Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  At the higher levels of education there was considerably more ferment, but most of it was generated by such outside stimuli as the GI Bill of Rights and other manifestations of federal aid. Segregation was virtually complete in both public and private colleges and universities, although some of the states bordering the South—West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, Missouri—had moved on their own or under court orders to admit a few blacks to graduate and professional schools. In the states farther south, black veterans seeking admission were turned away; some, like Heman M. Sweatt of Houston, excluded from the law school at the University of Texas, enlisted the aid of the NAACP to sue the university and the state. Texas responded by opening a makeshift law school for blacks in Austin and a new institution, Texas State University for Negroes, in Houston, hoping to hold back the march of reform. Sweatt’s petition was rejected by a federal district court, but his case was appealed, and more would be heard from it. Ten campus organizations at the University of Texas, meanwhile, took up his cause and that of other black applicants, announcing their support for a race-free admissions policy and offering to raise funds for Heman Sweatt’s appeal.

  The university, like the church, was not disposed to take advanced positions on social questions, but it often did provide a sanctuary of sorts for individuals of a more activist bent. A large majority of the black Southerners who spearheaded reform movements were either academicians or ministers—and some, like Benjamin E. Mays, were both. As for whites, people like Frank Porter Graham and Howard Odum of the University of North Carolina were still actively involved in a variety of academic and social projects aimed at regional betterment. On the explosive issue of race, however, not much had changed from previous years: Separate was still separate, and equal was still a myth, and the impetus for change, such as it was, came from outside—from the NAACP, from veterans, from lawsuits—and not from within.

  Segregation was simply one more costly burden for the overextended Southern states and their public and private colleges. Burgeoning postwar enrollments, outmoded facilities, underpaid faculties, poorly qualified new students and poorly financed older ones—these would have been handicaps enough. Dual facilities and programs to serve the separate-but-equal charade were the last intolerable straw. Since the late 1930s—long before they started talking about ways to maintain postwar segregation—the states and their academic leaders had been casting about for ways to hold down costs by encouraging interstate cooperation. When black veterans started applying to schools of medicine and law in the white universities, a new urgency crept into the search for regional solutions.

  As early as 1944, Governor Colgate W. Darden of Virginia had proposed that black students seeking specialized instruction in programs not available to them be given scholarships to schools in other states. In a frequently cited example, it was suggested that Meharry Medical College in Nashville, the only school in the South training black physicians, would expand to accommodate students from other states in the region, with those states providing the necessary funds through scholarships. One consequence, of course, would be that segregation of white medical schools could be maintained. At four consecutive annual conferences of the Southern governors, beginning in 1944, plans for an interstate compact on educational cooperation were discussed and refined, and Governor Millard Caldwell of Florida emerged as the movement’s leader. There was even talk of vesting ownership of some institutions in a regional body—this being one proposed alternative to the demise of Meharry, which entered the 1947-48 academic year skirting unsteadily on the edge of financial collapse.

  In the fall of 1947, the governors of sixteen Southern and border states unanimously approved the concept of an interstate educational compact. The following spring they incorporated the new entity, committed their states to annual budget appropriations, formally requested additional funding from foundations, established a headquarters in Atlanta, and appointed John E. Ivey, Jr., a protégé of Howard Odum’s, as its director. Over the next three or four years, the compact would become permanently established as the Southern Regional Education Board. Both those who had eyed it hopefully as an instrument for perpetuating segregation and those who had opposed it in fear of that outcome would have reason to be surprised by what the interstate agency eventually was able to accomplish.

  American higher education had one more opportunity to provide social leadership in 1947. The previous year, Harry Truman had appointed the President’s Commission on Higher Education, a twenty-seven-member panel of scholars, administrators, and others, and charged them with making a comprehensive study of the nation’s colleges and universities. In their voluminous report, Higher Education for American Democracy, issued in December 1947, the commission offered a mountain of statistics to document the strengths and weaknesses of higher learning, and urged greater efforts by the federal and state governments and the private sector to finance a wide range of improvements.

  The report condemned both the doctrine and the underlying principle of separate-but-equal education, not only showing the failure of the policy but declaring that “it contravenes the equalitarian spirit of the American heritage.” The “tragic paradox” of discrimination, said the commission, was its costliness to those least able to afford a dual system: all blacks, Southern whites, Southern colleges and universities, and the states of the South. “There will be no fundamental correction of the total condition,” the report concluded, “until segregation legislation is repealed.”

  Two of the Southerners on the commission—O. C. Carmichael, the recently retired chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and F. D. Patterson, president of Tuskegee Institute—stood with the majority in support of that conclusion, but three others issued a sharply worded dissent. Lewis W. Jones, president of the University of Arkansas; Goodrich C. White, president of Emory University; and Douglas Southall Freeman, editor of the Richmond News Leader, signed the disclaimer (as did Arthur H. Compton, president of Washington University in St. Louis), and their action quickly attracted supporting statements from a host of other Southern and border-state educators, including the presidents of Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, Tulane, and Johns Hopkins universities, and B. Harvie Branscomb, Carmichael’s replacement as chancellor of Vanderbilt.

  While acknowledging that “gross inequality of opportunity” was a fact of life for black citizens that should be corrected “as rapidly as possible,” the dissenters went on to assert their belief “that efforts toward these ends must, in the South, be made within the established patterns of social relationships, which require separate educational institutions for whites and Negroes.” The commission may have spoken with “high purpose and theoretical idealism,” they said, but it had taken “a doctrinaire position which ignores the facts of history and the realities of the present.” Such pronouncements, they asserted, would only jeopardize the existing social arrangement, impede progress, “and threaten tragedy to the people of the South, both white and Negro.”

  Once again, Southern leaders could not muster the vision and courage to direct their region onto a new path. Day by day, the options born of postwar euphoria were diminishing, and those that remained would be further eroded in the stormy tumult of 1948. For all its hopes and its promise, the South was still spooked by goblins of its own creation.

  6. Homegrown Progressives

  Of all the South’s homegrown efforts to tackle regional social problems arising from the depression and the war, none were more extensive and substantial than those of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the Southern Regional Council. When they were created—the former in 1938, the latter in 1944—they constituted the primary internal responses to Old South conservatism and white supremacy. Throughout the forties, they provided the truest measure of liberal-progressive thinking in the region.

  They were rivals in some respects, the more intensely so because of their similarities. Back and forth across the fence, they whispered criticisms of each other: too much reckless radicalism, too much conservative
caution, too much activism, too much empty talk. Many people, including a few key individuals who served in both organizations, wanted them to work together toward mutually shared goals; some hoped they would merge into a single, broad-based movement, an activist army for social reform. They never did unite, and neither grew to the size of a battalion, let alone an army, but both had a significant impact on the postwar South. If you want to know what was being said and done by white and black Southerners before 1954 to place the explosive issue of race relations on the public agenda, you have to look closely at the Southern Regional Council and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.

  The Council (as SRC was known by its regulars) emerged from the locust shell of its twenty-five-year-old predecessor, the Atlanta-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation. The Conference (as SCHW and its subsidiary group, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, were both referred to) was founded in Birmingham and later based in Nashville and New Orleans. The two organizations entered the postwar era in the summer of 1945 full of hope that the South was on the cusp of a great advance. By the end of 1947, that breakthrough was still within their long-range vision but not within their grasp, and the continuing struggles of both groups were a telling measure of the chronic division and instability within the South itself.

  Academicians predominated on the SRC staff and board. Both Guy B. Johnson, the executive director, and his part-time associate, Ira De A. Reid, were sociologists, Johnson at the University of North Carolina and Reid at Atlanta University. (Reid was also the only black staff member.) Howard W. Odum of UNC was the council’s president, and Charles S. Johnson, the soon-to-be president of Fisk University, was chairman of the executive committee—and both of them were sociologists too. George S. Mitchell, an economist, would soon join them, and there would be others from academia.

  The SRC described itself as a leadership body, not a mass-membership organization; it had a large board of directors (seventy-five to a hundred members), and it hoped to develop branch councils in each Southern state, but its regional roster of rank-and-file recruits was never large. The staff and board were broadly representative of the region in terms of race and geography, but they were solidly, almost exclusively, middle class, and only about a dozen women (all but two or three of them white) were members of the charter board and staff. Nothing about the organization could fairly be called radical. If any NAACP leaders, Communists, Socialists, or right-wingers were present—or even any elected or appointed public officials—they kept a very low profile.

  Most of the prominent Southern black leaders of the postwar era were central figures in the SRC, including all those who had started the dialogue in Durham and had held up their end of the discussion in subsequent meetings—Charles Johnson, Gordon Hancock, Benjamin Mays, P. B. Young, Rufus Clement, and others. Many of the best-known white liberals and progressives in the region also gave their names if not their energy to the council (but, for reasons both various and complex, there were some notable exceptions, including Ralph McGill, Frank Porter Graham, Lillian Smith, and Jonathan Daniels). It had taken nearly two years of delicate maneuvering by dozens of active Southern men and women of both races to bring the council to life in 1944. But even though the organization was finally on its feet, it was still a long way from being unified. Not only did those who kept their distance accentuate the disunity; internal factions also clashed over purposes and priorities. Usually the underlying cause was that same old bone of contention that Southerners had been gnawing on for ages: segregation.

  The most conservative faction of SRC members came together around the notion that any overt attempt to eradicate segregation would be too antagonistic to the ruling elite in the South, and thus counterproductive. Their strategy was to acknowledge segregation as the existing law, and to pledge SRC to work within it. This group was predominantly white, but included a few blacks as well. Some were pragmatists who reasoned that no progress was possible without support from the white establishment; others believed that the separate-but-equal philosophy could be made to work, and would be best for both races in the long run.

  The liberal faction—a balanced biracial mix—was convinced that the South was shackled by the ball and chain of segregation, and that both the black minority and the white majority would be permanently crippled if they didn’t cut themselves free. Here, too, pragmatism and ideology were at work, with some advocating desegregation as a more efficient and fair use of human resources, and others saying it was a constitutional or religious or moral imperative. In general, the antisegregationists wanted the SRC to support the budding sentiment for an integrated society, and thus to be positioned on the breaking wave of history.

  In between were the moderates—perhaps the largest faction of all. They wanted to avoid at all costs an up-or-down vote on segregation. Personal views aside, they were convinced that neither the separate-but-equal group nor the integrationists could win the larger society over to its philosophy. Fearful of a resurgent backlash that would cast the South down into its nightmarish past, they preferred to see the council concentrate on programs and research that would deal with Jim Crow laws only obliquely, if at all. In general they were philosophically opposed to segregation, but they expected it to prevail in the South for decades, even generations.

  With Howard Odum presiding and Guy Johnson as executive director, SRC seldom wandered far off that middle road. So many problems cried out for attention; there was more than enough to be done, they said, without getting hung up in ideological debate. The council spread its thin resources as far as it could, trying to bring help and hope to Southerners in need without unduly alarming the guardians of vested power. A modest annual budget of less than $50,000 was raised, with the Rosenwald Fund and other foundations providing most of it. In no sense was SRC an extreme group; everything about it bespoke caution, diplomacy, moderation.

  The staff had its hands full. Ira Reid was assigned to direct a two-year study of racial discrimination in the South (soon narrowed to Atlanta, and then further to public transit in the city). George Mitchell, former director of a political action committee in the labor movement (and, like Reid, an ex-New Dealer), was hired to set up a program for returning veterans. Dorothy Tilly took over Jessie Daniel Ames’s old assignment as head of what had once been called “women’s work”; she soon developed it into an outreach program that opened SRC branches in several states and enlisted church groups in various social-concern programs. A monthly magazine, New South, was launched in 1946 to replace Southern Frontier, the old CIC journal. A year later the council started a radio series called “Southern Roundtable,” modeled after a popular discussion and debate program from Chicago. The moderator was a new SRC staffer, Harold C. Fleming, a native Georgian and an army veteran just out of Harvard.

  Women were influential members of the council, out of all proportion to their small number. Among them were three whites and two blacks who filled important offices or argued persuasively from within the ranks for a progressive agenda. Josephine M. Wilkins, a longtime leader of the Georgia League of Women Voters and founder of a social-action group called the Georgia Citizens Fact-Finding Movement, became a council vice president. Jane Havens of Florida and Alice Spearman of South Carolina shared Wilkins’s progressive vision. The two leading minority women were Grace T. Hamilton, executive director of the Atlanta chapter of the National Urban League, and Charlotte Hawkins Brown, a veteran North Carolina educator whose involvement in Southern social reform reached back to the 1920s.

  Teetering on the highwire between liberal activism and conservative caution, the Southern Regional Council inched along. Virtually every proposed program of staff action, every resolution praising or condemning the acts of others, every utterance of organizational policy or philosophy, was subjected to the most intense scrutiny. Drafted statements in support of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission and federal anti-lynching legislation, or in opposition to the poll tax and the white primary, were often watered down
by fears of “what this will cost us”—meaning white friends in high places, money from foundations and other donors, perhaps even the council’s tax exemption as a nonprofit organization. Ira Reid’s study of discrimination suffered the same cautionary fate; so did George Mitchell’s investigative report on the 1946 racial disturbance in Columbia, Tennessee. Council resolutions assailing mob violence were passed in response to the rash of lynchings that summer, but they only highlighted the obvious impotence of law-abiding citizens besieged by an epidemic of lawlessness.

  The council was constantly worried about lack of support, both financial and popular. All the way through 1947, its revenues were insufficient to support a budget of $5,000 a month for all expenditures, including salaries. Dues-paying members to that point numbered fewer than two thousand. Guy Johnson resigned that summer and returned to Chapel Hill; George Mitchell took his place as executive director and set a goal of five thousand members, with a commensurate increase in the budget. Ira Reid was also gone by then, having taken a teaching post in New York (Harold Trigg, a black educator from North Carolina, became the new associate director). In the winter of 1946, Howard Odum retired as SRC president, and Paul D. Williams of Richmond replaced him. Only sixty-five people were in the audience when Williams spoke at the council’s annual membership meeting in November 1947.