by John Egerton
Much had happened in the previous decade or more to forewarn all Americans that the whole range of racial issues would eventually have to be opened up and examined. A small library of novels and nonfiction books about race had been written—illuminating volumes by such noted authors as James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Gunnar Myrdal, Rayford Logan, W. J. Cash, Lillian Smith, and numerous others. Many more stirring portents of change echoed through popular music, art, movies, and theatrical productions. Blacks who had been locked out of combat roles and defense-industry jobs had won concessions by threatening a massive march on Washington. In the armed forces and in labor unions, blacks had fought successfully for certain basic rights, and more victories were coming. Here and there in the church, the university, and the press, individual voices raised calls to conscience. The Democratic Party, once the fiefdom of conservative Southern politicians, was becoming more diversified, more responsive, more liberal. Hundreds of thousands of African-Americans now lived in cities such as New York and Detroit, and white intolerance there was fueling deep hostility, even deadly riots. Federal courts had issued several pathfinding decisions against racial discrimination. Presidents Roosevelt and Truman had gradually shifted the moral weight of the White House toward a more inclusive democracy.
Only those who weren’t paying attention could fail to notice that the United States was moving ever closer to a formal acknowledgment of its 325-year-old racial dilemma, its crisis in black and white. The lines were being drawn for a classic ideological face-off between the conservative right and the liberal left—tradition versus change, old opposed to new, the past standing with arms folded against the future. Many people knew the odds, and the stakes; even though the vast majority of uncommitted citizens remained on the sidelines awaiting instructions, the factional leaders on the right and left knew that a crucial test was at hand.
The South would have a few months, at most a couple of years or so—only a little time, as time is measured—in which to determine its future course, and to establish the pace and tone and tenor of its response to the pressures for change. Realistically, the odds still favored the continuation of white supremacy. It was decreed and enforced by the politicians, reinforced by the social institutions, chiseled into the hard stone of Southern history; it permeated the culture. The South had virtues and graces that were not minor or insignificant, but they were largely obscured by the deep-rooted heritage of exploitation, violence, and demagoguery. The seemingly immovable object, white supremacy, stood across the field of battle from some elements of opposing energy that held out the threat, the promise, of becoming an irresistible force. According to the laws of physics, the meeting of such powers invariably produces a violent explosion. The laws of history and humanity that came to be applied in the postwar South would eventually bring a similar consequence.
On October 11, 1945, a mob of white men went to the county jail in Madison, Florida, a small town near the Georgia border, and removed a prisoner, Jesse James Payne, from his unguarded cell. The thirty-year-old black laborer had been awaiting trial for the alleged rape of a little girl. The mob took Payne out into the countryside and tortured him to death. Sheriff Lonnie Davis later said the prisoner had been removed by someone who had a key to the cell. Further questioning revealed that the only known key was the one belonging to the sheriff himself.
The semiofficial statistics on lynching in the United States compiled annually by Tuskegee Institute in Alabama recorded Payne’s death as the only such incident in the country that year. But Payne was by no means the only victim of Southern mob law in 1945. Within three months of V-J Day, published reports told of at least five other black men summarily slain by whites without due process of law in small Southern communities—one in Union Springs, Alabama, two in the southwest Mississippi towns of Liberty and Woodville, and two others in north Florida, at Branford and St. Augustine.
Atop Stone Mountain, just east of Atlanta, an October rally of the Ku Klux Klan came off as both a celebration of these acts of terror and a warning to blacks of more violence to come. Dr. Samuel Green, Grand Dragon of the Georgia Klan, claimed that there were more than twenty thousand members of the secret society in his state alone. The huge cross that the Atlanta obstetrician and his hooded followers torched that night could be seen glowing on the horizon from sixty miles away.
One war had ended. Another was heating up again.
2. Epidemic of Violence
The volatile subject of racial equality never had much potency as a twentieth-century political issue until the 1940s, for one simple reason: Before that, no one in power could see much likelihood at all that Southern blacks might regain the democratic standing they had enjoyed briefly after the Civil War. But the wind shifted ever so slightly in the late 1930s, and then, even as the nation was swept up in global conflict, one color-related incident after another broke to the surface of public consciousness.
For a long time before that, though, the South had been whistling “Dixie” to an acquiescent nation. Southern politicians who rose to power and stayed there between, say, 1880 and 1930 almost invariably espoused a party line that decreed segregation and white supremacy, and their edicts were carried out by whatever means necessary, including repression and terrorism. If any Northern politicians took serious exception to such behavior, they uttered their complaints in discreet whispers. In the first thirty years of this century, race was not a compelling national or regional issue; it had been taken beyond the pale of discussion and debate. Notwithstanding those who condemned violence, hardly any white person of prominence went so far as to condemn the laws and customs and routine practices that systematically deprived black American citizens in the Southern states of virtually all the rights and liberties of citizenship.
The most extreme of those “routine practices” was lynching, the ever-present symbol of the white South’s tolerance for terrorism. As a socially sanctioned criminal act, lynching was epidemic in the South from the last quarter of the nineteenth century through the first quarter of the twentieth, after which it diminished but by no means disappeared. The Tuskegee Institute statistics placed the number of such incidents nationally at more than 4,700 between 1882 and 1950—and if the truth could be known, the total was surely much higher. More than eighty-five percent of the atrocities took place in the Southern and border states, and the overwhelming majority of victims were black. All fourteen of the states with a hundred or more lynchings during that period were either in the South or on its border. Between 1900 and 1930, more than 1,500 blacks and about 150 whites were lynched in the South—but it was exceedingly rare for anyone to be punished for taking part in a lynch mob. (Coincidentally or not, the eleven Southern states have also carried out more than half of the approximately 18,500 legal executions of convicted criminals in the nation’s history.)
Opposition to lynching did increase noticeably during the New Deal years. In the early 1930s, the Atlanta-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation published a major study condemning the practice, and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching brought moral pressure to bear upon the problem in a grassroots campaign that lasted for the better part of two decades. The NAACP and other organizations fought hard to eradicate the scourge, and Congress tried repeatedly to pass stiff federal laws against it. But it was all to no avail. Nobody wiped out lynching; it gradually diminished because it became too outrageous, too widely condemned, and too socially unacceptable for the perpetrators to keep it up.
The criteria for defining a lynching, drawn up at a Tuskegee conference in 1940, were narrowly construed; they required, among other things, legal evidence of an illegal death at the hands of a group acting under the pretext of serving justice. Untold dozens and scores of additional deaths—people in custody or suspects “resisting arrest,” prisoners alleged to be attempting to escape, fugitives pursued and “brought to justice” at the end of a rope by unofficial posses—all these would have doubled or even tripled the numbers of unju
stified and extralegal killings that Southern society tolerated in the long reign of vigilante terror that stretched from the end of Reconstruction to the aftermath of World War II. The sheer number of atrocities committed with impunity against blacks by mobs of white men, or by individuals—often with the knowledge or assistance of law-enforcement officials—was self-evident proof of the South’s chronic and unrelieved racial pathology.
The recorded annual total of lynchings fell steadily as time passed—from an average of 150 a year in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, to an average of thirteen a year in the 1930s, to a total of eight in the decade of the 1950s—but the terrorist act remained a shocking tool of intimidation and inhumanity inflicted by a tiny handful of whites and tolerated by a multitude of others. This shameful aspect of the Southern heritage commanded such visibility for so long that the names of the politicians who reigned in the South during the worst of those mean times—men like “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman of South Carolina and James K. Vardaman, the notorious “White Chief” of Mississippi—live in infamy to this day.
When you consider how many men the South sent to the U.S. Senate in the first half of this century who encouraged or at least condoned lynching (two dozen would be a conservative guess, and that’s giving the benefit of the doubt to many a filibusterer), it’s hard to escape the conclusion that promises of continued segregation, white supremacy, and violent repression of the black minority were usually helpful, if not essential, to a winning election strategy. The names and faces of politicians did change from time to time, but the dominant character of social and racial conservatism continued to hold liberalism and reformation at bay. Neither the church, the press, nor the intelligentsia presented much of a challenge to the reactionary leadership of Southern politicians.
The Dixie denizens of the U.S. Senate wielded extraordinary power in that body and in their home states throughout the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, as did their companions in the House of Representatives and in the governors’ offices of every state. When World War II ended, almost all of them were eager to resume control under the old rules of race and class privilege. While a spirit of liberalism and restoration was catching on with many veterans and with some institutional leaders, the hard-line white supremacists seemed determined at any cost to stop racial reform cold, even if it took violence to do it.
In the early months of 1946, the all-white Birmingham city police department under Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor solidified its reputation as a repressive force hostile to the resident minority population. As many as five black men, all military veterans, were reportedly killed by uniformed officers in the first six weeks of the year (the exact number was in dispute, owing to Connor’s control of the flow of information from inside the city government). For months and years to come, so many racially motivated beatings and killings would be laid to the police, and so many unsolved home bombings would occur there, that a local black newspaper editor, Emory O. Jackson of the Birmingham World, charged Connor and his crowd with “creating the climate for outrages to breed and break out.”
As a festering hotbed of police brutality, Klan terrorism, racial hostility, and commonplace violence, Birmingham had few peers—but it wasn’t alone in its extremism. Reports out of Gretna, Louisiana, and El Campo, Texas, that February told of black ex-servicemen dying at the hands of white officers of the law, and in the same month, two other incidents made front-page news all across the country. Neither fit the narrow definition of a lynching, but both—the maiming of a soldier in South Carolina and an outburst of racial violence that took two lives in Tennessee—signaled an ominous turning of the racial screw by Southern whites.
As soon as Isaac Woodard got his discharge papers at an army base in Georgia on February 12, he gathered up his belongings and hurried to catch a bus for home. Just back from fifteen months in the South Pacific, he was eager to return to civilian life. His wife was waiting in North Carolina, and they were going on to visit his parents in New York. After the bus had left Augusta and crossed the Savannah River into South Carolina, Woodard and the driver exchanged words over some minor point of racial etiquette. When the bus reached Aiken, the young soldier got off to go to the restroom. In the meantime, the driver called ahead to the police station in Batesburg, the next stop, to ask for help in dealing with a drunk and disorderly passenger.
Woodard later conceded he had taken “a drink or two,” but insisted that he wasn’t drunk. Apparently he didn’t need alcohol to bolster his courage. The driver resumed his verbal harangue when they were on the road again, and Woodard responded in kind; soon the angry words were flying between the front and back of the bus. At the Batesburg depot, Woodard was ordered off, and as soon as he stepped out the door he was grabbed by the local police chief, Linwood Shull, and a deputy, who struck him before he could speak. They took him around a corner and beat him severely. The bus pulled away, and Woodard was dragged off to jail.
When the bloodied veteran was brought into court the next morning, he was unable to see. Because of the obvious seriousness of his injuries, the judge had Woodard taken to an army hospital for examination. There, doctors finally determined that a blunt instrument (a billy club, as it turned out) had been jammed into his eye sockets so violently that both of his eyes were mutilated beyond repair. The soldier was hospitalized, and the charges against him were dropped.
Isaac Woodard’s plight didn’t come to public attention until mid-July, when Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People released a sworn affidavit signed by the victim. White got others, including the actor Orson Welles, to take up the call for justice. Their insistent pleas spurred the Federal Bureau of Investigation to look into the case. Finally, in the fall of 1946, Linwood Shull was indicted in Columbia, South Carolina, and brought to trial in federal court. The jury acquitted him, said White later, “to the cheers of a crowded courtroom.” Woodard had moved to New York by then, having spent two months in the veterans’ hospital without recovering his sight. He was permanently blind.
The Tennessee incident, which would be described in the national press as a race riot, took place in another Columbia, a county-seat town of about five thousand whites and three thousand blacks some forty-five miles south of Nashville. Three lynchings there since 1925 had left scars, but the postwar months had been placid, and business was brisk in the stores, including those in a row of black-owned shops and residences known as Mink Slide, just a block from the courthouse square.
On the morning of February 25, Gladys Stephenson and her son James, a navy veteran just back from the Pacific, went to the appliance section of a department store on the square to pick up a small radio she had left to be repaired. A dispute arose (accounts differed on the substance of it) between the black woman and the clerk, a young white man who, witnesses said, abused her verbally and then struck her. James Stephenson stepped in. He and the clerk got into a scuffle, and soon the white fellow was lying on his back, with cuts and other injuries, after crashing through a plate-glass window.
The Stephensons were arrested and swiftly charged with breach of the peace. They entered a guilty plea and paid a fifty-dollar fine, but the young ex-sailor was promptly rearrested when the injured store clerk’s father swore out a warrant accusing him of assault with intent to commit murder. A prominent black businessman, Julius Blair, posted bond, and all the parties in the dispute went their separate ways, pondering the events of a very traumatic day.
But the episode wasn’t over. As dark approached, a milling throng of white men on the square was passing rumors, whiskey bottles, weapons. The old lynchings were brought up, and some said it was time for another. Along the Mink Slide row, black veterans sensed the danger; they got weapons too, and set up lookout posts, and put out all the lights. The throng of whites was growing louder and angrier. Hoping to keep control of the situation, the chief of police drove to the edge of the black section with a carload of officers and tol
d four of them—half of his entire force—to patrol on foot through the darkened area. The men had not gone far when they heard shouted orders to halt—and when they didn’t comply, shots rang out. All four were wounded, one seriously, and they retreated.
An eerie quiet followed. By ten o’clock that night, the state safety commissioner and a unit of highway patrolmen had arrived, and together with some of the local white men they surrounded the area; soon thereafter, a unit of the Tennessee National Guard was deployed. Just before dawn, the police and soldiers swept through Mink Slide, shooting into businesses, destroying property, cleaning out cash drawers and taking other valuables, ransacking scores of homes, and seizing about three hundred weapons. More than a hundred people were arrested; all of them were denied bail and counsel. Only blacks were targeted in the sweep. Miraculously, no one was killed.
Walter White and Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP flew into Nashville later that day. White went to see the governor and then started calling newspaper reporters and organizing a national defense committee (Eleanor Roosevelt agreed to serve as one of its leaders). Marshall, by now a battle-toughened civil rights lawyer, enlisted two Tennessee attorneys, Z. Alexander Looby of Nashville and Maurice Weaver of Chattanooga—one black, the other white—to help him plan the defense.