by John Egerton
Never mind what the generals had really said about black heroism and valor—Eastland and Bilbo considered such praise to be nothing but propaganda, lies. It was harder, though, for them to dismiss the words of a white Mississippi hero, Lieutenant Van T. Barfoot of Carthage. Awarded bronze and silver stars and a Medal of Honor for his numerous acts of bravery, Barfoot seemed shyly ill at ease when he met with the Mississippi congressional delegation in Washington. But he stiffened when Bilbo asked him, “Did you have much trouble with nigras over there?”
“I found out after I did some fighting in this war that the colored boys fight just as good as the white boys,” the lieutenant drawled. “I’ve changed my ideas a lot about colored people since I got into this war, and so have a lot of other boys from the South.” Barfoot went on to relate a story about having dinner in the diner with a black captain on the train trip up to Washington. “I’ve fought with colored men—why shouldn’t I eat with them?” he asked. Bilbo and Eastland fumed in silence.
The daily newspapers of the South were almost unanimous in their condemnation of the Mississippi senators; fewer than five percent saw any truth in their slanders against the black soldiers. It was one thing to oppose the integration of juries or police departments or political parties, but it was something else altogether to say that men who had fought a common enemy heroically, who had risked and sometimes given their lives for others, were nothing but cowards and traitors. That was simply too much.
It was a genuine novelty for white newspaper editors in the South to rise in unison to defend black Americans—Southerners and others—from attacks by Southern politicians. The war did that; it had a profound effect on the social consciousness of the American people. Keep in mind that this was not a military action against faceless aggressors; this war was billed as a crusade to save democracy from fascism and imperialism and racism, as a life-or-death battle pitting liberty against totalitarianism, freedom against dictatorship. At a cost of a million casualties and tens of billions of dollars, the United States came to the aid of its allies and saved “the free world” from an “outlaw world” personified by Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo. And then, having done that, we had to face the question of whether all those things we were fighting for would be the birthright of whites only, or of all Americans.
It was World War II, more than the Great Depression or the New Deal, that ushered in the modern age. The war turned hard times into hopeful times, it moved people up and out, it changed our ways of thinking and working and living. It ended in a cataclysmic flash of blinding light and searing heat, a paradoxical mushroom symbol of death and birth; it heralded the realignment of nations, the coming of new technology, the beginning of the cold war. Practically everything about this war, from the way we got into it to the way we got out of it, suggested transformation. After this, the times and the experience seemed to tell us, nothing will ever be the same again; this is an end and a beginning.
Southern blacks shared the hopeful view of many others that great and positive changes would come from winning the war, and they were willing, even eager, to fight the battles in order to enjoy the spoils of victory. Charles S. Johnson said in a radio address late in 1944 that time and history were on the side of the colored populations around the globe, for they far outnumbered the Caucasians. Seen in that light, Jim Crow segregation was a ridiculously outmoded relic. Harold Preece, a columnist for several black newspapers, said in “an open letter to the Southern boys, white and Negro,” that if they would stick together after the war, they could prevent “the riding boss and the mill owner” from returning to the divide-and-conquer strategy of old. “If we black folk perish, America will perish,” Richard Wright had warned the white majority in 1940, and he had held up a lantern on “the common road of hope which we all have traveled.”
Realistically, though, black Southerners in particular and all Southerners in general faced massive opposition in their struggle for racial and regional equality. The defining pillars of society—political parties, the church, the academy, the press, the commercial-industrial complex, the moneylenders, the military—still functioned confidently according to the laws and habits of segregation and inequality. A few labor unions had broken out of those restraints, and there were scattered signs of change elsewhere—in the music world, for example, and in some reformist organizations, and even in certain factions of the Democratic Party in the North. But by and large, the white South still followed the lead of men who would not hear of any lessening of white supremacy, even if the status quo also meant a perpetuation of the South’s inferior ranking in the nation—and without a doubt, it did.
Even for those who traveled on the road of hope—soldiers bonded by the shared dangers of war, for example—homecoming usually meant a return to old ways of thinking and acting. The new American Veterans Committee, a liberal and interracial organization of ex-GIs, was forming chapters around the country (Atlanta, Nashville, and Chapel Hill were among the first in the South), but it was dwarfed by the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, both of which were conservative and—in the South, at least—segregated. In most of the Southern states, the American Legion not only maintained all-white posts; it even prohibited the formation of all-black units. In the District of Columbia, an effort by two hundred veterans of both races to establish an integrated post was vetoed by the organization’s national leadership.
Racial friction broke out repeatedly on public buses and trains. The Southern Railroad routinely sided with whites in these disputes—but so did the Louisville & Nashville, the Illinois Central, the Chesapeake & Ohio, and other lines running through the South. A lawsuit filed by black riders ejected from a Southern Railroad train in Virginia in 1943 would eventually result in a 1946 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court outlawing forced segregation on interstate routes. In 1944, Benjamin Mays, the president of Morehouse College, also sued the Southern for forcing him out of a dining car (this after one of his faculty members, English professor Hugh Gloster, was pulled off a crowded train in Tupelo, Mississippi, severely beaten, and jailed for asking the conductor to make more seating available to black passengers). Reports of such mistreatment were heard repeatedly from every state in the South. Every time someone gained an inch, it seemed, the yardstick got longer.
The catalog of imposed and self-inflicted problems was distressingly old and lengthy. Southerners seldom had the pleasure of coming out on top in anything they did. For most of them, the view had always been from the bottom looking up, from the outside looking in. “Been down so long, looks like up to me,” they sang through the hard times. How could they not be hopeful now that the war had ended? Their problems were still before them, still weighing them down—but glowing on the horizon was that breathtaking sense of possibility which blossomed out of military victory. Things would be different, they had to be—and if they were different, surely they would be better, not worse.
Tens of thousands of Southerners would remember years later—and some of them remember yet—the mournful sight of the train taking Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s body back to Washington. On his widows instructions, the Southern Railroad steam locomotive took twenty-five hours to crawl the more than eight hundred miles from Warm Springs to the Union Station terminal, across the way from the Capitol. The route through Georgia and the Carolinas and Virginia was a watercolor canvas of redbuds and dogwoods and azaleas, a landscape awash with the floral brilliance of spring. It was as if the South had come in its coat of many colors to pay its heartfelt respects, and to say farewell to an old friend.
Throughout the day and night, people stood all along the route to watch and cry, to sing hymns, to pray. In cities and towns, at whistlestop crossings, in newly plowed and planted fields, they were there in twos and dozens, hundreds and thousands. The numbers were astonishing; some guessed two million, the newscaster David Brinkley later wrote. They were the South’s own best image of itself—men and women and children of all ages, races, and classes whose deeply held belief
s and aspirations came not from the feudal barons who kept them in check, but from this crippled yet towering, irrepressible, and invincible Yankee who had given them hope and courage. They may have feared the demagogues of Dixieland, but this was the leader they respected and admired, the one who had brought out the best in them, the one they would have followed to the ends of the earth—and now they watched sadly as he left the South for the last time, rolling away to his grave.
In the last car, the curtains were kept open and the lights on for the entire trip, so that people along the way could see the flag-draped coffin, the military honor guard—and, some of the time, Eleanor Roosevelt herself, sitting there alone. When the train had moved past them and disappeared from sight, the Southerners went back to their hoeing and other labors, wondering what in God’s name would happen next.
FDR’s last journey out of Warm Springs was not the only indelible image the South would have as a keepsake of 1945, of course. There would be the first impressions of the crusty new President, his Missouri ways so different—and yet somehow familiar, like distant kin. There would be the bombs of August, the mushroom clouds, the formal acceptance of Japanese surrender by General Douglas MacArthur (who, proud citizens of Little Rock were quick to tell you, was born there in 1880). And there would be the joyful and rambunctious victory celebration, a unifying act of thanksgiving that stitched the frayed fabric of America together, however briefly.
And these scenes of stark contrast, like old snapshots browned with age: the mules of yesterday and the tractors of tomorrow, turning the good earth side by side; cotton-picking people in a losing race with cotton-picking machines; TVA power lines strung like spiderwebs over lantern-lit shacks; the black engine of the South—nurses, cooks, housekeepers, field hands—holding body and soul together in a society that denied them the vote, the law, even a sip of fountain water or a place to relieve themselves.
Penny postcards and three-cent stamps, a nickel cup of coffee, Lucky Strikes and Camels for a dime a pack, dinner at Antoine’s for three or four bucks, a good pair of leather shoes for ten, a wool suit for twenty—and before long, a new Ford or Chevy for five or six hundred. It was a portentous time, ominous and glorious, threatening and promising. One door closing, another opening.
The South was alive with anticipation, expectation, foreboding. Eighty years after Appomattox, here was another chance to start again on a clean slate. Who could not be tempted? Who wouldn’t want to stick around to see what happened next?
Interlogue:
Yesterday and Tomorrow
Ralph Emerson McGill leaned out the window of his fourth-floor office at the Atlanta Constitution and beamed happily at the swelling throng of revelers down on Forsyth Street. Late on that Tuesday afternoon, August 14, 1945, confirmation of Japan’s long-awaited surrender had finally come, and World War II was officially over. The street scene filling McGill’s field of vision had a dreamlike quality, an air of unreality. In that euphoric moment of triumph, words seemed pitifully inadequate, even to a voluble Southerner with the eyes and ears of a reporter and the heart of a poet. Like so many others, McGill had waited anxiously for the long night of deadly warfare to end, for dawn to break. It was time, past time, for a new day—and surely, he thought, no one yearned for it more earnestly than did the long-suffering people of the South.
McGill had his own very personal reasons to celebrate. At the age of forty-seven, he was the best-known newspaperman in Georgia, if not the entire South. Having supported the political and social goals of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal from 1932 onward, he had found himself in a position, as editor of the Constitution in 1939, to give influential backing to the President’s military policies, and he had stuck to those editorial guns with unflagging zeal for six long years. Now the fruits of victory were America’s and the South’s to savor—made less sweet only by the death of FDR four months earlier—and McGill, a relentless newshound, was eager to get out on the road and take the pulse of his readers, to talk with and listen to the salt-of-the-earth country folks of Georgia.
He had been overseas in April when Roosevelt died, and he was still away later that month when his wife gave birth to their only son and named him Ralph Junior. After the death in infancy of a daughter in 1936 and the subsequent death at age five of an adopted daughter, Mary Elizabeth and Ralph McGill had not expected, in the seventeenth year of their marriage, to get another chance at parenting. They received the blessing with grateful hearts. Fatherhood seemed to mellow the middle-aged editor, to elevate his spirits and give him a newfound sense of hopefulness and optimism. The outbreak of peace added further to his mood of well-being. By the time he got home on that exhilarating night of victory, McGill had hatched a plan to take a little trip through the Georgia countryside with his wife the next day, leaving the baby in capable hands at home.
McGill never learned to drive an automobile; it was a chore he gladly left to his wife and friends. Mary Elizabeth piloted the family car, and on this occasion she had the rare pleasure of launching the journey with a tankful of just-unrationed gasoline at twelve cents a gallon. Heading south on U.S. 41, with the windows rolled down and the heat rising in shimmering waves off the pavement that stretched in front of them, the McGills seemed not to mind poking along at the thirty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit. Gradually they relaxed and surrendered to the slow country rhythm, absorbing the healing warmth of a Georgia summer day in a world at peace.
As the morning wore on, McGill used a yellow legal pad to jot down quotes from some of the people they encountered, as well as some of his own thoughts and impressions. Later he drew from the notes to compose his next day’s column. Away from the city it seemed like Sunday, he wrote—quiet and tranquil, with lots of businesses closed and people lounging in the shade, relaxed but happy, talking and laughing, celebrating. It could have been the Fourth of July.
They made a pilgrimage to Warm Springs, seventy-five miles from Atlanta. At the Little White House, McGill removed his hat and stood for a reflective moment of silent tribute to his fallen leader. At the military hospital nearby, he and his wife attended a service of remembrance and thanksgiving conducted by war-wounded patients, and McGill was deeply moved by their heartfelt prayers and by the gentle dignity and simplicity of the occasion. Here was the strength and glory of America, he clearly saw, embodied in such heroic young people as these. When he got on the phone in Columbus that night to call in his column to the paper, McGill’s spirits were soaring. “All I can see for this country is the green light,” he concluded.
There were plenty of problems lurking out there, no question about it—management versus labor, capitalism versus communism, Democrats against Republicans, whites against blacks, the North over the South—but McGill the conciliator looked with hope to an era of genuine progress. He had recently been to Russia, and though the Soviet system of government repelled him, he expressed great admiration and respect for the “brave, enduring” Russian people. (In the Constitution on August 8, it was bigger news that Russia had declared war on Japan than that the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on a Japanese city.) The Russians were our allies, McGill argued. The American Communist Party was too puny to worry a great nation like ours. Instead of finding a red conspiracy in every act of friendship—such as General Dwight Eisenhower’s just-concluded visit with Joseph Stalin in Moscow—we ought to be celebrating the defeat of fascism and imperialism, the signing of the new United Nations charter, and the coming conversion of swords into plowshares. Ralph McGill wanted desperately to believe that people were basically decent and that, given a chance, they would do the right thing.
All around him in Atlanta and elsewhere in Georgia and the South, he saw people who reinforced his sense of hope, his belief in the future. Mayor William B. Hartsfield, a Eugene Talmadge conservative when he took office in 1937, was turning out to be a progressive leader (his service to the city would eventually extend for almost a quarter of a century). Governor Ellis Arnall was in the thir
d year of a highly successful four-year term, and there was talk of a constitutional amendment to allow him to seek reelection. The state’s two senators in Washington, Richard B. Russell and Walter George, were more conservative—but they were statesmen, not yahoos, McGill believed. They had joined the Southern revolt against President Roosevelt, but now they had Harry Truman in the White House—a former member of their club and a border-state Southerner besides—and that augured well for the future.
The Southern Regional Council, created in 1944 with the help of McGill and others to succeed the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, was poised to bring improvement in race relations to the city and the region. Leaders of the higher-education community, men like Rufus Clement, Goodrich White, and Benjamin Mays—presidents, respectively, of Atlanta University, Emory University, and Morehouse College—were joining with other professionals to point the way to cooperation among the many elements of political and social thought in the city. Others besides Clement and Mays who represented the growing black middle class—people like attorney A. T. Walden, editor C. A. Scott, Urban League director Grace T. Hamilton, ministers William Holmes Borders and Martin Luther King, Sr.—were showing their determined intention to become active participants in Atlanta’s postwar civic dialogue.
Even the forces of business and labor, perennially at war with each other, displayed a promise of better things to come in the cooperative spirit of such McGill allies as Robert W. Woodruff of the Coca-Cola Company and Lucy Randolph Mason of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Conversion of the big aircraft and automotive plants in the Atlanta area to nonmilitary production was imminent, and that was more good economic news for the city. Governor Arnall’s antitrust suit against twenty-three railroads was on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Interstate Commerce Commission in Washington, anticipating the probable outcome of the case, was finally bestirring itself to equalize freight rates. The arbitrary advantage of cheaper shipping costs long enjoyed by Northern business and industry was a galling bias that symbolized to many Southerners the intolerable perpetuation of Yankee dominion; now, at last, there was good reason to believe that the discrimination and inequality would soon end.