by John Egerton
But those who knew Jim Dombrowski best knew that his dedication to both Christianity and socialism made him a natural enemy of communism. (As for Horton, he was no serious Christian, but no Communist either.) In his nearly ten years as Highlander’s general manager, Dombrowski had proved himself to be adept at administration, fund-raising, and organizing. His ongoing commitment to racial equality and to a Southern reformation had won for him the firm support of most SCHW stalwarts, including Frank Graham, Charles Johnson, Lucy Mason, Clark Foreman, and Mary Bethune. In all the institutions from which the organization drew its strength—labor, the church, the university, the New Deal, the press—Dombrowski had friends who knew and respected him, who liked his quiet and steady manner. Their feeling was that if anyone could save the Southern Conference, he could.
From a new headquarters in Nashville, Dombrowski set to work raising funds and recruiting dues-paying members. The third general meeting—now billed as the biennial conference—was scheduled for April 1942 in Nashville, and a monthly publication, the Southern Patriot, was launched later that year. Both John Thompson, the controversial outgoing president, and Clark Foreman, the man elected to replace him, found Dombrowski an easy person to work with, and they and the other officers pulled together with him to try to repair SCHW’s image and keep it alive as a progressive force for Southern change. Still nearly broke but no longer leaderless, the organization got its second wind and raced on.
Only about five hundred delegates registered at the 1942 convention, but five times that many packed the War Memorial Auditorium for the double-barreled main event: presentation of two Thomas Jefferson Awards (to Frank Porter Graham and Mary McLeod Bethune) by Eleanor Roosevelt, and a concert by the famed baritone Paul Robeson—his first appearance in the South. Amazingly, both of Nashville’s fiercely competitive newspapers, political and ideological opposites, put aside their feelings about SCHW, labor, communism, race, and all the other topics they generally enjoyed chewing on, and gave the conference straightforward coverage. There were no editorials attacking the unsegregated seating arrangement, and neither paper made an issue of any of the hot topics that had enlivened previous conferences.
Robeson’s recital was a huge success; his thundering baritone brought the enthralled audience straight up out of their seats. In brief closing remarks, he called for patriotism in the war effort (Bataan had just fallen to the Japanese, and the Allies were chasing General Rommel’s German and Italian armies across North Africa)—but then he added a plea for the release of Earl Browder, secretary of the American Communist Party, who was serving time in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta for passport violations. Straight out of left field, Robeson thus made one more unwelcome link of memory between the Southern Conference and the Communists—but not even that got a rise out of the newspapers.
The delegates and their leaders leaned over backward to avoid flashing a radical image to the public. They talked a lot about winning the war, about youth and industry and agriculture, about citizenship and productivity; they paid homage to President Roosevelt as everyone’s commander-in-chief; and they declined to tackle the segregation issue head-on, choosing instead to talk about jobs and voting and economic growth—in a separate-but-equal society, presumably—as the route to racial equality.
Clark Foreman later said the Southern Conference for Human Welfare was “the peak of the New Deal,” the culmination of FDR’s efforts to help the South rise up from feudalism. Historian George B. Tindall more accurately observed that SCHW was not so much the peak as the epilogue, the aftermath. When the movement was spawned in 1938, the New Deal was already in decline; Roosevelt’s continuation in office for six and a half more years may have saved the conference from an early grave, but he and Eleanor didn’t have it in their power to make SCHW an effective organization.
Dombrowski and Foreman and their remnant of believers in a Southern reformation carried the effort on their shoulders through the remainder of the war. The budget crisis lifted a little, and membership climbed modestly to about three thousand. The half-dozen charter members who had been singled out and pilloried as Communists in 1938 were all gone within five years; John P. Davis, the last of them, left in 1943 to become a political correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier. The Communists never gained control of the organization—never even came close—but the anticommunists never ceased to see a red hiding behind every bush. The reason was clear. “Integration,” one of them said, “is the Southern version of communism.” The Cold War was just around the corner.
7. “We of the South Must Decide”
Watching the leftward drift of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the South’s “conservative liberals” saw their initial doubts and fears confirmed. There was something altogether too aggressively radical about it, they felt; right from the start, the Socialists and Communists had come in and muddied the waters with their confrontational tactics, and the delegates had insisted on making an issue of the segregation thing—and now all they had to show for four years of thrashing about was an aroused and suspicious white public on guard against the slightest hint of social change.
But nothing was ever simple. It wasn’t enough for the journalists and academics and others who kept their distance from the SCHW merely to dismiss the organization with smug criticism. If they sincerely wanted the South to change—and all of them proclaimed that they did—then they had to acknowledge that nay-saying only begged the question: If the Southern Conference wasn’t working, and if the Southern Policy Committee was going nowhere, and if the New Deal was for all practical purposes finished, and if the Commission on Interracial Cooperation was petrifying from inactivity, what in heaven’s name would it take to break the stalemate? What could be done to start the ball rolling toward moderate reform?
Howard Odum had felt for years that he knew the answer. Throughout his long and productive career as a social scientist, he had tried to deal in a disciplined, rational, scholarly way with problems that ordinary people tended to approach politically or emotionally, even physically. He was a teacher, a professor; he had little use for the grimy give-and-take of politics, and none at all for raw conflict, whether verbal or physical. His style was to study problems, to make them more palatable through patient discussion, and finally to resolve them by indirection. For several years, Odum had been promoting the creation of a regional research and development council that would defuse the volatile race issue by incorporating it with other public concerns, such as economics and labor relations, agriculture, and planning. By 1938 he was on the verge of consolidating these social science initiatives with the remaining programs and resources of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, of which he was then president, when a succession of events beyond his control upset the strategy.
Odum was beside himself. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone had cockeyed notions about what should be done with his South. The Tennessee Valley Authority and other New Deal busybodies were brazenly co-opting his regional planning ideas. President Roosevelt had launched that quixotic and ill-fated campaign attack on the Dixie demagogues. The Southern Policy Committee was drawing off the cream of the region’s intelligentsia. Odum’s own university president, Frank Graham, was leading the charge toward Birmingham and the big conference there. And if all that weren’t enough, we were about to get caught up in another world war. “Between the Right Honorable FDR, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and twenty other groups that are literally taking the lead,” he wrote to a colleague, “I think I’ll go heat-wave haywire.”
His grand design was in limbo. He made a slight adjustment in 1939, working through Mark Ethridge to join forces with Francis Pickens Miller’s Southern Policy Committee right after the SCHW meeting, but nothing came of that. Then the war started, and the South receded from view as a public concern, and Odum was compelled to wait for events to present him with a new opening. As luck would have it, the opportunity came when Jessie Daniel Ames decided to pursue her own agenda at the CIC.
For a decade or more, Mrs. Ames had carried two imposing titles in her Atlanta professional life: Director of Women’s Work for the Interracial Commission, and Executive Director of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. By the beginning of the forties, the ASWPL held the signatures of more than forty thousand Southerners—mostly white women—who were openly committed to the abolition of lynching. They took some credit for the fact that this once-flagrant and near epidemic atrocity was diminishing (from an average of thirty a year in the 1920s to about six a year in the last half of the thirties), and that community sanction of it had been destroyed. Ames and her organization had shunned the very idea of help from Washington—even lobbying against a federal anti-lynching statute—and now, she proudly asserted, the South had almost eliminated this stain on its soul, and the ASWPL could soon bow out with its mission accomplished.
Business was slow at the CIC, too—not because the South had solved its racial problems, but because the organization was about to wither on the vine from a drought of ideas, a lack of energy, and an absence of leadership. Its director, Will Alexander, had been in Washington since 1935, and though he was still the CIC’s nominal leader, he gave almost all of his time to the Farm Security Administration and the Rosenwald Fund in Chicago, of which he was a key board member. Arthur Raper, the CIC’s research director, had also moved to a job in the Department of Agriculture in Washington after his increasingly critical attacks on Southern feudalism and racism cost him his teaching post at Agnes Scott College in Georgia. The CIC’s information director, Robert B. Eleazer, was about to retire after twenty years on the job, and the president, Howard Odum, seldom came to the office in Atlanta anymore because there was simply nothing left for him to do there.
Jessie Daniel Ames and the office manager, Emily Clay, did their best to give the organization some vitality, but it was a losing battle. Mrs. Ames was a complex person; a committed social activist and reformer, she was also a states’ rights true believer and a disaffected ex–New Dealer, an adversary of Walter White and the NAACP, a lukewarm supporter at best of the CIO labor organizing drive, and a strident critic of the SCHW. Like Virginius Dabney and W. T. Couch and other old-school liberals, she was for racial equity within the bounds of a separate-but-equal society; segregation was more of a nuisance, in her estimation, than it was a cancer on the South. Most of all, she wanted the CIC to regain its authority as the region’s leading voice for gradual but steady social change—and yet there it was, losing membership and foundation support, becoming more and more isolated from the progressive currents of Southern life. In frustration and anger, Mrs. Ames concluded that the men who controlled the CIC were ready and willing to let it die.
In December 1941, a newspaper column distributed by the Associated Negro Press and written by Gordon Blaine Hancock, a sociologist at Virginia Union University in Richmond, caught Jessie Ames’s eye. It was called “Interracial Hypertension,” and the gist of it was that American society, with its growing racial tensions, was like a man suffering from high blood pressure—risking disaster unless prompt and judicious treatment was administered. Hancock was critical of both blacks and whites who took what he considered to be extremist positions on racial issues; far from helping to cure the disease, he said, they actually made it worse.
Ames liked the tone and spirit of the article, and wrote Hancock to tell him so. She picked up on his assertion that “the better-class whites and Negroes” could resolve the American dilemma, and would bear a heavy responsibility if they failed to make the effort. “Now is the time of all times,” she asserted, for this “better class” of Southern whites and blacks to get the jump on Northern radicals and Southern reactionaries by agreeing on an agenda for social reform. After they had exchanged several letters, Ames went to Richmond in February 1942 for a meeting with Hancock, and there they agreed that he would organize a committee of black leaders from the region to draft a statement of “minimum advances” that needed to be made, and she in turn would convene a similar group of whites who would take the statement seriously and make a conciliatory response. Soon thereafter, at Ames’s invitation, Hancock wrote a longer piece for Southern Frontier, a CIC periodical, on the “leadership” approach to social change, and Ames gave it an explicit title: “Needed: A Southern Charter for Race Relations.”
Ames and Hancock had much in common. Both were effective speakers and good writers, outspoken activists but moderates, and both were caught in the crossfire between radicalism and reaction. Hancock in particular was a favorite target of black critics, who considered him an insufferably pompous arch-conservative (and he did at times give them cause). The Baltimore Afro-American blasted him as a stooge of Virginius Dabney and Mark Ethridge; the historian Rayford Logan, a bitter foe, also accused him of being a lackey of certain pseudo-liberal whites. They said he was cautious and timid, but Hancock’s blasts at black firebrands were anything but that, and he minced no words when he attacked whites, either; he said Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit “disparages the Negro race and blasphemes Negro womanhood,” and “the author’s pronounced literary powers are sacrificed on the altars of this country’s moral and intellectual depravity.”
He relished such verbal combat. In his view, radicals really weren’t concerned about people who had been “bushwhacked, lynched and kukluxed into submission.” It’s always “the lowly Negro who will do the suffering and dying,” he charged, “while the stall-fed Negro with his head in some jim-crow trough withdraws to his swivel-chaired retreat until the fires of persecution burn themselves out.” Hancock could dish it out, but he could also take it; he told Ames that the race issue would not be lifted from the realm of extremist rhetoric and put onto the table for substantive discussion until there emerged some whites who were not afraid of being called “Nigger Lovers” and blacks who could stand up to being called “Uncle Toms.” Certain in his own mind that neither whites nor blacks had him in their pocket, he seldom let the critics’ barbs penetrate his thick skin.
During the first few months when they were in close contact, Ames made it clear to Hancock that she, too, was acting on her own, not at the direction of Will Alexander or Howard Odum, and she asked him to keep their conversations in confidence, ostensibly because she didn’t want it to appear that the initial gathering of blacks was being manipulated by whites. Her unexpressed objective, though, was to save the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, to resuscitate it even as Odum and Alexander were about to administer last rites. In one dramatic stroke, she might be able to restore black confidence in the CIC, silence the organization’s radical critics, and put white Southerners in a position of having to respond affirmatively to a reasonable overture from responsible blacks.
By the time she had published Hancock’s essay in Southern Frontier and he had sent out a letter to a select group of well-known Southern black leaders, asking them if they would meet in response to the challenge of a “concerned white Southerner,” their plan was no longer a secret. Odum and Alexander may have first learned of it from black friends like Charles S. Johnson and other recipients of Hancock’s letter. In any case, when they did finally get all the details, they were hardly in a position to criticize Ames for putting forth an idea that the blacks so heartily endorsed. By that time, she and Hancock had a six-month start on their joint venture; there wasn’t much left for Odum and Alexander to do except stand back and watch.
Working closely with publisher P. B. Young of the Norfolk Journal & Guide and Luther P. Jackson, a historian at Virginia State College in Petersburg, Hancock first convened a group of black Virginians to plan the drafting conference. They secured a place and date for the meeting—Durham, North Carolina, on October 20, 1942—and then got into a bitter wrangle over who should be invited. Hancock and Young prevailed with the view that only Southern blacks should participate, lest the whole effort be dismissed by whites as the work of Northern agitators.
More than seventy-five prominent black professionals (al
l but seven of them men) from throughout the South were invited to the Durham meeting at North Carolina College for Negroes, and fifty-seven of them attended, with the remainder sending letters or telegrams of support. Many Northern black activists heaped criticism on the gathering as a weak conclave of Hancock conservatives, and his credibility was not helped when W. E. B. Du Bois, the only bona fide radical among resident black Southerners, declined to attend.
But Hancock didn’t buckle under pressure. He opened with a challenge to the delegates to act, “absolutely unfettered and unintimidated,” for the good of the South and the nation—and with that, they organized themselves into the Southern Conference on Race Relations and elected Hancock as their director. Seven committees were formed to take up issues topically (political and civil rights, industry and labor, education, agriculture, and so forth). A drafting committee headed by Charles S. Johnson took the task-group reports and fashioned them into a final conference statement.
The one-day gathering ended before the work was finished, but the Johnson committee (including Hancock, Young, F. D. Patterson, Benjamin Mays, Rufus Clement, Horace Mann Bond, and three others) continued to work on the document. Johnson was the principal drafter, and it was he who finally released it to the press on December 15, 1942. It was called “A Basis for Interracial Cooperation and Development in the South: A Statement by Southern Negroes,” but it would soon come to be known as the Durham Manifesto, and it opened the way for “responsible white leaders” to reciprocate in good faith. Moderate in tone and balanced in its specific calls for action, the statement covered the now-familiar range of issues affecting the lives of Southern blacks (the vote, criminal justice, jobs, military service, equal educational opportunity, access to health care, and the like).