by John Egerton
In his remarks that day, Williams cited the council’s thoroughly biracial makeup as a model of cooperation and equity for others in the region to emulate, but not everyone was comfortable with such a self-conscious focus on race—or on SRC’s presumed virtues. Virginius Dabney, an influential figure of long standing, was one council member who believed that calling attention to integration was an enormous tactical mistake.
“I can think of nothing more disastrous to the SRC’s future than its identification in the public mind with an effort to abolish the segregation system,” Dabney told Guy Johnson and others. “If SRC spends not only a good bit of its funds but a large portion of its energies in fighting segregation, we will lose both the battle and the war.” Responding to increasing national criticism of the South as violence spread across the region in 1946, Dabney had written a defensive piece for the Saturday Review of Literature titled “Is the South That Bad?” Said Ira Reid in emphatic response: “Yes!”
A single question and a one-word answer thus captured the essence of SRC’s—and the South’s—perpetual dilemma. Capable, earnest, well-intentioned people, different from one another in many ways but having in common a lifelong bond to the South, were trying to work together to build a framework for the region’s future. But some wanted to follow the Old South model, others thought it had to be replaced, and those in between were stymied, not knowing which planks to use and which to discard.
Howard W. Odum and Charles S. Johnson, ultimate symbols of the dilemma, were foremost among those who gravitated to the center. They had been primary leaders of the Southern Regional Council experiment from the very beginning. Johnson had drafted in 1942 the vital document at Durham that led to the founding of the SRC, and Odum had spoken up at the right moment in Richmond in 1943 and saved the embryo council from self-destruction. The two men were philosophical and tactical moderates who tried to persuade those on either side to join them in the middle and work cooperatively for the good of all. On most issues, Odum and Johnson could find common ground. But for all their wisdom and experience—as sociologists, as policy-makers, as sensitive human beings—they couldn’t see eye to eye on what to do about the burden of segregation.
Odum’s retirement from SRC leadership effectively signaled the end of his durable dream: to create a powerful regional institution of research and development that would define the South of the future. Grand designs had always danced in his head, but he lacked the heart for conflict—without which no grand design could be realized. For all his temporizing and his abundant caution, Odum clearly understood the biracial nature of Southern culture. He knew it was race above all else that had set the South apart from other regions for centuries. He knew, furthermore, that the South would ultimately have to attain integration and equality within itself if it was ever to achieve those standards within the nation. He understood those verities intellectually; it was their practical realization that stymied him.
Odum was advancing into the twilight years of his long and productive career when he quietly gathered up his papers and left SRC in 1946. It was a parting more significant than it appeared: The man with the regional plan was stepping down, his dream unfulfilled. He wrote The Way of the South that year, and published it the next. In it he summarized and restated his concept of regionalism more succinctly than ever before. He saw the United States divided into six regions, of which the Southeast was one. These, he said, should be balanced and complementary—equal but not identical, different but not inferior or superior, integrated into a national whole but not homogenized. Through planning and cooperation, “the regional equality and balance of America” could be achieved. He viewed the ongoing dispersal of the South’s large black minority throughout the country as a promising development, and favored incentives to support this long-term process of “voluntary migration.”
The sociologist acknowledged that regional equality presupposed citizen equality irrespective of race—but this, too, would have to be achieved voluntarily, and over an indefinite period of time. He rejected out of hand any “coercive enforcement by the nation of a non-segregation economy advocated by many agitators.” Was he, in his heart of hearts, still unable at that time to see thoroughgoing equality as a positive good? The record is fuzzy on that crucial point. His readers, though, were left to draw a virtually inescapable conclusion: In Odum’s eyes, the segregated and inequitable and divisive “Southern way of life” was not yet a subject open for debate and negotiation; for the foreseeable future, it would remain the prevailing reality.
In his private reverie, Charles Johnson must have read Odum’s words with deepening discouragement. The two men had known each other for more than twenty-five years; they were professional associates, collaborators, personal friends. But Johnson had written in the Durham Manifesto that he and his fellow black petitioners were “fundamentally opposed to the principle and practice of compulsory segregation in American society.” Quietly but firmly, he had always made clear his conviction that “separate but equal” was a flawed and failed principle of law and social custom. He obviously wanted the United States and its constituent assemblies to abolish segregation and discrimination based on race. By those lights, he came dangerously close to belonging to the band of rivals dismissed by Odum as “agitators.”
Johnson had spent his entire career trying to build bridges—from the past to the future, from a closed South to an open nation, from a prevailing attitude of white supremacy to a new belief in multiracial democracy. As a young man, he came to see that race relations—the interplay between the white majority and the colored minorities—would be America’s glory or its doom, and he devoted himself wholeheartedly to a pursuit of the glory. For his pains, he had been called just about everything in the book: a reformer, an accommodationist, a liberal, a conservative, an integrationist, an Uncle Tom, a diplomatic gentleman—and now, an agitator. If he and Howard Odum, the quintessential centrists, couldn’t stand together on the rock of race, the prospects for the Southern Regional Council were bleak.
Simultaneously with Odum’s The Way of the South in 1947 came Johnson’s Into the Main Stream, published by the University of North Carolina Press. It was a book of “promising signs in the South’s development toward better human relations,” and a search for the one main stream by which all Americans could be transported to full citizenship. No doubt thinking of his white friends, Johnson wrote with empathy and insight:
The fear of disturbing the controls of the racial system frequently places restraints upon progressive action in racial matters of any sort. Always there are in every locality a few well-meaning humanitarians willing to do something, but action carries a responsibility that only the stoutest hearts can sustain for long. … That is undoubtedly why it so often happens that the intellectual liberals who know what should be done are torn between their private convictions and their public caution, and the most forthright declarations of the need for change are made by persons who are estimated by the community to have so little weight as to be innocuous.
As a board member of both the Southern Regional Council and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, Charles S. Johnson no doubt saw clearly how much alike the two organizations were, and yet how different. The leaders of SRC were—to use Johnson’s descriptive phrase—“intellectual liberals … torn between their private convictions and their public caution.” Those who directed the SCHW were more action-oriented and more candidly expressive of an equalitarian point of view. It was precisely because of those “forthright declarations” that they were widely regarded as radicals and extremists with little influence on the majority of Southerners.
It would be hard to make a solid case, though, that they were really radicals. Middle-class white Southern males accounted for almost all of the officers and staff of the SCHW, as they did at the SRC, and the conference’s board of directors was roughly three-fourths white and eighty-five percent male—again, much the same as SRC’s. Even by Southern standards, they weren’t all that
far out, either; it would have been more accurate to call them liberal Christian Democrats—and that, too, was an apt description of the SRC. (Cross-fertilization was heavy between the two organizations. SCHW President Clark Foreman was a member of the SRC board, and SRC staff members George Mitchell and Ira Reid were on the board at SCHW. At least a half-dozen others, including Will Alexander, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Lucy Randolph Mason, Aubrey Williams—and, of course, Charles Johnson—served on both boards.)
The accusations of Communist sympathy that shadowed half a dozen or so conference stalwarts between 1938 and 1942 had driven off almost all of the suspects; only John Preston Davis’s name was still on the list of SCHW officers and directors—and Davis, former head of the National Negro Congress, had moved to Pittsburgh and was no longer active in the organization. If Communist influence had ever truly penetrated the SCHW, it had long since been filtered out. But right-wing opponents never tired of hurling the charges—and the conference gave them a larger target by refusing to exclude any potential members solely because of their political beliefs.
The conference was generally more liberal than the SRC—in its activism (protesting, circulating petitions, lobbying), in its associations (with Northern liberals, the labor movement, the NAACP), and in its pronouncements on the issues of the day. It went on record in 1946 against “discrimination on the grounds of race, creed, color, or national origin,” calling it “fundamentally undemocratic, un-American, and un-Christian.” Even so, the leaders chose not to attack Jim Crow laws explicitly at that time, taking instead the New Deal tack that the way to relieve blacks of the yoke of discrimination was to give them political and economic power. That might have been considered radical when members of the Roosevelt administration advocated it in the 1930s, but it was the standard position of the Democratic Party’s liberal wing now. If there was anything revolutionary about the SCHW’s goals in the mid-forties, it was its announced intention to bring about genuine majority rule in the oligarchic South, where roughly three of every four adults didn’t vote, and most of the ones who did were in some incumbent politician’s hip pocket.
Conference President Foreman and James A. Dombrowski, the executive secretary, were more advanced in their views on race than were most of the other whites in the organization—or, for that matter, those in the Southern Regional Council. Both men had shown by word and deed years earlier that they recognized segregation as a white problem that was crippling the South. Still, it was one thing to hold that view personally, and quite another to espouse it as organizational philosophy; not even the SCHW was quite ready for that. Instead the conference concentrated on labor and voting-rights issues (the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax was one of its major projects)—and unlike the SRC, it was aggressive enough to draw a visceral response from the likes of Mississippi’s bombastic Senator Theodore Bilbo. This “mongrel conference,” this “un-American, communistic outfit of white Quislings” that caters to “negroes, Jews, politicians and racketeers,” was demanding repeal of poll taxes and other measures the senator held dear. “If I were called upon to name the Number One Enemy of the South today,” he thundered, “it would be the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.” Cleverly, Foreman and Dombrowski used the quote as an endorsement in reverse.
During the first year or so after the war, the SCHW far outpaced SRC in size and scope. Its membership was close to three thousand by the end of 1945, and fiscal receipts for the year totaled almost $85,000 (one-third of it from labor unions). Membership was concentrated in the Southern and border states, and branch chapters were organized in some of them, with Georgia and Alabama having the strongest. To boost its lobbying and fund-raising capabilities, the conference also developed large and active membership groups in Washington and New York. On any given issue, SCHW had both the resources and the activist inclination to make a bigger impact than SRC.
It was in 1946, an ominous year of instability and crisis for the South and the nation, that the Southern Conference for Human Welfare reached the pinnacle of its strength—and, almost simultaneously, found itself caught up in a train of events that led to its own unraveling.
From headquarters in Nashville, Foreman and Dombrowski had wide latitude and authority to act for a compliant board of directors, and they concentrated on laying the foundation for a mass-membership organization. Two South Carolinians were hired as traveling recruiters: Osceola McKaine, the black political organizer, and Witherspoon Dodge, the white former minister whose organizing skills had recently been utilized by the CIO unions. Mary McLeod Bethune, back at her school in Florida after more than a decade of service in Washington, also made a speaking tour on behalf of the SCHW. As a result of these and other outreach programs, Conference membership quickly doubled, and, by the end of the year, was said to have reached ten thousand.
A series of successful fund-raising events outside the South (starring such famous personalities as Joe Louis, Orson Welles, and Frank Sinatra) led to heady SCHW predictions of a $200,000 income for 1946 (the actual total turned out to be more like $120,000). Judging by the national exposure and the rising numbers, any casual observer might well have been impressed; the Southern Conference was starting to look like a force to be heeded. In a reorganization aimed at achieving greater flexibility and clout (and to prevent the SCHW from losing its tax exemption because of political activity), the officers and directors decided in January 1946 to create a new entity, the Southern Conference Educational Fund. Under the plan, SCEF would be a tax-exempt body engaged in teaching, publication, and other forms of nonpolitical persuasion, leaving the SCHW free to pursue activist goals in the political arena. Both would answer to the same administrative and governing hierarchy.
All these new developments were full of promise. But even as they raised the hopes of Southern progressives, negative currents radiated out of the conference. Since the first assembly in Birmingham in 1938, a steady falling away of erstwhile supporters had continued year in and year out, until the number and quality of losses gave pause even to the most loyal defenders. In war and peace, these defections continued.
Forget for a moment the ones who never darkened the door: McGill, Dabney, Daniels, Carter, and other journalists; Odum, Guy Johnson, Paul Green, the Vanderbilt Agrarians, and other academics; Gordon Hancock, P. B. Young, Grace Hamilton, Jessie Daniel Ames, and other blacks; and women. Look past the quickly disillusioned, too—Francis Pickens Miller, John Temple Graves, W. T. Couch, Howard Kester, H. L. Mitchell. These were not the hard-to-lose; the Southern Conference never really had them in the first place. But it could ill afford to do without the services of those who had quickly seen in SCHW the possibilities of genuine reform, and had worked together for that goal. Frank Porter Graham, Louise Charlton, H. C. Nixon, Eleanor Roosevelt, Maury Maverick, Mollie Dowd, Benjamin Mays, Mark Ethridge, F. D. Patterson, Rufus Clement, and Tarleton Collier were among them; their absence left a void. Another was Joseph Gelders, the controversial Birmingham radical and suspected Communist who had been a key figure in the founding of SCHW; he settled in California after serving in the army in World War II.
And one more important name: Lillian Smith. She had stayed away from the first meeting in 1938—citing, among other things, her suspicion that Communists were playing too much of a behind-the-scenes role in the organization. But so many people she admired and respected kept imploring her to join, that finally she agreed to attend the 1940 session in Chattanooga; then, in 1942, Smith accepted a seat on the board at the urging of Foreman and Dombrowski, both of whom she liked and trusted. After Strange Fruit catapulted her to fame in 1944, she had less time to be involved with the SCHW, and in May 1945 she resigned from the board. But in her characteristically blunt and direct way, she skipped the polite excuses and told Foreman and Dombrowski exactly why she was quitting.
“You see, my dreams of the Conference were so different,” she wrote. “I saw it as a great coming-together of Southerners” in an assembly free of segregation “by color
or religion or bank account or sex or the kind of job we work at or the political beliefs we hold. … I wanted us to prove to our country that democracy works.” But for all its talk of majority rule, she said, SCHW was actually being run in a grossly undemocratic fashion— “like a labor union”—by a little clique of officers and board members. She wasn’t one of those insiders, and didn’t want to be. And so with that, the independent lady from Old Screamer Mountain took up her lonely post outside the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, as she had a year earlier outside the Southern Regional Council.
Not only was the loss of old allies hurting SCHW; from the perspective of wary Southerners, so was its choice of new ones. When racial tension flared in February 1946 at Columbia, Tennessee—right in the backyard of the conference, so to speak—Jim Dombrowski worked with Walter White and the NAACP to investigate, and together they set up a national defense committee for those arrested in the disturbance. It was the first time a Southern-based biracial organization dared to work openly with the activist civil rights group from New York. For that, and for his open criticism of local and state officials, Dombrowski was denounced by the Nashville Banner and other Tennessee papers, called before a grand jury, and characterized by the American Legion as “a seasoned, well-trained agitator for the Communist Party.”
Such charges were old hat, of course; the right wing had fired them at SCHW since 1938, and at Southern liberals in general for a lot longer than that. But something profoundly different was at work in 1946. In the wake of World War II, the surviving political-economic systems of capitalism and communism were fighting for world dominance. The United States, in league with its traditional allies in Western Europe, was trying to hold the line against communism in Eastern Europe and the Pacific rim. The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin was pressing its advantage all along the postwar border with the West (a dividing line that Britain’s Sir Winston Churchill, in a March 1946 speech in Missouri, would call an “iron curtain”). Communist regimes in China and elsewhere were also putting pressure on the possessions of the crumbling colonial empires. Soon, Russia would have the atomic bomb, and the arms race would escalate ominously. A little later on, onetime South Carolinian Bernard Baruch would coin a phrase that gave the unofficial but deadly serious East-West conflict a name: the Cold War.