Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  But the reactionary politicians in power used every weapon at their disposal to subdue the reformers. By 1950, just as racial injustice was beginning to press to the forefront of public consciousness throughout the South, the “Old Guard” was poised to mount a strong counterattack. In the frenzied atmosphere of cold war anticommunism—just then reaching its peak nationally—the cabal of Southern demagogues succeeded in linking racial equality to “the red menace” in the eyes of their constituents. Using this potent tool as a blunt instrument in the Democratic primaries that summer, they whipped the South’s two leading liberals in the U.S. Senate, Frank Porter Graham of North Carolina and Claude Pepper of Florida.

  These right-wing strikes—“public muggings,” as one liberal called them—had a chilling effect on those who had enlisted in the postwar movement for a Southern social reformation. In time, all the white liberals who had tried to straddle the fence on the race issue would be forced to declare themselves on one side or the other, and virtually all blacks were automatically relegated to the left flank. These and other signs of continuing reactionary rule brought to an end, for all practical purposes, whatever hope remained that either whites and blacks or the South and the nation would voluntarily reach an equitable accommodation with each other. With that estrangement, a deepening silence settled over the region in the early 1950s, giving Southern reformers cause to wonder if the tomorrow they longed for would ever come.

  Tomorrow would dawn, finally, on May 17, 1954. The principal figures in its deliverance would be an unlikely combination of dedicated NAACP attorneys, courageous black plaintiffs, and conservative white judges. Together they would put the South and the nation on course toward the fulfillment of American democratic and constitutional ideals. The pattern was set: Instead of voluntary acts of enlightened self-interest, it would take lawsuits, court decisions, protest demonstrations, needless casualties, and long years of struggle to establish this new direction and realize a more equitable result.

  III

  1945–1950:

  Breaking the Mold

  Shocked to the bone, we began to perceive that the white race was now on the defensive. The mirrors of the world were turned on us, and we did not like what we saw there. … But the more thoughtful were searching for insight, and questioning their own souls, and struggling to find a way out of trouble for our people. Ministers, church women, little magazines, fact-finding groups, more and more books, more and more decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court glowing with human justice stirred the Southern conscience as never before in history. Almost by the sheer weight of words the old Southern mold had cracked open and we were looking at ourselves inside it.

  —LILLIAN SMITH,

  Killers of the Dream

  1. Postwar Opportunity

  “This is the place,” said Carl Sandburg, a Yankee emigrant from the windy shores of Lake Michigan. Standing for the first time on the porch of Connemara, the farmhouse he had come to buy in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, the famed poet and Lincoln biographer felt a strong sense of belonging, and the vista of forested slopes before him brought a smile to his face. It was the summer of 1945. In serene disjunction with the times (whether behind or ahead, he had no way of knowing), Sandburg, at the age of sixty-seven, was about to plunge into the northward-flowing American population stream and swim south against the current.

  You could read a lot of symbolism into his choice. In a period when millions of people, white and black, were leaving the South in search of the elusive Promised Land, Sandburg was moving into the region. Someone of his national stature taking such an affirmative step could not fail to boost the spirits and the pride of people all over the much-maligned South. Not even the bigots among them were boorish enough to dismiss him as a Jew, a Socialist, a Swede, or a Chicagoan (all elements of his heritage); on the contrary, Sandburg and his wife were washed by waves of Southern hospitality. Until his death there, more than twenty years later, the poet would proudly remain an adopted Southerner, delighting in the porch talk at Connemara with such frequent visitors as his friend and biographer, Charlotte writer Harry Golden (also a Northern emigrant), and a well-known native of the upcountry South, Ralph McGill.

  This is the place, Sandburg said—and, he might have added, now is the time: time for the South to turn its gaze from the past to the future, to secure the blessings of liberty and equality for all its citizens, to cast off the stigma of inferiority and take its rightful place as a full and equal partner in the family of states. It was time for the South to decide whether it was going to be a backward-looking feudal society or a modern and progressive democracy. Idealism certainly pointed the South toward a democratic future—but realism and tradition stood in the way.

  At war’s end, the eleven states of the old Confederacy still lagged far behind the other thirty-seven by almost every measure of collective strength, from education, employment, and income to health, housing, population growth, and political participation. (It is an arbitrary convenience to define the modern South as comprising the eleven Confederate states; Kentucky, Maryland, and other border jurisdictions could justifiably be counted as well, and I do include them from time to time in this narrative, but for obvious reasons, the historically rebellious states make a suitable unit for statistical comparison.) And not only did the South trail the North; in much the same way, blacks in the region were shortchanged compared with whites. A few numbers from the field of education drive home the point.

  The Southern states averaged spending only about $50 per pupil in their public schools in 1944–45 (compared with over $100 in the other states)—and of that meager sum, roughly eighty percent went to schools serving whites and twenty percent to the black schools. Expenditures for teacher salaries, books, buildings, and equipment were likewise imbalanced, both North to South and white to black. While teachers in, say, Michigan or Colorado were earning above the national average of $1,500 a year, white teachers in Mississippi or South Carolina were drawing less than $800, and their black counterparts got only about $500.

  Schooling in the South remained a privilege, not a right. Almost a million people over the age of twenty-five had not completed a single year of school, and one of every four (compared with one in eight nationally) hadn’t even made it through the fifth grade. In Atlanta—vaunted oasis, fount of opportunity—the more than 100,000 black citizens could avail themselves of only one public high school. Fewer than one in every twenty-five adult white Southerners had a college degree, and an even smaller fraction of blacks had finished the twelfth grade. The proportion of college-age young people in the region who were enrolled in degree-granting institutions in the late thirties and early forties was extremely low too—about one in twelve whites and one in twenty-five blacks. Southern schools awarded fewer than two hundred doctoral degrees a year—a scant five percent of the national total.

  Inseparably linked with the dismal state of education were numerous other measures of inadequacy. The South had 27 percent of the nation’s population and 40 percent of its natural resources, but only 12 percent of its money and its manufacturing capacity. Housing for a huge segment of the population could be described fairly as primitive, devoid of the basic comforts and conveniences that mainstream Americans considered standard. Poor health was manifest in the low number of doctors and hospital beds, the high number of mothers and babies who died in birthing, the high homicide rate (but, curiously, a below-average suicide rate), and lower life expectancy overall for every racial and sexual category of Southerners. And perhaps most telling of all was the chronic poverty of millions of people in a society historically structured to favor an elite leisure class. As late as the start of the 1940s, some ten million people in the region—one of every three—had cash incomes of less than $250 a year. Even as the South was about to enter the modern age, its leaders clung to the slavery-inspired notion that the many should sweat for the comfort of the few. And, in so believing, they perpetuated a distorted Southern concept of work
—its methods and traditions, its outcomes and rewards, its status, its very nature.

  Much non-farm employment in the South amounted to little more than low-skill, low-wage drudgery, not only unsatisfying but often mind-numbing (textile work, for example) or hazardous (coal mining). Unemployment had fallen sharply and family income risen for this segment of the population during the wartime boom, but wages hadn’t gained much relative to those paid in other parts of the country—and wouldn’t, without more labor unions and collective bargaining. Furthermore, with the manufacture of the tools of warfare now ending, it was unclear how successfully the factories would be able to convert to the making of consumer goods. Regardless of the products they turned out, Southerners on hourly wages typically earned only half to two-thirds as much as Northern workers. And once again there was an added racial disparity: The median income of Southern blacks was only about half that of Southern whites.

  It was still true in 1945 that more Southerners were engaged in farm-related work than in all other occupations, but that was changing rapidly. Farmers worked longer hours for less pay than anyone else—and Southerners, not surprisingly, were the poorest of the nation’s farmworkers. As in earlier times, big planters dominated the region’s agricultural economy, and it took tens of thousands of laboring men, women, and children to keep the old-fashioned system in operation. It would be well into the 1950s before the rural-urban balance in the South shifted decisively to the cities, largely as a consequence of the mechanical revolution that escalated on the region’s farms after the war. In 1945 the typical Southern farm still ran on mule power; more than three million of the beasts of burden were in the fields, compared with fewer than 150,000 tractors. A substantial majority of the region’s farms had no electricity, no telephones, and no indoor plumbing.

  Still, the most profound change in Southern agriculture in the forties may have been more demographic than technological: the mass exodus of tenant farmers and sharecroppers and field hands, black and white alike, from the cotton and tobacco patches to the towns and cities. Two million more blacks moved out of the South than into it during the 1940s; the net loss of whites owing to emigration was much smaller but still substantial. These declines were masked by high birth rates in both races, resulting in an overall population increase of about four million whites and 200,000 blacks.

  By 1950 there would be more than thirty-six million people living in the eleven-state region; over nine million of them—one of every four—were African-Americans. (The South had been thirty-five percent black in 1910 and thirty percent black in 1930; now the percentage was twenty-five, and that pattern—a five-percent decline every twenty years—would be repeated once again in 1970, when the black-to-white ratio would slip to about 20–80.) Other races (mainly American Indians) accounted for fewer than sixty thousand of the South’s people in 1950—a seemingly understated number, until you consider the fact that the Census Bureau at that time had no category for Hispanics; it simply counted them as whites. The South at midcentury was still classified as rural, but only by a margin of fifty-three to forty-seven percent—meaning that about eighteen million people lived in towns and cities, more than twice as many as in 1930.

  In spite of the absolute gains realized during the transition from a state of depression to a wartime economy, Southerners in the mid-1940s still presented an image of pervasive disadvantage and need. So much had changed for the better in the dozen years since the coming of the New Deal—and yet so many problems were still there, unresolved, and new ones were riding on the wings of postwar reconstruction. Far from ushering in paradise, this “peace era” would be turbulent and unsettling. Inflation, layoffs, strikes, labor-management violence, a shortage of consumer goods, political conflict, racial antagonism, cold war anticommunism, the atomic threat—there would be no end to the concerns, and they would be deeply troubling to all Americans. To Southerners caught up in the long and frustrating search for equal opportunity in the national arena, the obstacles would be especially dispiriting.

  The region had been at rock bottom when the Great Depression struck, but the whole nation and much of the world was spiraling downward then; Southerners could rationalize their lowly status—cold comfort though it was—in the knowledge that at least they weren’t the only people who were hurting. But now, with the war at an end and the South’s condition still poor relative to the rest of the country, an altogether different impetus—a forward thrust—was propelling the ship of state. America seemed on the verge of a great renewal, a reinvention of itself. With an air of invincibility, it was facing the future in an expansive, opportunistic, idealistic mood. Implicit in that positive spirit was the admonition that the time to move was at hand, and those who didn’t get on board would be left on the dock when the ship sailed.

  The South could not have skipped the postwar revolution of new technology and rising expectations no matter how hard it might have tried. The Roosevelt New Deal and the war itself had already opened up too many possibilities, too many visions of a better life for the taking; Southerners, like all Americans, had to be included in that bright and promising picture.

  Innovation seemed to have a multiplier effect. Consider the impact of the Tennessee Valley Authority: From its inception in 1933, the agency generated cheap and accessible electric power in the upper South by building hydroelectric plants next to its dams. Soon, town and country people alike had electricity, and they bolted out of the dark ages in a rush. When rationing and austerity ended after the war, a pent-up demand was loosed for appliances, radios, record players, motor vehicles, and a host of time- and labor-saving tools and gadgets. This was also the time when mass advertising came into its own as a consumer stimulus (not that people really needed stimulating to snap up the new cars, refrigerators, boats, clothes, and other goods as soon as they came off the assembly line).

  Novelty begat novelty in private enterprise and government programs alike—in fact, they fed off each other. The postwar boom in automobile sales led directly to massive roadbuilding programs and eventually to the interstate highway network, begun in the 1950s. Cars allowed people to drive longer distances to work, shop, and play, and that mobility greatly reduced the South’s isolation. (One unwelcome consequence of the increased traffic, though, was a soaring highway death toll.) Motels, fast-food chains, expanded parks and recreational facilities, supermarkets, and drive-in theaters would head the long list of developments spawned by the car culture. A nation on the go, America roared out of the war years with practically everyone behind the wheel; cars (and, especially in the South, trucks) quickly ceased to be thought of as luxuries and were looked upon as necessities.

  Air-conditioning likewise modified social behavior, particularly in the subtropical Gulf Coast states. The tobacco and textile industries had begun to use cooling systems to maintain quality control of their products even before the First World War, and by the end of the thirties, most of the railroads and movie theaters operating in the region had put in temperature-regulating devices for the comfort of their customers. Soon after World War II, technological advances made air-conditioning commonplace throughout the society; in less than a quarter of a century, the South would be converted from a muggy, oppressive, sweat-drenched summer place to a labyrinth of air-cooled cocoons—cars, homes, schools, churches, even shopping malls and sports stadiums. Air-conditioning spurred industrial growth in the region, and stimulated trade at restaurants and hotels, and even influenced architecture. So quickly did we become accustomed to refrigerated air that the inescapable heat we once tolerated with hardly a passing comment became an agitating and intolerable discomfort whenever we were forced to stay in it.

  It was the blessed relief of air-conditioning that eventually lured people away from long-winded conversation on the porch and into the cool, enclosed parlor or “family room,” there to watch in enthralled silence as yet another major postwar technological force—television—cast its magic spell. Within a few years, TV would be acknowledged as
the most powerful tool of education and culture available (proving, its critics said, that not every novelty is an unmixed blessing). In the final analysis, television probably has done more to transform American culture than all other technological innovations of the twentieth century, including air-conditioning and automobiles.

  Richmond, Atlanta, Fort Worth, Louisville, Memphis, and New Orleans were in the first wave of Southern cities to inaugurate commercial television stations in 1948—the same year CBS and ABC began operating as networks in competition with NBC, the 1946 TV pathfinder. The video screen profoundly altered the way all Americans thought and acted about virtually every aspect of their lives. The South would be especially affected. Think, for example, of the rise of professional sports, the desegregation of pro teams, and their entry into Southern urban markets in the 1960s—all spurred by the pervasive power of television. And think of the impact on journalism brought about when visual renditions of the news could be delivered instantaneously to virtually every home. In a sense, the civil rights movement was a made-for-television drama. Not surprisingly, Georgia Governor Herman Talmadge (son of Gene) and other segregationist Southern politicians would complain publicly in the early 1950s that television was undermining segregation. In point of fact, it was.

  By midcentury, a substantial majority of Southerners would be totally dependent on their cars and trucks, and soon thereafter they would embrace television and air-conditioning as essential to their workaday lives. Those who still lived on farms would be mastering mechanical cotton-pickers and other harvesting machines, and assembly-line workers would be learning to use ever more sophisticated equipment (with computers soon to come), and homemakers would be cleaning, cooking, and freezing with the latest electric or gas appliances. Their health would be further protected by miracle drugs like penicillin and the polio vaccine; still another revolutionary medical marvel, birth-control pills, would be introduced in the early 1960s. All in all, these irreversibly Americanizing influences served to push the people of the Southern states ever closer to the national fold.