supporting FDR in the ailing President’s final days.
Still more contrasts: Representative Martin Dies of Texas and his House Un-American Activities Committee associates, including Congressman Joe Starnes of Alabama, had succeeded in bringing J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI into the search for subversives, and in putting the heat on the CIO as a suspected source of Communist infiltration. But the CIO and its Political Action Committee fought back, helped in large measure by Lucy Randolph Mason, its Southern troubleshooter, and George S. Mitchell, director of CIO-PAC in the Southeastern states. Working closely with Highlander and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, Mason and Mitchell and the rest of the CIO pushed for the labor body’s biracial agenda: abolition of the poll tax and other impediments to voting, equitable wage and hour standards, and a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission with enforcement powers.
For their pains, the CIO incurred the wrath of the mushrooming far right, the militantly anticommunist opposition to the dying Roosevelt and his stagnant New Deal. To George Mitchell and Lucy Mason and the other Southerners in the labor movement, this was old hat. It was routine in the South for those who tried to change the status quo to be criticized and shunned; worse, some were hounded and threatened, branded as radicals, traitors, turncoats, Communists.
The Southern labor activists found some comfort, even vindication, in the 1944 elections when Dies stepped aside to avoid almost certain defeat, and Starnes was unseated by his Alabama constituents. But if such victories made progressive Southerners euphoric, it was only because they savored every inch of progress in a long and painful uphill climb. There were hopeful signs that big changes could come after the war, but that was in the future. For now, the South could count on only a relative handful of reformers,
white and black, to answer the postwar call to action. What’s more, they were a remnant on the fringes of established power, not a force in the center of it. With them thus far—and only tenuously at that—were the barest minimum of politicians, editors, religious leaders, white academicians, or corporate executives. If the reformers had anything remotely resembling a power base or the nucleus of a movement, it was in two now-familiar organizations: the left-leaning Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and the much older and more conservative—and fading—Commission on Interracial Cooperation.
The progressive response to the first Southern Conference for Human Welfare meeting in Birmingham had been highly favorable. Even some Southern newspapers, including the Birmingham News, expressed qualified editorial approval of the gathering and its outcome. Several national magazines also subsequently featured positive critiques by conference participants Lucy Randolph Mason, Charles S. Johnson, Sterling Brown, and George C. Stoney. They observed that police enforcement of the local segregation ordinance had put a damper on the meeting. Johnson noted pointedly that other groups had been allowed to hold biracial meetings in the city without interference; he suggested the possibility that “other interests inimical to the Conference’s program found it convenient to use the race issue, in the ancient manner, as the most effective means of confounding or perhaps nullifying the proceedings.”
The last of the SCHW delegates were still in town on that Thanksgiving weekend in 1938 when the “inimical interests” fired their first reactionary shot. In a hastily called meeting at the Birmingham City Hall, a group of women and men claiming to represent various Democratic Party organizations in Alabama assailed the local sponsors of the conference, including Judge Louise Charlton and Congressman Luther Patrick, for undermining the poll tax and raising the threat of racial equality. They praised Eugene “Bull” Connor, the police commissioner, for enforcing the city segregation ordinance, and they called on the House Un-American Activities Committee to “ferret out all the facts concerning the so-called Conference for Human Welfare.”