by John Egerton
For nearly a century the United States had lived with the destructive consequences of regional hostility and estrangement. Now the cumulative effects of the depression, the New Deal, and the war were breaking down those sectional barriers and compelling all Americans to think in national rather than regional terms. The United States in 1945 was vastly different from what it had been in 1929. The federal government’s role as a provider of services (health, housing, jobs, education, welfare, highways) and as a regulator of activity in such fields as agriculture, banking, broadcasting, and interstate travel had expanded enormously, and that trend would not be reversed as the nation grew ever larger and more complex.
The national economy, having tripled in size during the war years, was severely tested in the mid-1940s by two daunting challenges: the absorption of ten million military men and women into civilian life, and the conversion of industry to the production of consumer goods. Some of the pressure would be relieved by federal investments in education, job training, and housing under the GI Bill of Rights—yet another example of a national response to what had once been thought of as state or local or even private concerns. As a practical matter, however, no force except the federal government was powerful enough to remove price controls, lift wages, and try to keep a lid on inflation and unemployment—just as, by the same token, only the nation had had the resources to overcome the depression and win the war.
Now, for a brief moment in history, the United States stood proudly as a victorious and unified country—a single people under one flag, one army, one political system, one currency, one language (albeit diversely accented). The same basic institutions—religious, academic, economic, informational—undergirded the national structure. Ever since the Southern war of rebellion in the 1860s, the issue of federal sovereignty had been sticking in the South’s craw. Now, eighty years later, the answer finally seemed abundantly clear: Like it or not (and many old Rebs didn’t), this was one nation, indivisible.
National authority was unquestionably secured as the United States took up its domestic agenda in the late summer of 1945. More decisively than ever before in American history, federal solutions were widely seen as the primary response to an expanding array of problems. Government was no panacea, but it was the essential engine of a progressive society, and most people adjusted to that fact. (It would remain for the next generation to discover the flip side of big government: the arrogance of power, the paralyzing crush of bureaucracy, the susceptibility of politicians and parties to corruption, and all the rest.)
The cry of states’ rights would still be raised, but it would never again prevail against higher authority exercised in the national interest. Even so, the certainty of failure had not been enough to deter the breakaway South in the 1860s, and it would not be enough in the 1950s and beyond. Though they would stop short of war this time, the region’s leaders would foment yet another rebellion in the name of states’ rights and Southern sovereignty—with the same disastrous results as before.
No matter how passionately the guardians of Old South culture yearned to live by antiquated social rules, there was no realistic possibility that the region could go on following its traditional course indefinitely. Isolated, undemocratic, backward in many ways, beset with contradictory feelings of superiority and inadequacy, determined at all costs to maintain a rearguard defense of its race and class divisions, the South was hopelessly stranded in the trailing ranks of the national parade—and all for the comfort and glory of a handful of its citizens. The end of the war brought with it a pervasive sense that a new age was beginning, and nothing would be quite the same as it had been. Change would not come to the Land of Cotton swiftly or precipitously—but it would come.
What was it that set the South apart from the rest of America in the middle of the twentieth century? Was it history, tradition, geography, isolation, ruralism, violence? Was it culture, class, religion, mythology, language, music, food, families? There were many elements, some positive, some negative, but one was paramount. What divided the South from the nation—and Southerners from one another—was race.
The wall had loomed since European explorers first encountered the native inhabitants of the Americas in the late fifteenth century, and since the first Africans were brought to this continent against their will in 1619. Periodic epidemics of religious and ethnic discrimination and xenophobia down through the years have underscored the pervasiveness of intolerance. It was never just Southern whites but whites in general who separated the races and assured the one of perpetual advantage over the others; as Gunnar Myrdal so convincingly showed in An American Dilemma in 1944, white supremacy was a product of national, not regional, failure.
Even so, the vast majority of blacks in the population of America had always been in the South—first as slaves, then as freedmen, and finally as the lowest segment in the regional labor pool. In spite of massive migration to Northern cities, three-fourths of the country’s thirteen million black citizens still lived in the states of the Old Confederacy after World War II (as did much smaller numbers of Hispanics, Indians, and Asians). It was primarily here that segregation and discrimination and inequality were so blatantly practiced and so intricately woven into the fabric of everyday life.
The white South had never spoken with one unified and unwavering voice against the humanity of the African-American population. To be sure, most politicians and lesser numbers of journalists, scholars, and religious leaders did often perpetuate the myth of a solid white South, but there were always dissenters who spoke and worked for some degree of justice and fair play for people of color. Most of them voiced a kindly and well-intentioned paternalism; others stressed the need for equal protection of the laws; still others felt that blacks were entitled, on an equal but segregated basis, to all the programs and services available to whites. But it was one thing to favor nonviolence and common decency, and quite another to stand up and speak out for complete racial equality. When it came to outright criticism of segregation itself, only a handful of Southern whites with any public stature or following at all had found their voices by 1945—and all of them were on the outer margins of power, not at its center.
The writer and editor Lillian Smith was getting national attention as an outspoken integrationist. H. L. Mitchell, Lucy Randolph Mason, and other regional leaders of organized labor were firmly in favor of full equality for blacks, and so were James Dombrowski of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and Myles Horton of the Highlander Folk School. A few religious radicals—Howard Kester, Alva Taylor, Claude Williams, Don West—stirred controversy by living out their belief in the brotherhood of man. (Some denominational bodies passed resolutions on racial tolerance, but virtually none gave up segregation.) Ex–New Dealers Will Alexander, Aubrey Williams, and Clark Foreman had all declared their opposition to Jim Crow laws by the end of the war. Broadus, George, and Morris Mitchell, the three sons of Samuel Chiles Mitchell, the aging liberal scholar, were all activists like their father. Social scientists Howard Odum, Guy Johnson, Rupert Vance, and Arthur Raper headed the list of academics linked to progressive causes.
Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall and Florida Senator Claude Pepper stood out among a handful of practicing politicians who called themselves liberals, though they didn’t feel free enough to take advanced positions on racial issues. Perhaps the most noted Southern liberal in a role of real authority (unless you count Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black) was the longtime president of the University of North Carolina, Frank Porter Graham, soon to be appointed to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate; he too felt compelled at times to equivocate a bit on matters of race, but he and Dorothy Rogers Tilly of Atlanta, the only Southern members of the U.S. Committee on Civil Rights appointed by President Truman in 1946, would distinguish themselves as forthright advocates of a new national course in race relations.
A number of the South’s leading newspaper editors leaned modestly in the direction of liberal progressivism, but not on all issues; race co
ntinued to hold them back. Even in the late forties, most of them shied away from federal solutions to what they saw as state or local or private problems—lynching, job discrimination, poll taxes and other impediments to voting. Early liberals, including Virginius Dabney in Richmond and John Temple Graves in Birmingham, were drifting further to the right, while Atlanta’s Ralph McGill, Raleigh’s Jonathan Daniels, Mark Ethridge of Louisville, and Hodding Carter of Greenville, Mississippi, were searching for a middle course between what they saw as radical and reactionary extremes. Younger men just back from the war would soon offer progressive editorial leadership, among them Harry S. Ashmore in Little Rock, William C. Baggs in Miami, and C. A. “Pete” McKnight in Charlotte; John N. Popham, a native Virginian, would play an influential role as the first Southern correspondent of the New York Times. But not one newspaper in the region editorialized against Jim Crow segregation laws until after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision mandating desegregation of the public schools. Only a scattered few independent journalists, like Thomas Sancton in Louisiana and Stetson Kennedy in Florida, were on the leading edge of this approaching wave.
More than a few black Southerners had seen clearly for a long time the urgent need to end legalized segregation and extend the privileges of full citizenship to their race, but their power to effect such changes was severely limited. Often they were caught between oppressive whites close at hand and militant blacks voicing criticism from the relative safety of the North. Some black newspapers in the region tried to fly the flag of racial liberation, but they were essentially conservative enterprises with small circulation and limited influence—and in any case, only a few had writers of the caliber of someone like John H. McCray, editor of the Lighthouse & Informer in Columbia, South Carolina. The Southern black church was conservative, too, and without much latitude in the struggle for equal opportunity; a postwar decade would pass before it joined the battle against white supremacy.
In the thirties and forties, independent educators headed the list of progressive black leaders in the South. Prominent among them were Charles S. Johnson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Benjamin Mays, Rufus Clement, F. D. Patterson, and Gordon Hancock. Numerous others, inside and outside the region, showed a prophetic understanding of social issues in those years. Among the most eloquent in their advocacy of racial equality were writers James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Saunders Redding, and Sterling Brown; attorneys Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston; activists W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, Paul Robeson, and A. Philip Randolph. The list of black reformers was longer than that of whites, even though it was defined by one restraining reality: Only those who were not dependent on whites for their livelihood could afford the risk of speaking their minds candidly.
These are some of the now-familiar figures, black and white, whom we have encountered in this chronicle of the early struggle for racial and regional equality—and most of them would still be there on the liberal side in the postwar battle for human rights in the South and the nation. If their numbers were small, it only proved how hard it was to speak out with logic or even pragmatism on an emotional issue like race. More than three centuries of white dominance had developed and reinforced traditions that defied logic and ignored self-interest. Segregation gripped the minds of many Southerners like a chronic disease, an incurable addiction; in their fervor for it, some whites would prove themselves to be ready to ride it down to defeat, just as their forebears had ridden slavery.
If the liberal-progressive remnant had been able to agree on goals and methods, ends and means, they might have won a substantial following among the South’s silent majority. With united leadership and a little luck, both the black minority and the region as a whole might have managed in the late forties to break free from their long-standing positions of enforced disadvantage. But human nature had the last word as the liberals fell into conflict among themselves.
The Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the Southern Regional Council, the two leading social-action organizations of the 1940s, eyed each other more like suspicious rivals than collaborative allies. The SCHW spun off a new organization in 1946—the Southern Conference Educational Fund—ostensibly to receive tax-exempt contributions and leave the SCHW free to engage in political action. But in truth, the decision cloaked a personal and philosophical split within the group and marked the beginning of the end for the SCHW. For its part, the Southern Regional Council would be locked in internal debate about segregation for several years after the war. Even at that, the SCHW and the SRC fared better than the Southern Policy Committee, an earlier conclave of liberals that by 1940 had all but dissolved in frustration and anger.
Blacks in the region who courted either Southern whites or Northern blacks in the campaign for social reform had critics aplenty, no matter which way they turned. More-militant blacks in the North often branded them as Uncle Toms, while white liberals sought to exploit them as buffers against the more conservative whites—who in turn regarded even the most diplomatic black reformers as disruptive troublemakers. Whites who showed even the most modest inclination toward racial accommodation were likewise squeezed between reactionary white politicians on the right and radical activists, black and white, on the left.
Internal squabbling, petty jealousies, and personal hostility sometimes brought almost as much grief to the liberal-progressive cause as did ideological opposition from the right. (Conservatives had to face internal dissension too, but they had the advantages of incumbency, vested power, and majority-white privilege on their side.) Ralph McGill and Lillian Smith had never liked each other, and they were too proud to meet and iron out their differences. McGill also had little use for Don West, Claude Pepper, the SCHW, or the labor movement—but he greatly admired labor’s Lucy Randolph Mason, who was a friend of Pepper and West and a member of the SCHW. Smith was a harsh and disdainful critic of the Southern Regional Council, and though she eventually joined the rival Southern Conference, she didn’t stay long in its ranks. Frank Graham never was active in the SRC. Howard Kester, a Christian Socialist, and H. L. Mitchell, an agnostic Socialist, shared an abiding distrust of all activists they suspected of being Communists—including fellow agnostic Myles Horton and fellow Christian Jim Dombrowski. Blacks were equally as hard on one another; the conference of black Southerners out of which the Southern Regional Council grew was soundly criticized by black leaders in the North even before it began.
And so it went, as the thin ranks of reform-minded Southerners and their outside allies struggled against tradition, inertia, ignorance, silence, the old guard of ruling reactionaries—and themselves. For all their differences, the progressives seemed to have enough interests in common to lay the foundation for a coalition. By and large, they were Roosevelt-Truman Democrats. Consistently through the years, they had opposed the Ku Klux Klan and other right-wing terrorist organizations. They were for better race relations, expanded civil rights for blacks, full and fair application of the rule of law. Most of them had more positive than negative opinions of labor unions and the federal government, and they enthusiastically welcomed the postwar emergence of nontraditional young politicians in the aging ranks of demagogic officeholders. And still they fought among themselves.
Their real adversaries were those very demagogues, and the people on the right who kept them in power. Here were the most strident critics of Roosevelt and Truman, the sworn enemies of federal authority, the defenders of states’ rights; here were anti-union, anti-black partisans who slapped the red label on all who strayed from conservative orthodoxy on race, religion, and politics; here were people who not only tolerated the Klan but supported it, even belonged to it; here were the beneficiaries of democratic exclusion and apathy.
And yet, as clear-cut as the left-right ideological split was, the liberals could never muster more than a thin shadow of the unity that kept the conservatives in harness throughout. Always outnumbered and constantl
y working against the grain of the culture that had evolved over generations, the progressives couldn’t overcome emotion with logic. Once again, the reason was race: When all was said and done, white Southerners were more willing to stand against racial justice than for it.
In the nine years that separated the coming of world peace and the historic Brown decision, the white South tried in vain to deal with race by avoidance and indirection, hoping all the while that somehow the issue would resolve itself and simply fade away. Conservatives and liberals alike knew how crucial the matter was to the future of their region, but they could see no way to settle it, and so they resisted it as an unthinkable thought, an issue only to be approached defensively, in reaction to initiatives taken by others. Conservatives saw disturbing trends coming out of the war—trends toward urbanization, industrialization, a broader franchise, diversification of the Democratic Party, the re-emancipation of blacks. Liberals were not so much alarmed as encouraged by those trends, but they saw and dreaded the hardening of reactionary resistance, the rise of violence against blacks, the signs of hostility to organized labor, the national outbreak of red hysteria, and the stain of the Communist taint on all progressives.
Throughout the Roosevelt years and right on into the first postwar months of adjustment, race was a low-priority agenda item for virtually all whites, North and South, left and right; most seemed inclined simply to let things rock along until a crisis of some sort forced the public to pay attention. But black Americans—the targets of discrimination—were not so indifferent. By war’s end, they seemed more universally determined than ever to gain the basic freedoms for which they had fought overseas. Their first order of business in the summer and fall of 1945 was to make rapid progress in two areas: employment (access to jobs, union membership, equal pay for equal work) and political-civic standing (voting rights, political party participation, fair treatment at the hands of the police, the law, and the courts). There were other pressing needs, of course—in education, housing, health care, transportation—but working and voting came first.