by John Egerton
In April 1947, Jones performed an act of charity that was somewhat shocking even to the university community when he hosted a biracial group of travelers testing the desegregation of interstate buses in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling on the subject. After Bayard Rustin and three others were roughed up and arrested at the Chapel Hill bus station and then released on bail, Jones took them back home with him, trailed by menacing carloads of angry white men. The four “freedom riders” were soon escorted out of town by a supportive convoy of Carolinians. They returned more than a year later to be tried, convicted, and sentenced to thirty days’ labor on a road gang.
Of all the white denominations in the South, the Methodist Church may have been the most interested in improving race relations. Methodists in the region—women more conspicuously than men—had shown an interest in social issues for decades. Individuals seemed to stand out more admirably than groups or congregations. One whose contributions were felt in several areas was Dorothy R. Tilly. She was a genteel lady who took her identity from her husband (she always signed as “Mrs. M. E. Tilly”) but got her conscience and her courage from deep within. In her church, in various ecumenical organizations, in the Southern Regional Council, and in President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights, the diminutive Mrs. Tilly was a towering figure.
Another Methodist, former minister Will W. Alexander, neared the end of his long career with the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, the Farm Security Administration, and the Rosenwald Fund with decided views on the race issue. As chairman of a commission on race relations for the Federal Council of Churches in 1946, Alexander guided the drafting of a report that formally aligned the ecumenical association—and, by implication, its member denominations—with the principle of racial equality. Renouncing segregation as “unnecessary and undesirable and a violation of the gospel of love and human brotherhood,” the commission called on the federal council to “work for a non-segregated church and a non-segregated society.”
Postwar ferment in the state convention of the all-white Southern Baptist denomination in Georgia, and in some other Southern states as well, pointed to the possibility of a breach in the wall of segregation there. White and black Baptists, meeting separately but simultaneously in Savannah in 1946, first agreed to hold a precedent-breaking joint worship service. Then, at the urging of Joseph A. Rabun, a young minister from a small town in south Georgia, the white Baptists “put some teeth” in a social service committee report, approving a declaration that “no man shall be discriminated against because of race, creed or color.” The delegates stood up and denounced the quadruple lynching in Walton County four months earlier, and the recent spread of hate groups in the state. As noteworthy as the resolutions themselves was the fact that Rabun, a thirty-eight-year-old ex-marine chaplain in the Pacific, was pastor of the First Baptist Church of McRae, where Eugene Talmadge, Georgia’s white supremacist governor-elect, kept his letter of baptism.
Something invisible but palpable was tugging on the coattails of the Southern Baptists. In North Carolina the following week, white Baptists in convention first passed a resolution authored by the Reverend Das Kelley Barnett of Chapel Hill condemning racial segregation in the church—and then rescinded it by a narrow margin after Barnett and other liberal delegates had left for home. Similar rumblings were felt in Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, and other states.
Joseph Rabun went back to face the wrath of his McRae congregation with his message of Christian brotherhood undiluted. Talmadge was too sick to attend church by then—he died a month later—and the controversy might have been laid to rest too, if Rabun had said no more. But in February 1947, with Herman Talmadge having emerged as his father’s stand-in for governor, Rabun showed up at legislative hearings on the segregationist white-primary bill and testified in support of “my Negro neighbors … politically beaten, robbed, and left for dead” by the proposed legislation. “My stand might place my position in the community where I live in jeopardy,” he declared, “but cost me what it will, I cannot consent to silence against a threat to the welfare of my state. The real issue is not a white primary, it is democracy.” (Another Georgia Baptist, former Governor Ellis Arnall, recalling that testimony years later, would describe Rabun as “a very courageous and sincere man.”)
Members of Rabun’s McRae congregation hurriedly telegraphed the younger Talmadge to assure him that their minister didn’t speak for them. Rabun offered to resign, but his deeply divided flock was, for its own unreported reasons, not ready to endorse a divorce. Finally, after six months of agonizing, they decided by a vote of sixty-seven to thirty-five to accept his resignation. Soon, labor organizations and other liberal groups in the state were touting Rabun as an attractive Democratic contender in the 1948 Georgia governor’s race. There was already one announced candidate: Herman E. Talmadge.
Nobody criticized Rabun for blurring the lines of separation between church and state; it was his lowering of the barriers between black and white that got his fellow Baptists upset. At a time when denominations North and South were issuing pious pronouncements on brotherhood and equality, local congregations were marching to a different and more conservative drummer. All but a tiny fraction of Protestant congregations, in or out of the South, were “composed exclusively” of a single racial group, wrote Liston Pope in Survey Graphic magazine in 1947. There was, he said, “very little difference between southern and non-southern white churches” in their racial makeup.
Catholics did a little better, even in the South. The church’s presence in the region was slight, and its percentage of black parishioners was low, but the hierarchy had acknowledged the need “to improve social conditions” by creating the Catholic Committee of the South in 1940. Gerald P. O’Hara, the Bishop of Savannah, and Paul D. Williams, a lay leader in Richmond, put their weight behind the effort. Milwaukee Archbishop Samuel Stritch, a native of Nashville and an activist on social issues in the church, was their instigator.
With Williams as its first executive secretary, the Catholic Committee of the South became a liberal voice for social justice within the church, and a collaborative partner with Protestants and Jews of like mind—often to the dismay and irritation of conservative bishops in the region. In fact, it was the bishops’ tight control of funds that kept the committee from having a significant regional impact, though it continued—in name, at least—for more than fifteen years. Paul Williams, whose early awakening to Southern social problems had come from reading Howard Odum, was elected to succeed Odum as president of the Southern Regional Council in 1946, and he would hold that post for six years.
Black churches in the South, the vast majority of which were Baptist or Methodist congregations, had emerged from the nineteenth century not as segregated institutions of their own invention but as products of two external and inconsistent developments: emancipation from slavery and exclusion from the white churches. Over the years, the black churches came to be the strongest institutions in African-American life; unlike political parties, libraries, hospitals, and even schools, churches appeared to find broader fields of service in a segregated society than they might expect in a more equitable and integrated one. Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, a longtime student of black culture, predicted in 1947 that “vested interests” among denominational leaders in the black church would have the ironic effect of making those institutions, like their white counterparts, resistant to racial and social reform. Desegregation of churches, he predicted, probably “will follow rather than precede the breakdown of the secular color line.”
More often than not, the institutional church, white and black, did prove to be an obstruction to the prophetic voices that arose within it, rather than a stage for them. Many a Southern activist was led by his or her religious faith and teachings into a deepening personal commitment to social reform, only to find that the church was more interested in preserving its traditions and privileges than in reforming itself or the larger society. The church, like the university, may have b
een a wellspring for the intellectual and philosophical stimulation out of which some reform movements came—but when the institutions themselves shrank from joining the fray, it was often their sons and daughters, acting in new alliances or as individuals, who moved the dialogue and the action to a higher plane.
Thus it was not the Methodist Church but the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching that dared to challenge a social evil; not the Presbyterians but the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen; not the Baptists or the Episcopalians or the Congregationalists but the Young Men’s (or Women’s) Christian Association; not the black church but its leaders speaking through the NAACP. And finally, in 1955, it would not be the black Methodist and Baptist denominations but the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that would originate the plan of nonviolent resistance to racial oppression.
The YMCA and YWCA were among the first church-related agencies to address social concerns. Many of the Southerners who yearned to do something about race relations in the twentieth century—and almost all of the ones who had strong religious ties—could trace their awakening in some degree to the exposure they got at the Y. Student associations for men and women, white and black, were opened across the South by W. D. Weatherford and others in the first quarter of the century; in the second quarter, these young people became the leaders who moved the associations forward. Among other things, they did away with the racial barriers that the culture imposed and that paternalistic leaders like Weatherford enforced.
The women were the first to hold local biracial meetings, beginning in the 1930s, and those led to the first interracial regional conference for YM and YW delegates at the YMCA conference center for black students at Kings Mountain, North Carolina, in 1938. But the Blue Ridge Assembly across the state continued to resist such equity, even after Weatherford, its founding father, resigned from his commanding position at the center in 1944. Many of those who had worked there under his reign felt it was past time for a changing of the guard. “Dr. Weatherford was a sweet man, good and well intentioned, beloved and respected,” said one of them, “but he was an obstacle to change, not an inspiration for it.” His influence on racial policy would linger for eight more years; not until 1952 would Blue Ridge host its first racially integrated regional conference of student YMCA and YWCA leaders.
The policy of exclusion almost spawned a tragedy in 1946. Leaders of the biracial YWCA, having been turned away from Blue Ridge, leased a private campground near Hendersonville, North Carolina, that summer and convened a series of meetings there, some of them involving male students, white and black. Word of the gatherings found its way into the nearby town; rumor spread quickly that the Ku Klux Klan would raid the camp and punish the participants. Rosalie Oakes, a member of the regional YWCA staff in Atlanta, and Jean Fairfax, dean of women at Tuskegee, remembered years later the fear that swept through the camp. “We asked every clergyman in town, white and black, to help us,” Oakes recalled, “but none of them would.” State and local police were likewise uncooperative. (A possible expression of moral support might have come from Carl Sandburg, had the women known that his new mountain home was only minutes from them.)
“We sat up all night, singing and praying, waiting for the assault,” said Fairfax. “It was a terrifying experience.” The night passed uneventfully, and the conference ended the next day. Later that evening, a caravan of cars brought more than a hundred Klansmen with guns and torches to the empty campground. Apparently the hooded men had targeted the wrong date for their invasion.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was also heavily influenced by religious institutions—but driven by ideological, political, and social interests that the denominations considered too radical or too advanced.
In spite of the horrendous racial murders of 1946, the NAACP had reasons to be optimistic. By the end of the year, the civil rights organization had more than a thousand branches throughout the nation and a total membership of nearly half a million people. Walter White still served as its executive secretary, heading a strong staff that included his longtime assistant, Missouri-born Roy Wilkins; field secretary Ella Jo Baker, who came from the Virginia–North Carolina region; and youth secretary Ruby Hurley, a native of the District of Columbia. In the association’s Legal Defense Fund, Thurgood Marshall was orchestrating a two-phase strategy that had begun as a challenge to the inequality of separate-but-equal segregation—and later would question the constitutionality of segregation itself. The venerable and irascible but still-brilliant W. E. B. Du Bois, involuntarily retired from the Atlanta University faculty, was back in the New York office, having agreed in 1944 to end his old feud with Walter White and take a position as director of a program of special research. The truce between the two strong-willed men would be predictably short-lived.
The Southern chapters of the NAACP were in most instances the only open and organized resistance to Jim Crow segregation and discrimination existing in their communities. A few cities, such as Atlanta, had strong National Urban League chapters, but the NAACP was in every major city, and even in many smaller ones, providing direct cooperation and support to the handful of black attorneys in the region and backing the local and state chapter secretaries in their ongoing battles with white authority.
From the perspective of some Northern liberal critics, the national organization was too hierarchical, too elitist, and too much in the grip of the smooth and resourceful White, who enjoyed his ties to establishment power and didn’t mind flaunting them. But whatever else he was, White was a forceful and courageous foe of segregation, and he never backed away from his mission to eradicate it. What’s more, the association’s fieldwork in the South grew steadily more effective under Ella Baker and Ruby Hurley, and the legal work directed by Marshall was simply indispensable, and local leaders were often uncommonly inspired and productive. To their Southern critics on the right, the NAACP was not a high-society club of punchbowl moderates at all, but a disruptive aggregation of black radicals. No matter which side the detractors fired from, though, they all had to acknowledge that throughout most of the South, the “N-Double-A” was the only antisegregationist game in town—and a pretty tough game at that.
In Richmond, for example, attorneys Oliver W. Hill and Spottswood W. Robinson III had several lawsuits in progress in the fields of voting rights, education, and public transit when the war ended. It was their groundwork that enabled Thurgood Marshall to win a major Supreme Court victory in 1946, arguing successfully against state-imposed segregation in interstate travel. Hill would be elected to a city council post in Richmond two years later—becoming the first black ever to serve on that body—and he and Robinson, NAACP stalwarts in Virginia, would render timely and effective service again when the school desegregation issue came to court.
And in Columbia, black activists in the NAACP and several other groups made South Carolina stand out among the Southern states for the high level of its grassroots involvement in public affairs. Black Republicans had organized the Lincoln Emancipation Clubs to push voter participation; black Democrats, told that they couldn’t belong to the state party, had formed their own Progressive Democratic Party; a statewide organization of black teachers won court cases on the issue of equal pay for equal work—and in all of these, the NAACP was the prime mover and shaker. James M. Hinton, the state president, and Modjeska M. Simkins, the state secretary, together with the other black leaders of South Carolina, were in the thick of every issue that enlivened the social agenda in that state in the mid-forties, from local hassles over the hiring of black policemen to federal cases that ended up in Judge Waties Waring’s courtroom in Charleston.
Osceola McKaine was easily the most intriguing figure of them all, with his rare combination of experiences as a World War I lieutenant, a cabaret owner in Belgium, a cofounder of the Progressive Democratic Party, and the party’s 1944 candidate for one of South Carolina’s seats in the U.S. Senate. After that campaign, he tried unsuccessfull
y to unite the state’s black Democrats and Republicans, and served on a national advisory board for the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and demonstrated his commitment to an interracial reform movement in the South by working (with white South Carolinian Witherspoon Dodge) as an organizer for the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. But in mid-1946, McKaine was diverted by urgent calls from Ghent, Belgium, where his supper club, Mac’s Place, was in need of his attention. He left the South, never again to see his Carolina homeland; in 1955 he died in Brussels at the age of sixty-three, and his body was returned to Sumter for burial.
People like McKaine and his South Carolina companions were the life-blood of the NAACP. They gave it legitimacy as a grassroots organization, and proved its effectiveness as a creative, responsive, aggressive advocate of democracy for all Americans. There were other black organizations, and groups of well-intentioned whites, and even a few biracial coalitions that tried to nurture a more progressive and equitable climate in the region, but none had the single-minded commitment of the NAACP. Without the association at work in the South, there would have been no broad-based pressure to end Jim Crow segregation, and no effective push for racial justice, during the first half of the twentieth century.
The public schools of the South had more money to spend in the mid-1940s than a decade earlier, but they still lagged far behind the rest of the nation. Teachers in New York averaged three times more in salary than teachers in Mississippi—and white teachers in Mississippi drew about twice as much as blacks. The gap in expenditures per pupil was proportionally as wide, North to South and white to black. Instead of being a force for progressive growth and improvement in the region, the schools were little more than pawns in the perpetual struggle for political and economic power that preoccupied local and state governments; for years to come, they would contribute little to the rescue of the South from its isolation and stagnation.