by John Egerton
President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights, appointed in 1946, stood for a White House picture when it issued its report, “To Secure these Rights,” in late 1947. Only two Southerners were on the fifteen-member commission—Dorothy Rogers Tilly of Atlanta and Frank Porter Graham of the University of North Carolina. They are standing side by side on Truman’s left in the picture. (Illustration Credit 24.24)
On a stop in North Carolina during the 1948 campaign, President Truman and his vice-presidential running mate, Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, smiled for the cameras and a friendly crowd. With them were the President’s daughter, Margaret Truman, and his former press secretary, Jonathan Daniels (left), editor of the Raleigh News & Observer. (Illustration Credit 24.25)
More than ten thousand delegates to the national convention of the NAACP heard an address by President Truman from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in June 1947. No previous president had ever spoken to the group. (Illustration Credit 24.26)
Before Claude Pepper (seated, right) lost his U. S. Senate seat to Congressman George Smathers (back row, center) in 1950, the two Florida Democrats and others were congenial guests of President Truman (seated, center) at his “little White House” in Key West. This November 1948 occasion was a celebration of Truman’s upset victory over his Republican, Dixiecrat, and Progressive challengers. (Illustration Credit 24.28)
Senator Theodore G. Bilbo went home to Mississippi in January 1947 after his colleagues refused to seat him pending an investigation of alleged irregularities in his reelection campaign. The sixty-nine-year-old senator died of cancer a few months later.
Black voters stood in line for hours to cast ballots in the August 1948 Democratic primary in South Carolina—the first statewide election to follow Judge J. Waties Waring’s ruling against the white primary. About thirty thousand blacks voted. (Illustration Credit 24.29)
On a tumultuous campaign swing through the South in the late summer of 1948, Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace was often heckled and threatened. In Memphis on September 3, he was assigned a plainclothes police bodyguard (wearing hat). Also with Wallace was his campaign manager, Clark Foreman (far left). (Illustration Credit 24.30)
A floor demonstration at the States’ Rights Party (Dixiecrat) Convention in Birmingham, July 17, 1948 (Illustration Credit 24.31)
Governors Strom Thurmond of South Carolina (center) and Fielding Wright of Mississippi (and Thurmond’s wife Jean) were at the beginning of their quixotic Dixiecrat campaign for the White House when this photo was made at the Jackson airport in the summer of 1948. (Illustration Credit 24.32)
North Carolina Governor Kerr Scott (left) announced the appointment of Frank Porter Graham to the U. S. Senate at the climax of a campus luncheon honoring the University of North Carolina president in March 1949. (Illustration Credit 24.33)
Senator Frank Graham, running in the spring of 1950 for election to a full term, tried to get his message directly to the people—as in this campaign speech from the back of a pickup truck in Wake County, June 17, 1950.
5. New Signs of Reform
If a team of assessors had gone through the South taking stock of the resources of liberalism in the first two years or so after the war, they might have been surprised by what they found. In politics, in the community of war veterans, in the church, in the university, in the labor movement, in organizations such as the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the Southern Regional Council, in the various factions of socially active blacks and white liberals, in the press, in literature and the arts—in all these arenas of social and cultural ferment, there were modest signs of a renewal in the making, indications of another New South rising. Old South conservatism still prevailed in the mainstream—but these little currents, these creative freshets, were bubbling up all over the place, and in number and variety they were a genuine source of encouragement and optimism.
The venerable literary journals, such as the Virginia Quarterly Review, featured essays and criticism by many of the South’s most noted scholars and journalists, and foremost in their minds were the burning postwar questions of Southern social policy. Political scientist William G. Carleton set the tone in 1946 with a revisionist dissection of “the myth of the conservative South.” Soon thereafter, Rupert Vance, Guy B. Johnson, Tarleton Collier, and numerous others wrote provocatively on regionalism, race, class, and the South’s place in the nation. Even more pointed were soundings on the South in such national magazines as Survey Graphic and Common Ground. Survey Graphic devoted an entire issue to the segregation problem in 1947; New Orleans journalist Thomas Sancton served as special editor for the project.
The Southern Packet, a sprightly new journal calling itself “a monthly miscellany of Southern books and ideas,” emerged from Asheville, North Carolina, in the summer of 1945. Its publisher, George Myers Stephens, managed to keep it alive for almost a decade, though it was frail and skeletal in its last years. Clearly more liberal than the Virginia Quarterly and others of that older and somewhat stuffier class, the Packet gave voice to white and black activists who had a youthful sense of urgency about Southern problems.
By far the most ambitious regional magazine venture of those years was Philip G. Hammers effort to launch Pace, “a weekly review of Southern affairs,” modeled in unabashed imitation of Time. Hammer, an ex-New Dealer in his early thirties and a product of the University of North Carolina, saw the postwar period as a rare occasion for bridging the liberal-conservative chasm in the region. He hired Calvin Kytle, a young journalist and ex-G.I., to put together a dummy issue, dated June 19, 1946, and used it to attract subscribers and investors. But the volatile and erratic postwar economy after the removal of price supports kept Hammer from finding the necessary backers, and finally, after a year and a half of striving, he had to abandon the project.
Far more successful was a monthly magazine published in Chicago but having enormous appeal to black readers in the South: Ebony, made to look and read like a black version of Life, was started in 1946 by twenty-eight-year-old John H. Johnson. Having been born among hardscrabble migrants in rural Arkansas and “jerked up” in the urban jungle, Johnson nursed an abiding ambition to live out his own Horatio Alger fantasy. He would go on to become the nation’s foremost black publisher.
Early postwar fiction from Southern writers was neither voluminous nor memorable, except for one classic and acclaimed novel: All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1946 portrayal of a Louisiana politician strikingly reminiscent of Huey Long. Warren, one of the Vanderbilt Fugitive-Agrarians, had taught at Louisiana State University during the last sensational years of Long’s despotic rule. The native Kentuckian’s fame as a novelist and poet came after he left the South in 1942, but all his novels were set in the region. He alone among the Vanderbilt writers would attain fame and a degree of permanent stature as a national literary figure. But social consciousness was not a hallmark of white writers from the South in those years; in fact, you could make a case that the thirties were a more fertile decade for “social message” literature than the forties—for black writers no less than whites.
From a commercial standpoint, practically every novelist, regardless of race, was overshadowed by the phenomenal Frank Yerby, a black Georgian who earned a master’s degree at Fisk University and then, after several searching years of exploration, started writing Southern historical romance novels in the mid-forties. With his first best-seller, The Foxes of Harrow, he hit upon a formula for book-to-movie adventure stories that would serve him handsomely for years to come. Downplaying his own race, Yerby amassed a fortune by turning out more than two dozen Old South sagas for primarily white audiences. When he moved to Europe in 1952, it was not to bitter exile but to the comfortable life of an affluent working writer, as far removed from contemporary social issues and black self-consciousness as were his books.
One book of poetry stands out in fascinating contrast to the general tone of regional fiction right after the wa
r. Clods of Southern Earth, published in New York in 1946, was written in rural Georgia by Don West—another fugitive, but of the lowercase kind. The self-styled “mountaineer agitator” had been in hot water ever since he and Myles Horton opened the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee back in 1932. Temporarily living again in his native north Georgia hills, West wrote emotional verses celebrating tenants, miners, millhands, and others with whom he identified—the poor, white and black. He also singled out for praise a wide range of activists, from his radical friend Claude Williams to the paternalistic old Atlanta Baptist minister M. Ashby Jones—plus Ellis Arnall, Langston Hughes, and Lucy Randolph Mason. One of his poems, “They Take Their Stand,” was a slashing attack penned “for some professional Agrarians.” West dedicated the collection to his friend and mentor at Vanderbilt, Alva Taylor.
The nonfiction written by Southerners in those postwar years was another matter; unlike the novels, these books were mainly works of social commentary, with race as the major theme. The first and most talked-about was Black Boy, Richard Wright’s bare-knuckle autobiography, which had enough sharp edges in it to cut just about everyone, blacks included. A seven-page spread in Life magazine in June 1945 capped the sensational reception of the book, which had shot to the top of the best-seller list even as most Southern reviewers panned it or ignored it (some papers would not even accept advertisements for it). At thirty-seven, the ex-Mississippian was already famous for his 1940 novel, Native Son—and notorious for his earlier membership in the Communist Party and his marriages to two white women. As his fame soared, Wright was intently planning a move to Paris to escape the pervasive racism in America. He and his second wife, Ellen Poplar, and their daughter sailed for France in May 1946. For all intents and purposes, he would remain an exile for the rest of his life.
Buell Gallagher, a white educator who had been president of Talladega, a black college in Alabama, was another angry exile of sorts. He had left the region when he wrote Color and Conscience: The Irrepressible Conflict in 1946, spelling out many of the contradictions of racial inequality that he said were keeping the South in a state of permanent disadvantage.
Still more volumes of nonfiction came from native Southerners whose life experiences, submerged in scholarly detachment, gave their work an authoritative ring of truth. Young historian John Hope Franklin’s chronicle of the black experience in America, From Slavery to Freedom, was well received from the time it first appeared in 1947. Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin’s memoir, The Making of a Southerner, was another of these knowing and notable books with a certain inner light; so, in a more scholarly way, were Howard Odum’s The Way of the South and Charles S. Johnson’s Into the Main Stream.
Race preoccupied many nonfiction writers who sensed how pivotal the postwar years were. Gunnar Myrdal declared in a 1946 essay that “American Negroes can be satisfactorily integrated into [the country’s] democracy,” but he warned that the time for such an equality-based union “is rapidly running out.” If it should “follow its own deepest convictions,” he said, “America can show that justice, equality and cooperation are possible between white and colored people.”
It was in 1947 that three already-noted volumes from the left, center, and right (in that order) first appeared: Stetson Kennedy’s Southern Exposure, Ellis Arnall’s The Shore Dimly Seen, and Theodore Bilbo’s Take Your Choice. A conservative scholar, Charles W. Collins, brought out Whither Solid South? that same year. A studious attempt to “prove” the innate inferiority of blacks, it became a virtual bible for segregationists. Acknowledging that slavery was “a great crime against Africa,” Collins went on to say, in effect, that white supremacy is a reality that cannot and must not be compromised. “The South will never submit to manhood suffrage for the Negro,” he declared, “nor to the abolition of segregation.” His conclusion dovetailed with Bilbo’s; a last-resort alternative might be “a forty-ninth state in Africa.”
Race was far more of an open topic of discussion all over the United States in the postwar years than it had ever been before. Bobby-sox crooner Frank Sinatra received a special Academy Award in 1945 for his work in a movie short called “The House I Live In,” which accentuated positive efforts to promote racial tolerance. Still among the biggest stars of popular music were black artists Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday, and coming along fast was a young jazz pianist and singer, Nat “King” Cole of Montgomery, Alabama, by way of Chicago. Joe Louis, another Alabama expatriate, continued his decade-long reign as heavyweight boxing champion of the world; he was an exalted figure among descendants of Africa everywhere, but he also had a large and appreciative following among whites.
A purely Southern creation, country music, started its climb to national and international popularity after the war, thanks in large measure to the “honky-tonk” sounds of Hank Williams and other celebrated picker-singer-songwriters. Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne, a black street musician in Greenville, Alabama, is generally credited with the discovery and early nurturing of Williams’s considerable talents when the brooding, footloose teenager was drifting away from home and school. In a brief span of just fifteen years, Hank Williams went on to create a body of music that drew deeply from the white and black reservoirs of Southern poverty. His fame soared before and after his death at the age of twenty-nine from a variety of chemical excesses; he was called “a hillbilly Shakespeare,” and his songs had a universal quality that transcended their origins. More than twenty thousand people attended his funeral at the city auditorium in Montgomery in 1953.
For millions of Americans, the most noteworthy postwar development in race relations was the debut on April 11, 1947, of twenty-eight-year-old Jackie Robinson as a major-league baseball player with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Because of racial discrimination, he was years late getting his chance as a rookie—but once he was out there, nothing and nobody could hold him back. An outstanding hitter, fielder, and base-stealer, he would remain the Dodgers’ second baseman for thirteen years. Three months after Robinson made his debut in the National League, the Cleveland Indians brought up a twenty-two-year-old outfielder, Larry Doby, to be the first black player in the American League. Leroy “Satchel” Paige, a forty-four-year-old “rookie” with a quarter-century of experience as a pitcher on all-black teams, followed Doby to Cleveland in 1948. Twelve more years would pass before the last all-white major-league team, the Boston Red Sox, finally desegregated; soon after that, the first big-league franchises would be established in the South—in Houston in 1962 and Atlanta in 1966. With the barriers removed at last, scores of black players came on to raise the level of the big-league game—and a substantial majority of them, like Robinson (Cairo, Georgia), Doby (Camden, South Carolina), and Paige (Mobile, Alabama), were natives of the South.
Robinson’s real confrontation with the Jim Crow character of baseball had actually begun earlier, in March 1946, after he and his wife, Rachel, had made they way across the segregated South to spring training in Daytona Beach, Florida. The Dodgers’ owner, Branch Rickey, had recruited the versatile athlete, a Californian since his childhood days, and assigned him to the minor-league Montreal Royals. At training camp, Robinson won his spikes with outstanding play and a steely knack for fending off racists. Helped by another black player, John Wright of New Orleans, who withstood the slings and arrows of bigotry alongside him, and by Montreal manager Clay Hopper, a white Mississippian, Robinson blazed a trail that brought the Dodgers organization—and the city of Daytona Beach—into the modern era well ahead of their competitors. Play-by-play announcer Red Barber, another Southerner, also helped, as did the baseball commissioner, former (and future) Kentucky politician “Happy” Chandler, who ignored the negative reaction of almost all the other major-league club owners and approved Rickey’s plan to transfer Robinson’s contract from Montreal to Brooklyn in early 1947.
Baseball mirrored a larger evolution in race relations that gained momentum after the war. The tiny hairline cracks that had bee
n spreading across the surface of segregation and white supremacy for the past dozen years were becoming larger and more noticeable. Politicians still generated the laws and customs that kept the nonwhite minority in an inferior—often invisible—status, and the caretakers of the churches and schools and civic institutions still tended to reinforce those social patterns. But increasingly, there were other sources of information and guidance besides the decrees of traditional authority figures: books, magazines and newspapers, popular music, movies and the theater, spectator events, radio, and now this mind-boggling thing called television. In myriad ways, often subtle and almost imperceptible, they whispered a message that contradicted the official wisdom: Segregation can’t be sustained in a democratic society.
In baseball—an institution of much greater importance to many Americans than politics—the message of April 11, 1947, was not a whisper but a shout. More than the complexion of the players began to change when Jackie Robinson became a Dodger. Fans of every race, sex, age, and home address, people who loved the game and made heroes of its luminaries, had a new star to follow—a dark, handsome, dashing combatant who was in every way as good as the best. The game, the big-league cities—and the South—would never be the same again.
The pillar institutions, for all their conservatism, did not blindly follow the politicians, nor were they without the capacity or the will to chart their own future direction. Religious and educational institutions in particular showed occasional flashes of independence, and some individual leaders among them raised spirited dissenting voices questioning the status quo.
In Chapel Hill, the stately Presbyterian church across the street from the University of North Carolina campus, which counted UNC President Frank Porter Graham as one of its officers, formally declared in 1945 that “We do not close our doors or discriminate against … any sincere worshipper who may present himself”—and thereafter, blacks occasionally attended and were welcomed. The liberal-minded pastor, the Reverend Charles M. Jones, was sometimes in conflict with the local community and with denominational higher authority during the decade or so of his tenure at the Chapel Hill church, but his congregation, Graham included, was solidly behind him.