Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  I come from this state. My grandfather had slaves. But to me, civil liberties mean human rights, God-given rights for all Americans. This is not a social question. This is not an economic question. It is a question of God-given rights. If you want a feudal society with overlords, or a Hitler or Mussolini government, then this country is no place for you. We can have as much danger from within this country, from groups of intolerant men who would destroy the rights our forefathers gave us, as from any outside enemies.

  After less than two hours of deliberation, the jury found all five of the defendants not guilty.

  At about the time the Minden lynching case was coming to trial, a self-appointed deputation of taxi drivers in and around Greenville, South Carolina, took a black prisoner out of jail and pulverized him with knives, clubs, and shotgun blasts at close range.

  The victim, twenty-four-year-old Willie Earle, an epileptic ex-convict, was in the county jail at Pickens, twenty miles west of Greenville, charged with the February 15, 1947, stabbing of a white cabdriver (who would later die of his wounds). In the predawn hours of February 17, a convoy of about fifteen cars, most of them taxis, pulled up at the jail; the drivers and others with them—some forty or fifty men in all—told the jailer to turn Earle over to them. They took him to the vicinity of a livestock slaughter-pen between Greenville and Pickens. His mutilated body was found there a short while later, after a black funeral home director received a call about “a dead nigger in need of his offices.”

  Within thirty-six hours, U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark had sent FBI agents to Greenville, and they quickly obtained statements from twenty-six men who freely admitted to being members of the mob and witnesses to the lynching. South Carolina’s newly elected governor, forty-four-year-old J. Strom Thurmond, a highly decorated army officer in World War II, decried the lawless act and subsequently backed up his words with the appointment of a well-respected special prosecutor, Sam R. Watt of Spartanburg. (The line on Thurmond, a Carolina editorial writer noted with approval, is that he “tends to be liberal without being radical.”) Thirty-one men were indicted for conspiring to murder Willie Earle; one of them, R. C. Hurd, Sr., was named in several of the confessions as the trigger man.

  The following May, the case went to trial before Judge J. Robert Martin, Jr., and a jury of twelve men in Greenville. White sentiment in the class-conscious community seemed curiously divided, with working people generally vocal in their support of the defendants but some in the middle and upper classes whispering disdain of the “poor whites” and “millhand lintheads” who had taken the law into their own hands. Similar slurs were directed at the jury, which was made up entirely of working-class whites. (The opinions and feelings of blacks were more or less ignored, as if they had no stake in the matter.)

  But interest was high, and it reached far beyond South Carolina. The escalation of racial violence since the war and extensive publicity about this particular crime attracted press coverage by Time and Life magazines; The New Yorker sent English novelist and critic Rebecca West (whose father had once lived in the South), and the New York Times was represented by its recently named Southern correspondent, John N. Popham.

  Defense attorneys attacked the signed but unsworn confessions as forced statements obtained under extreme duress, but none of the defendants were called to testify, so they couldn’t disavow their words directly. (One cabdriver who did take the stand said he had been asked to join the mob, but had refused; before the trial was over, the witness received a severe beating, and he left town for his own safety.) To the surprise of many, the team of lawyers for the defense included one of South Carolina’s most outspoken liberals, John Bolt Culbertson of Greenville, a labor lawyer and former FBI agent who often outraged other whites by addressing blacks as Mr. or Mrs., shaking hands and socializing with them, and generally treating them as equals. But in a perplexing display of Southern chauvinism, he attacked the FBI, the federal government, the Northern press, and Willie Earle—who, he drawled, “is dead, and I wish more like him was dead.” Before the judge indignantly gaveled him to order, Culbertson smiled at the defendants and said, “There’s a law against shooting a dog, but if a mad dog were loose in my community, I would shoot the dog and let them prosecute me.”

  The Life reporter would praise prosecutor Watt for his skill and declare that Judge Martin had “conducted the trial from start to finish with admirable fairness.” (Martin would sustain a reputation for judicial integrity throughout his later tenure as a federal district judge.) It had all taken eight days, including five hours of deliberation by the jury. When the end finally came, a spring thunderstorm was hammering against the courtroom windows. The judge looked with a grim expression at the slips on which the jurors had recorded their verdicts. He rose and left the courtroom without speaking after the clerk announced the not-guilty decision. The roar of the victors was louder than the storm outside.

  Rebecca West, in her account of the trial in The New Yorker, saw the South’s wall of caste and class and color in historic and universal terms. “Here was a curtain cut of the same stuff as hangs between England and Ireland,” she wrote. From behind that magnolia curtain stepped two white Greenvillians, a man and a woman, to speak quietly to West as they left the courtroom. “This is only the beginning,” the man said. The woman was more descriptive. “It is like a fever,” she whispered, with tears in her eyes. “It spreads, it’s an infection, it’s just like a fever.”

  The fever kept popping out all over the South, fed by the inability or unwillingness of local, state, and federal prosecutors to bring terrorists to justice. Time after time in the wake of some outrageous crime, the police made no arrests, the district attorney brought no charges, the grand jury refused to indict, or the trial jury could not convict. More serious by far was the fact that many of these cases involved acts of violence, even killing, by officers of the law—jailers, prison guards, policemen, sheriffs, state troopers.

  Whether all of the racially motivated killings and maimings of 1946 and 1947 were simply episodic coincidences erupting at random across the unstable South, or whether they added up to a predictable, even calculated, surge of reactionary power, they came in the end to the same chilling result: scores of dead, hundreds of injured, thousands of terrorized citizens for whom the protection of the law was at best a meaningless ideal, and at worst a threatening reality.

  Inexplicably, Georgia seemed in 1947, as in the preceding year, to have a worse case of racial bloodlust than most of the other Southern states. In May, a black farmer arrested on suspicion of aiding a fleeing murder suspect was lynched in the Harris County jail at Hamilton. In July, at a prison camp near Brunswick, eight black convicts were killed and five others critically wounded in a hail of bullets fired by Warden H. G. Worthy and several guards. (Even some local white officials scoffed at the warden’s claim that the prisoners were trying to escape, but a grand jury took his word for it.) And at Ellaville in Schley County that November, a forty-nine-year-old widowed black sharecropper, Rosa Lee Ingram, and two of her twelve children—sons in their early teens—were sentenced to die in the electric chair for killing a white sharecropper who had held the woman at gunpoint and viciously whipped her when she resisted his sexual advances. (The sentences were later reduced to life in prison.)

  The resurgent Ku Klux Klan and other ragtag units of political and cultural extremism were often in the news—and these, too, showed a more imposing presence in Georgia than elsewhere. Hiram W. Evans, the Imperial Wizard of the national KKK, operated out of Atlanta for several years in the late thirties and early forties. After the war, the newly menacing statewide Klan in Georgia had as its Grand Dragon a fire-breathing Atlanta physician, Dr. Samuel Green, and the local Klan Klavern in the Georgia capital was led by Sam Roper, a onetime city cop who had headed the state highway patrol under Governor Talmadge. Roy V. Harris, speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, was a key figure in the formation of the Cracker Party, an Augusta-based right-wing movement
hostile to black political participation. Still another white supremacist outfit, the Columbians, emerged in Atlanta in 1946 as a Nazi-like cadre of brown-shirted bullies preaching hatred of blacks, Jews, and Communists.

  From so much hostile intent and violent behavior, so much pervasive meanness, you could easily draw the conclusion that the white South was effectively stifling dissent and enforcing conformity, uniting behind a banner of racial discrimination, reactionary politics, and religious intolerance. But the opposition to right-wing extremism had not dissolved; on the contrary, some Southern whites and almost all blacks were more determined than ever to usher in an era of postwar social change. Clearly, the ancient Southern animosities between right and left, white and black, ruler and subject, had reached a new and more ominous stage. The old expectations and fears no longer applied; a meaner game, a cutthroat game, was in the offing, and all that seemed consonant with the past was the Southern habit—recently honed by the war—of settling things violently, with knives and fists and guns.

  Even in Atlanta, supposedly the beacon light of urban progressivism in the region, signs of ultraconservative narrowness and resistance to change were visible at every turn. And yet it was precisely here, in the flagship city of New South idealism, that the black and white opposition to political and racial and cultural extremism was strongest. If Talmadge and the Klan and the Columbians and segregation and religious fanaticism and violence were here, so too were Arnall and McGill and visionary black leaders and the CIO and the Southern Regional Council and the American Veterans Committee.

  No matter how the South might eventually resolve its postwar conflicts, they would first have to be fought out in hundreds of local and state arenas; not until that happened could the legislative, executive, and judicial wings of the federal government be compelled to pay attention to those problems, and eventually to help resolve them. And of all these regional battlefields where the struggle for the South’s future would be waged, none was larger, more central, or more vital than Atlanta, and none was more impressively arrayed with formidable combatants of the right and left.

  With absolute certainty, the reactionaries knew that if they could stop change here, they could stop it anywhere in the South—and with just as much conviction, the progressives knew that if reform failed here, it would fail everywhere. In that sense, Atlanta was the ultimate testing ground, the crux of it all.

  3. Spotlight on Georgia

  Between 1937 and 1969, Mayors William B. Hartsfield and Ivan Allen, Jr., would preside almost continuously over Atlanta’s transformation from the Old South to the New World. Unabashed hucksters that they were, the two men never tired of extolling the manifold virtues of their beloved phoenix, rising since 1864 from the cold ashes of history. In time, both of them would be associated with the phrase “the city too busy to hate.” But that would be later, in the 1960s and beyond; in 1945, Atlanta was not yet a city at all, in the fullest sense, but a sleepy, suddenly overgrown Southern country town that had been jarred awake by a depression-ending war and singled out by geography and economics, by chance and circumstance, to be the model metropolis of the postwar South.

  To any objective witness, it must have seemed a poor candidate for such prominence. As it swelled with refugees from the poverty-plagued countryside, Atlanta was skirting unsteadily on the edge of disaster, barely staying one step ahead of the rest of the South, a long stride behind the rest of the nation, and a short arm’s length away from a violent explosion. If the South were likened to a third-world country—an Argentina, an Indonesia—then Atlanta was its Buenos Aires, its Jakarta, a teeming hub of extreme wealth and deprivation, of sophistication and naiveté, of grand visions and petty intrigues and run-of-the-mill corruption. When the residents of Georgia’s capital city looked away at last from the preoccupations of war, they could see displayed before them in their own community all the multiple fragments of the split personality that was the South.

  At Georgia Tech and Emory and Atlanta universities, at Morehouse and Spelman and Agnes Scott colleges, young men and women, white and black, went quietly about their separate pursuits of learning. A swift and sustained burst of industrial growth was creating thousands of new jobs in the city—so many that the value of manufactured goods would double in just five years. An average of fifty flights a day winged in and out of Atlanta, ranking it among the half-dozen busiest airports in the country (but ground transportation still dominated, with twice that many daily trains and four times as many buses rolling through the downtown depots). Preening in the dogwood and azalea-banked beauty of spring and the gold and crimson glow of autumn, Atlanta tiptoed toward the future, led by a team of elected or informally chosen players who seemed casually inclined toward a calm and cautious, moderately progressive approach to change.

  Their outwardly reasonable demeanor hid the fact that Atlanta was as deeply mired in race and class divisions and inequality as almost any other city in the South. Virtually all of its institutions acceded to the reality of Jim Crow segregation in an insular society that presupposed the superiority of all Caucasians over other races; what’s more, there was a pecking order among whites that robbed the poor of practically every privilege except racial bigotry. Few people of any race dared to question the maze of contradictions and inconsistencies that propped up the system. Atlanta had no black policemen or other officers of the law, no black judges or elected officials, few black voters (and thus virtually none as jurors), and only a handful of black professionals other than teachers and preachers. Medical care for the city’s 100,000 black residents, measured by the presence of only twenty-five physicians and fifty hospital beds to serve them, was still languishing in the “kitchen surgery” era. Though they made up fully one-third of the population inside the city and one-fourth in the metropolitan area, African-Americans were largely hemmed inside a central district that comprised about one-eighth of the city’s land area.

  Segregation prevailed in all the libraries, parks and playgrounds, community centers, public housing projects, buses and streetcars, taxicabs, hospitals, churches, schools, jails and prisons, restaurants, theaters, bars, bowling alleys, elevators, swimming pools, and cemeteries. Only the thinnest pretense of a fair-share division of resources was offered. The all-white board of public education divided its 1946 capital budget for new school construction seventeen to one in favor of whites. In Atlanta and throughout the South, just about the only institutions that permitted any biracial involvement at all were the military services, YWCA and YMCA groups, some labor unions, jazz bands, bootleg joints, and whorehouses.

  Mayor Hartsfield, who was recognized by whites and blacks alike for his moderate leadership, frequently expressed confidence that “the better element of white and colored people” in the city would work together to solve the problems of slum housing, poor health care, job discrimination, lack of police protection, and inadequacy of public programs and services for blacks. The Atlanta Journal gave editorial support to such cooperation, but added a caveat that white-black initiatives such as these must “rest on the major premise that segregation shall continue. Segregation is not discrimination, if accompanied as it should be by a just apportionment of community benefits.” Ralph McGill’s sustained opposition to Eugene Talmadge and the Ku Klux Klan and his insistence that the Constitution capitalize the word Negro and use standard courtesy titles without regard to race enhanced his reputation as a progressive, but he still didn’t endorse the abolition of legalized segregation.

  As limited as their liberalism was, the Atlanta newspapers and Mayor Hartsfield and Governor Ellis Arnall gave high visibility to the promise of a progressive awakening in postwar Georgia and the South. They had begun to hear prodding voices of exhortation from several quarters on the left: from Atlanta’s black leadership, with its growing fervor for voting rights and other liberties; from returning veterans attuned to reform, particularly those in the American Veterans Committee; from the Congress of Industrial Organizations and its locally based “Op
eration Dixie” drive to organize labor unions; from the Southern Regional Council, a potentially powerful force for change in the city and throughout the South; from various factions of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews with newly formed agendas for social betterment. Lillian Smith, along with other outspoken intellectuals—people in religious or academic institutions and the Northern press—pushed even harder for a Southern renaissance, with Atlanta as its generating station.

  From the far right came the reactionary drumbeat of the Klan, the Columbians, the Cracker Party, the Talmadge forces, members of the Georgia congressional delegation, most of the legislature, and a variety of religious groups, monied interests, American Legionnaires, and others. Facing their liberal adversaries at close range in the streets of Atlanta, the right-wing groups were spoiling for a fight, confident of victory. Before 1945 was over, Atlantans on the right and left and in the middle were on edge, waiting nervously for the ideological and psychological battle to begin.

  Ellis Gibbs Arnall had begun his tenure as governor of Georgia in 1943 with all the right credentials. His forebears had been stalwarts of the rural middle class—lawyers, judges, merchants, teachers. He himself had graduated first in his law school class at the University of Georgia, had served in the legislature, and had been the state’s attorney general. Bright and ambitious, he yearned to break the grip that Eugene Talmadge had held on Georgia politics for the better part of a decade. When Talmadge met with embarrassing criticism for political meddling in the state’s higher education system, Arnall seized the issue and rode it to an upset victory over the incumbent in 1942.