Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  The thorny question of segregation was broached in a carefully worded preamble. In diplomatic language that bore Charles Johnson’s imprint, the signers declared themselves “fundamentally opposed to the principle and practice of compulsory segregation in our American society,” but went on to say that, for the present, it seemed “both sensible and timely” to concentrate on “the current problems of racial discrimination and neglect,” rather than to insist on the immediate abolition of segregation itself. “We have the courage and faith to believe,” the statement continued, “that it is possible to evolve in the South a way of life, consistent with the principles for which we as a nation are fighting throughout the world, that will free us all, white and Negro alike, from want, and from throttling fears.”

  Benjamin Mays and one or two other members of the drafting committee had argued for a forthright and unequivocal call for the abolition of segregation, but Johnson, Hancock, and the rest were convinced that the South’s white liberals, whose support they considered essential, would be frightened away by such a declaration. Johnson’s careful wording of the final draft was aimed at giving the Durham conferees a statement they could endorse unanimously—and it worked.

  It also succeeded rather well with a larger audience. Reaction to the document in the Southern press was generally favorable, and the black response was mixed, with Northern newspapers predictably critical but Du Bois and Walter White and numerous others supportive. Ralph McGill set the tone for the white South with a column praising the black leaders for their moderate statement, and especially for its acknowledgment that segregation would, in McGill’s words, “be retained for a long time.” With that endorsement, Jessie Daniel Ames was able, after a couple of nerve-racking delays, to keep her side of the bargain with Gordon Hancock by attracting more than a hundred Southern white moderates and liberals to an Atlanta hotel on April 8, 1943, for a meeting of response and affirmation.

  With an abundance of caution, that group excluded virtually everyone who was active in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (Lucy Mason, William Mitch, and Mark Ethridge were exceptions), all fringe-party political activists except the Socialist Frank McCallister, and even New Deal operatives like Will Alexander. Of the 553 people who were invited, 115 attended and 292 eventually signed the conference statement. Educators, religious officials, journalists, businessmen, and civic leaders made up the bulk of the delegates. With McGill presiding, they managed after a few hours of discussion to agree on the wording of their response.

  The Southern Negro leaders in Durham had been “so frank and courageous,” they declared, and so “free from any suggestion of threat and ultimatum, and at the same time [showed] such good will, that we gladly agree to cooperate.” Discrimination based on race is indeed unfair, they went on; “primary justice and a simple sense of fair play demand” that we do better by all our citizens. The laws and customs of segregation and the “separate but equal” doctrine were not specifically mentioned; the emphasis was on cultivating an atmosphere of cooperation, goodwill, and mutual understanding. It was, all in all, a tepid endorsement of the black leaders, who had crawled carefully but courageously out on a very high limb.

  There were those, of course, who wanted less from the whites, and some who wanted more, but Ames and Hancock were relieved and elated that the delicate process of step-by-step maneuvering was still on track. The next move would be to bring together a collaboration committee from the Durham and Atlanta meetings, and to keep the forward motion going.

  Thirty-seven whites and an equal number of blacks were named to the joint committee that met at historic old St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond on June 16, 1943, and thirty-three representatives of each race showed up on that hazy and humid Wednesday morning. By mutual consent of the planners—including the journalists Virginius Dabney and Ralph McGill—the meeting was cloaked in secrecy, for fear that enemies right and left might be tempted to spoil the effort.

  Among the few appointees who couldn’t be present in Richmond were McGill, away on “war business” overseas, and Methodist Bishop Arthur J. Moore. The two influential Atlantans had played pivotal roles in bringing the committee of whites into cautious alignment with the Durham statement. In general, the blacks were represented by their acknowledged leaders—Johnson and Mays, Hancock and Young, Rufus Clement, Luther P. Jackson, Horace Mann Bond, and Charlotte Hawkins Brown, among others; the whites who took part, except for Dabney, Jessie Daniel Ames, and Howard Odum, were generally not people of regional stature. Dabney declined to serve as chairman. Most of the advance preparation, including a last-minute rush to prepare the agenda, fell to Ames, Hancock, and Young. They were discouraged, tense; this was not the smooth beginning they had wanted. When the appointed hour came, Young stood up to preside and called on Hancock for an opening statement.

  St. Paul’s was a fitting stage for this dramatic interracial gathering. Since the 1840s, the Greek Revival structure had maintained an imposing presence at the corner of Ninth and Grace Streets. It had architectural compatibility with another marble-columned edifice, the Classic Revival–style Virginia State Capitol, standing majestically on a shady lawn just across Ninth Street; Thomas Jefferson had designed the legislative forum in the 1780s, modeling it after a Roman temple.

  The opulent interior of St. Paul’s had sheltered many a famous son of the South. Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, was sitting in his center-aisle pew there on April 2, 1865, when a messenger brought him the somber advice of his military leader, Robert E. Lee, to flee the city and avoid capture by Yankee invaders. Three years later, so one eyewitness account claimed, the gracious General Lee, defeated but not diminished, “arose in his usual dignified and self-possessed manner” from his own St. Paul’s pew and walked to the chancel rail to kneel beside a tall, well-dressed black man and partake of the communion sacraments with him, while others in the hushed sanctuary stared in shocked amazement. Who, sitting there in 1943, could not hear those echoes of history? Gordon B. Hancock certainly heard; when he stood to address his black and white fellow delegates, he was inspired by what he called “a now or never feeling,” and his deep voice was filled with emotion.

  “We have come upon one of those rare occasions of history when the clock of Destiny is striking a mighty hour,” he said. Here is an unparalleled opportunity for the white South and the black South to save themselves and their nation. Negroes have been patient and loyal, and also super-patriotic; they have “borne their burdens with poise and courage.” The general absence “of open conflict between the races is due far more to the wisdom of Negro leadership than to the might of the white man.” That leadership “can be strangled or strengthened,” depending on how serious the white leadership is about making changes. The South “must cease waiting for outside sources to extort from it in the courts concessions that should be made without a fight”—equalized teachers’ salaries, to cite one example. “It makes a world of difference to the cause of race relations whether the capitol of the Negro race is in New York City or Atlanta,” Hancock declared.

  Brick by brick, the Richmond social scientist built to his climax: “The South must save the Negro or itself be lost. … Men must be brotherized or they will be brutalized. … When it becomes dangerous to do right and when it is risky to be just, we are headed for social and economic damnation. … Negroes and whites who sit about today’s counsel table are verily the saviors of our Nation. … The time is at hand when we of the South must … decide what we are going to do … if we have the moral courage to follow through.”

  The air inside St. Paul’s was charged with emotional energy. Pride, fear, and anger were evident. It was the anger that first found its voice. M. Ashby Jones, the venerable Baptist minister from Atlanta who had served on the interracial commission since its inception, jumped up to denounce Hancock for “going too far,” and went on to lecture “the colored people” in his patented paternalistic manner. In a rush of feeling, several people began to speak at o
nce, and then to shout. The fragile coalition was about to blow apart.

  It was precisely here that Howard W. Odum saw his long-awaited chance, and seized it. Stepping to the podium, he delivered a mild put-down of Jones for his outdated views, and supported the spirit and substance of Hancock’s remarks. Not only that, but Odum also just happened to have in his pocket a modified new version of his old blueprint for a regional research and development council. As he talked on, it became apparent that the mood was shifting once again. Here was a compromise the delegates could all endorse with gratitude and relief—all except Jessie Daniel Ames and a few others.

  Within a matter of hours, a committee headed by Odum had drawn up, and the group had approved, a statement of consensus (to be published later, when the fact of the meeting itself was revealed). In it they urged “the general adoption of the Durham statement” and pledged to “recognize now the importance of affirmative action, without which we shall fall far short of our hopes and possibilities.” Then they chose from within their ranks about twenty whites and twenty blacks to meet in Atlanta, “working out methods and practical means of approach” for what would become a new biracial organization in the South, a council very much like Howard Odum’s dream—or as near to it as he seemed likely to get. Virginius Dabney and Charles Johnson were chosen to lead the way in Atlanta.

  Hancock’s gratitude to Odum for saving the day would be eternal. He heaped praise on the sociologist (and saved a little for Jessie Ames, too), calling him “a moral and intellectual giant.” Odum modestly accepted the plaudits. “Early that morning we realized that the Negroes had their top-flight leaders present and that most of the southern white leaders had defaulted,” he told Hancock later, “and when your magnificent address on the crisis of Negro leadership had been rebuked by Dr. Jones … it became clear that there was a crisis.”

  As they looked ahead to the next phase, the principals in this long and subtle ritual maintained their formality and decorum, even when signs of strain and exasperation showed through. Still addressing one another as “Mrs. Ames” and “Mr. Dabney,” “Dr. Hancock” and “Dr. Odum,” they showed a determination to keep their composure that was in marked contrast to their more volatile counterparts in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.

  It is difficult to find descriptive terms for people like Hancock and Ames. Unlike Dabney and Odum, they were aggressive—more than willing to become personally involved in pressure-group politics, to plunge into the midst of controversy, to act instead of talk. Those who knew them best called them independent, moderate, conservative—anything but leftist or radical or revolutionary. They were very much alike in many ways—and yet they thought differently about the issue of race, and misunderstood each other on that subject. Hancock, like almost all black Southerners across the spectrum, wanted segregation to go away, to wither up and die; Ames, like many a white Southern liberal, didn’t. She thought she could live with it, in part because it placed no shackles on her; he knew he couldn’t, because the yoke was too heavy. In their moment of truth, Hancock was an open book, but Jessie Ames was still a puzzle. I can’t help wondering what she really believed, and what she was after.

  Hancock told Ames he was greatly distressed by “the difficulty of finding strong Southern white men who dare to assume the responsibility [for] the leadership of your group.” The black leaders, he said, “risked everything” to make their statement at Durham; “unless white leaders are willing to risk something … to ‘live dangerously’ for noble ends, then we are hopelessly lost.” For his part, he declared, “I am willing to go all out and risk my moral life if by so doing I can save the South from something that might happen to it.”

  Mrs. Ames seemed not to be listening; her mind was racing, trying to fathom the quickness of Odum’s coup. What a twist of fate! There she was, about to rescue the CIC from its executioners, when all of a sudden one of the axmen prevented an ambush—and now, her own co-conspirators were about to help the executioners administer the coup de grâce. There were enough organizations already, she told Hancock testily, and no need for another. “I would not have you think that I personally am opposed,” she quickly added. “If the group meeting in Atlanta decides that the times call for a new organization … I am the last person who would raise my finger to block it.” But, she went on, although “Dr. Odum did prepare a masterly statement … it was prepared before he got there. It was what the white man thought should come out of that meeting and it was what came out of that meeting.”

  To Dabney, Ames confided that Odum, in all his years as president of the interracial commission, had given only “casual attention to our work. … He is a man of ideas … but unless he has a large staff of people to carry out his ideas, they seem to circulate in a vacuum.” And Hancock, she said, wanted to have a new organization that “will immortalize the Negroes who met at Durham.” Her last reed of hope was that the upcoming Atlanta meeting would choose William E. Cole, a University of Tennessee sociologist and the acting director, on a part-time basis, of the CIC, as permanent director of the new organization.

  Forty delegates (including Ralph McGill and Bishop Arthur Moore) convened at Atlanta University on August 4 and 5 to take the next step. Dabney had sent last-minute regrets that he couldn’t be there, but Charles Johnson presided, and with Odum looking on and the blacks in enthusiastic accord, he got through a resolution to create “a strong, unified Southern Regional Council.” Unlike the old CIC (which would promptly be laid to rest) or any other group before it, including the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the new organization would bend every effort to be equitably biracial—but like the others, it would not confront the burdensome question of segregation.

  Odum and Johnson were named temporary co-chairmen of the new entity, and white-black parity was also reflected in the choice of William Cole and Ira De A. Reid as co-directors and the appointment of sixteen white and fourteen black board members. Preparations were made to set up the board and staff in the old CIC offices in Atlanta. Through the fall and early winter of 1943, those plans went forward. Finally, in an Atlanta courtroom on January 6, 1944, the Southern Regional Council was granted its charter, with five of its leaders—Odum, Johnson, McGill, Moore, and Clement—signing the incorporation papers. A charter meeting at Atlanta University on February 16 and 17 drew more than two hundred participants. They elected Odum to be president (after Bishop Moore declined) and Charles Johnson to be chairman of the executive committee, but William Cole was passed over in favor of Guy B. Johnson, a colleague of Odum’s in the University of North Carolina sociology department. Johnson, charitably endorsed by Cole, was made executive director, with Atlanta University sociologist Ira Reid as the associate director.

  The Commission on Interracial Cooperation was officially dissolved, and Jessie Daniel Ames made her exit emotionally but gracefully with a stirring exhortation to black and white Southern women to lead the march for change after the war. (Though she left the staff, Ames did retain a seat on the SRC board of directors.)

  Another page had been turned in the long saga of Southern liberalism. One more homegrown campaign for social reform was about to begin. The founding members of the Southern Regional Council, using words taken from their charter, closed their first official meeting with a pledge “to attain, through research and action, the ideals and practices of equal opportunity for all the peoples of the South.”

  When the executive committee met a month later, on March 22, the SRC was already under fire from the left. The Spring 1944 issue of Common Ground contained articles by J. Saunders Redding and Lillian Smith taking the white and black Southern liberals to task for ducking the segregation issue. Guy Johnson, speaking as executive director, was indignant; he vowed to have a strong rebuttal in the magazines next issue. (Common Ground had asked Virginius Dabney and Howard Odum to give their views in the same issue with Redding and Smith, but they had declined.)

  Redding, a Hampton Institute professor and one of the few regularly
published black social critics in the region, faulted the SRC for “three basic contradictions”: replacing a failed organization (the CIC) with a duplication of it, pursuing racial equality without opposing segregation, and trying to find a regional solution to a national problem. “The very conception of the Negro problem as one to be solved by the South alone is part of the old conceit that has kept the problem so long stalemated,” said Redding. “It is the South’s old cherished conceit that it knows the Negro and knows what to do about him.”

  Lillian Smith, facing toward Atlanta from her mountaintop in north Georgia, tried to be understanding. “I, too, am a Southerner,” she wrote. “I know all the temptations not to speak out, all the fears … of losing jobs, losing prestige, losing friends.” The “color conditioning” of white children in the South has required that “they learned from the people they loved most … that segregation is right. … And when one breaks the taboo of segregation … one feels a profound sense of guilt.” But it was time to cast off those “infantile learnings and fears.” The leaders of the SRC were not hypocrites, not evil people; they were sincere and able—but confused. Said Smith, “Not much is going to be done to bring about racial democracy by this group until its leaders accept and acknowledge publicly the basic truth that segregation is injuring us on every level of our life and is so intolerable to the human spirit that we, all of us, white and black, must bend every effort to rid our minds and hearts and culture of it.”

  Smith had been nominated for a seat on the SRC board of directors at the February meeting, but no invitation had been sent to her. The executive committee agreed unanimously at its April meeting that she should promptly be asked in, but when she declined in June—and sent copies of her letter to the press—some members of the committee considered it good riddance. “We are not going to strengthen our position by inviting our hecklers to come in,” Gordon Hancock wrote to Guy Johnson; such critics “do not belong with us.” (The feeling was mutual, as far as Smith was concerned. She never did go in much for big-group relations. The Southern Conference for Human Welfare couldn’t hold her, either; she resigned in 1945, after three years on its board, in part because it, like the SRC, was not forthright enough to suit her in its stance on segregation.)