by John Egerton
Guy Johnson, when his turn came, wrote in Common Ground that Smith and Redding and the magazine’s editors were “talking nonsense” if they believed the only way to “solve the race problem” was to “come clean and acknowledge publicly” that segregation is wrong and has to be abolished forthwith. “Our goal is democracy and equality of opportunity,” he declared. “We are striving to improve the social, civic, and economic life of our region in spite of a deep-seated and undemocratic pattern of segregation. This pattern, we think, will be with us for a long, long time regardless of what any of us might think or say or do, and we believe that someone has to do the very things that we are doing before the dissolution of this pattern can even enter the realm of possibility.”
Johnson’s frustration ran deep. He was out of patience with sideline critics who couldn’t see that it was “more realistic to base a movement on the support of thousands who are willing to do something than on a few lonely souls who denounce injustice but are powerless to do anything about it.” Coming out of rural Texas in the early twenties to study under Robert Park at the University of Chicago, Johnson had developed an early and sincere empathy with the besieged black minority. With his wife, Guion Griffis Johnson, a historian, he had gone on to serve on the UNC faculty for twenty years. His interest as a sociologist was in minority and folk cultures, and from early in his career he had consistently argued that the South “owes the Negro a new deal,” as he put it in a 1934 magazine article—by which he meant full and equal justice, opportunity, and encouragement. Johnson was highly regarded in the black academic world, not only as a good scholar but also as a decent fellow, fair-minded and sympathetic—but the sound and fury of public forums like the Southern Regional Council caused him almost nothing but grief and worry, and it only took a little while for him to tire of it and long for the soothing tranquillity of Chapel Hill.
Throughout its first year, the officers and members of the SRC debated the segregation question whenever and wherever they met. At one session of the executive committee, Francis R. Bridges, Jr., a state government official in Florida and one of the few council members who was a bureaucrat or a politician, argued that the organization ought to acknowledge and accept segregation as the law in the South, or else they would soon “alienate certain people” in power. Odum replied that he could never sign “any statement that says segregation forever is right.” Black publisher Carter Wesley of Houston wanted to “by-pass” the question for the time being; he couldn’t endorse the philosophy, he said, but “an open attack” on it would surely alienate the white establishment. In the end, the committee punted to the general membership.
Close to a hundred members attended the first annual meeting of the council at Atlanta University on December 6, 1944, and another hundred and fifty sent proxies. They passed a number of resolutions having to do with returning veterans that showed the general sentiment of the group: to guarantee voting rights, job opportunities, low-cost housing, equal education, access to transportation, and a fair justice system. Then they got around to the old sticking point: segregation.
At the risk of being accused of fostering racial separation, Carter Wesley said, “We must be realistic if we are going to accomplish anything in the South.” He introduced a resolution acknowledging that legal segregation existed and saying the SRC would “center our efforts on gaining equal facilities as provided by law and equal opportunities for all the people of the South.” Virginius Dabney supported that view; segregation meant discrimination, he conceded, but for the time being, they had to reassure people that it was far from the SRC’s purpose to do away with it.
Then it was Gordon Hancock’s turn to say the question shouldn’t be addressed. “I’m more interested in getting something done than in getting something said,” he declared. Frank McCallister seconded that view.
Benjamin Mays and Forrester Washington took a third position. Mays cast it in the form of a substitute resolution putting the council on record as opposing “the principle and practice of segregation” (the same language used in the Durham Manifesto), but adding that as long as it existed legally, the SRC would “work within the law to equalize all opportunities for Negroes.”
Howard Odum spoke in opposition to both resolutions. Either way, we run the risk of being shot down, he said. A motion was made to table the two formal proposals. It passed easily. The council had cautiously stepped back to an ante-Durham position.
Will Alexander was allowed the last word on the insoluble problem. Sooner or later, he said, this council “must do something about segregation, but I’m not sure that we know anything effective to do about it at this moment.” Whatever he thought about the council’s options, Alexander had finally decided what his personal position must be; he had already written for the following month’s issue of Harper’s his critical article on “Our Conflicting Racial Policies,” in which he concluded that “unless the problem of segregation can be solved, there is no hope of any alleviation of the race problem in America.”
Alexander and Clark Foreman, who was by then the president of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare—and also a member of the SRC board—briefly discussed the possibility of merging SCHW and SRC, but few on either side were interested, and the idea died aborning. The organizations were at once too different (radical versus moderate) and too much alike (biracial, all-Southern, essentially middle-class) to be anything but wary rivals—or more accurately, small boats passing in the dark.
The Southern Regional Council had quickly run aground on the same treacherous rock that had disabled all the social-reform movements before it, liberal or progressive or moderate or what have you. Snared in the binding net between radicalism and reaction, it was already in the process of dividing into three factions: the anti-segregationists, the pro-segregationists, and those who wanted, if at all possible, to avoid the subject and follow other avenues to reform. Guy Johnson had been in the third group, but by January 1945 he recognized that the stalemate had to be broken by a turn in one direction or the other.
“We can’t go on this way,” he wrote to Dabney, who was solidly in the pro-segregation camp. “We either have to take [an anti-segregation] stand such as Mays proposed, lose most of our white support and see the Council become more and more an agitation agency, or we have to take the alternative course as embodied in Wesley’s resolution, sacrifice some of our Negro members, and go out for the support of influential Southerners who are not now willing to come into the Council. Personally, I am now ready to support the latter course. In fact, if we don’t do something of this sort pretty soon, I don’t see much point in my being here. We might as well turn it over to somebody like Lillian Smith.”
Even with Johnson on his side, Dabney was unwilling to accept the nomination to succeed Odum as the SRC’s president. “The whole thing is fraught with explosive issues,” he said, and he questioned whether “I can afford to be connected with the organization at all.” Johnson turned next to Mark Ethridge, but he too declined. Finally, in February 1945, a disheartened Odum reluctantly agreed to stay in office one more year.
By mid-1945, fewer than a thousand people had paid their dollar-a-year membership dues, the executive committee was having trouble getting a quorum for its monthly meetings, and people like Ralph McGill and Frank Graham were on the outside, beyond the SRC’s beckoning—where, like Lillian Smith, they would remain. The staff was planning to undertake a two-year study of segregation problems in the region, to be directed by Ira Reid, and a grant was obtained from the Rosenwald Fund to set up a support-service program for returning GIs, under the direction of George S. Mitchell. Regardless of its manifold problems, the Southern Regional Council was trying to go forward.
Meanwhile, a lot was happening in the outside world. The nation had a new President—Harry Truman—and the war would soon be over, and the entire South was teetering on the rim of the new world, wondering, like the Southern Regional Council, which way to lean.
8. Farewell to the Chief<
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At about five o’clock on Thursday afternoon, April 12, 1945, sixty-year-old Vice President Harry S. (his middle name, not an initial) Truman stopped by the private office of House Speaker Sam Rayburn in the Capitol for an end-of-the-day sip of bourbon with a few of his friends. “Call Steve Early,” someone told him when he walked in. The message from FDR’s top aide turned out to be a cryptic but urgent call to come to the White House. There, a short time later, Truman was escorted into Eleanor Roosevelt’s sitting room, where a solemn First Lady rose to meet him. Gently she touched his shoulder and said, “Harry, the President is dead.”
Truman was dazed, speechless; he felt tears welling up. Finally he managed to respond. His voice had a peculiar twang—Midwestern, nasal, scratchy, a little on the high side. Soon it would be familiar to millions of people around the world. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked.
Mrs. Roosevelt’s answer was swift but sympathetic. “Is there anything we can do for you? You’re the one in trouble now.”
Just eighty-two days into his mission of joint service with a man he hardly knew, with whom he had conferred privately less than a half-dozen times, Harry Truman struggled with the realization that the ship’s pilot was gone, and he was alone at the wheel.
Press Secretary Jonathan Daniels was among those present in the cabinet room an hour later when Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone administered the oath of office to the thirty-third President of the United States. Daniels would carry with him for a long time a vivid image of Harry Truman on that occasion: “He looked to me like a very little man as he sat waiting in a huge leather chair.” More like a man on the way to his execution.
The Southerners who ran the Senate saw him as a little man too—the little man from Missouri—and they thought they had an understanding with him. He had been their colleague for ten years before being elected Vice President in 1944, and though he seldom voted with them on filibusters and states’ rights issues, they believed he would pass a litmus test on white supremacy. After all, they reasoned, his grandparents were Kentuckians and Confederates, and Truman himself had that unmistakably Southern habit of cracking jokes about colored people in private conversation. “Everything’s gonna be all right,” said South Carolina Senator Burnet Maybank to a friend on the way back from Roosevelt’s funeral. “The new President knows how to handle the niggers.”
The Southern feudal lords had long been ready and eager for Franklin D. Roosevelt to fade from the scene. Ever since the mid-1930s (remember the court-packing scheme, the reforms that smacked of socialism, the attempted purge of his congressional enemies?), they had wanted him gone, but the war had saved him. Now, at last, the New Deal and the man who made it were out of the way, and the war seemed headed for a favorable conclusion, and the Southerners were still in the saddle on Capitol Hill. Confidently, they thought they could pour Truman a drink, butter him up a little, call him Mr. President instead of Harry but still make him feel like one of the boys—and get him to nip this civil rights nonsense in the bud.
Roosevelt had won their enmity—and the eternal praise of millions of Americans—not so much by what he actually did as by what he thought and felt and said. Beneath his friendliness and good cheer, the politicians were convinced, FDR really cared more for the unwashed masses than for the elite class of privileged movers and shakers to which they themselves—and he—belonged. The Southerners had witnessed in silent frustration the crippled President’s strong bond with ordinary people; it was as if his handicap made him one of them, and gave them a feeling of kinship through shared vulnerability. To watch the man in action was to sense a feeling of personal courage, of fearlessness in the midst of every crisis. (Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, weeping for the man he said was “just like a daddy to me,” described the deceased FDR as “the one person I ever knew, anywhere, who was never afraid.”) The vast multitude of Americans were touched by his compassion and convinced of his sincerity, but the Southern barons were much more cynical; they read his concern for the weak as a sign of his own weakness, and concluded that he was soft—on blacks, on reds, on radicals.
His grip on Congress had grown weaker with each succeeding election since 1936. Back then, the Republicans had been reduced to twenty senators and eighty-nine representatives; by the 1942 and 1944 elections, the GOP was threatening to recapture both houses—and, in league with the President’s Southern enemies in his own party, they had effectively seized control. It was really the Southerners who held the reins, for they were not only in the majority party but claimed through seniority the chairmanships of most congressional committees. For a little while in the thirties, Roosevelt had felt that he no longer needed them; their revenge was to see to it that he couldn’t get along without them—and in his helplessness, they delighted in frustrating his every move on the domestic front.
If FDR was reduced to such impotence, then, why did they still fear him and hate him? Part of the answer is that he managed to do a lot in spite of them; the rest of it is that his aspirations for the “forgotten” Americans, such as the South’s peasants, white and black, were almost as important as his achievements in their behalf.
Roosevelt broke new ground. His cabinet substantially increased the desegregation of the federal bureaucracy, and FDR himself appointed more than a hundred African-Americans to upper-level administrative positions, including the first black citizen to be a federal judge and the first to be an army general. The black American minority as a whole had not made a significant economic or social advance by 1945; all but the exceptional few still had no integral role in the society other than subordinate labor, no secure prospect of adequate education or housing or health care, no promise of the equal protection of the law. But a start had been made, and the Roosevelt administration did at least seem to acknowledge the need for such changes.
Under FDR’s leadership, the Democratic Party had seated black delegates for the first time at its 1936 convention, and four years later it put into the party platform a pledge “to strive for complete legislative safe-guards against discrimination” in employment and military service. The President attracted some liberal white Southerners into the New Deal, and his eight appointees to the Supreme Court—including even James F. Byrnes, during his brief stay—set in motion a judicial reformation that would gradually but steadily eliminate the segregationist bias that had subverted the language and spirit of the U.S. Constitution over the previous half-century.
And not least, there was the President’s wife. Eleanor Roosevelt was a new kind of First Lady, an activist who deliberately used her visibility and status to achieve social aims. To many, her words and actions were truly radical—scandalously so to some, gloriously so to others. Actually, there was very little in her manner or her thinking that fit the radical mold; she was a gracious patrician lady—an evolutionary, not a revolutionary. Like her husband and most other New Deal liberals, she believed that simple fairness and steady economic growth would be enough to make race and class discrimination disappear—and so believing, she was reluctant to confront the laws and customs of segregation and white supremacy.
But Mrs. Roosevelt was a shining symbol of justice and hope for the least fortunate of America’s millions, and their affection for her, no less than for her husband, was boundless and constant. Together, Eleanor and Franklin gave downtrodden Southerners of both races (and others too, of course) reason to believe, for the first time in their lives, that things were better for them than they used to be, and would be better still tomorrow.
Between April and August of 1945, the world was jolted by a rapid succession of epochal events. Less than three weeks after FDR died—so we were eventually told—Adolph Hitler committed suicide to avoid capture by the Allies. Germany surrendered on May 8. The charter of the new United Nations organization was completed and signed in late June, and the U.S. Senate ratified it by a vote of eighty-nine to two on July 28. (Secretary of State Cordell Hull, an old statesman from the Tennessee hills, was awarde
d the Nobel Peace Prize for his central role in birthing the world body.)
On August 6, a B-29 Superfortress dropped the first atomic bomb, a horrific new weapon with the explosive equivalent of forty million pounds of TNT, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing or injuring more than 130,000 people. (The patriot South played a big part in this, as in so many other military missions: The plane had come off the assembly line of the Bell Bomber Plant, at Marietta, Georgia; the pilot was Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., of Miami and the bombardier was Major Thomas W. Ferebee of Mocksville, North Carolina; their devastating cargo, as powerful as the pay load of two thousand conventional bombers, got its destructive force from an atomic substance, U-235, produced in the top-secret laboratories at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.) Three days later, another of the big bombs was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, with similar results. On August 14 the Japanese surrendered, and World War II was finally over.
So many earth-shattering developments in such a short time were too much to assimilate. Americans reeled from the pit of grief to the pinnacle of exhilaration; finally, in a euphoric frenzy, they put aside their doubts and worries and partied in the streets. Even before Japan’s surrender, there was a tendency for people to shrug off the hard questions: What would be our role in the postwar world? What were we going to do with a menacing ally like the Soviet Union? How were we going to manage reconversion, the complex process of turning the war machine back to the service of a peacetime economy? What would life after Roosevelt be like?