Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  In North Carolina, the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers union local in Winston-Salem had close ties to the Communist Party in the 1940s, and was directly responsible for the rapid growth of the NAACP there. Both the union and the party encouraged active participation in local politics, and those who did get involved were soon able to see positive results: A local black candidate, Kenneth Williams, won a seat on the city board of aldermen in 1947. His backers said he was the first African-American public official in the twentieth-century South to win an election against white opposition.

  Another Carolina locale where there was Communist activity after the war was Chapel Hill. Junius Irving Scales, a native of Greensboro and an ex-GI, returned to the University of North Carolina in 1946 to find a loosely united coalition of students and faculty members active in local chapters of the American Veterans Committee, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and the Communist Party. Scales became an officer in all three groups, which shared many of the same social goals: avoiding World War III, combating racism, promoting organized labor, and raising the South’s standard of living.

  In the fall of 1946, the U.S. Communist Party sent thirty-six-year-old Sam J. Hall into the Carolinas as its district chairman. A native of Alabama, he had worked as a reporter for the Anniston Star and a Birmingham labor newspaper before joining the navy the day after Pearl Harbor. Already a Communist by that time, he served honorably in the military for four years, two of them on combat duty. In North Carolina, the short, chubby, amiable, soft-spoken Hall acted and sounded more like a Rotary Club regular than a scheming radical. He didn’t conceal his purposes; he trumpeted them. In February 1947 he ran advertisements in several North Carolina newspapers announcing a Communist recruitment drive, and in a long interview with the Raleigh News & Observer he stated his and his party’s aims in terms that could have served as the credo of a devoted liberal Democrat: to help the working class, to defend democracy, to prevent fascism, to erase poverty. Only one aim sounded a little strange: to bring about “the establishment of Socialism by the free choice of a majority of the American people.”

  The News & Observer story, quoting unnamed sources, reported that “there are not more than 200 to 250 Party card holders in both North and South Carolina, and approximately one-fourth of these are affiliated with the Communist Club in Winston-Salem.” Whether or not those numbers were accurate, the fact was that the party never grew to any strength in the region; by the end of 1947 it had peaked and fallen, its various factions chased in all directions by the deepening anticommunist hostility of the larger society.

  Alabama probably had more Communists in the 1930s than any other Southern state, and Birmingham, the hub of party activity, was a busy left-wing political arena in spite of regular harassment from Eugene “Bull” Connor and his police department. A weekly tabloid, the Southern News Almanac, began there in January 1940 with under-the-table help from the party; among its principal staffers were Joseph Gelders, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare organizer, and Sam Hall. The lively little journal had its own distinctive character. One of its most curious features, rich with the flavor of religious radicalism, was a regular column contributed by two white preachers: the well-traveled radical Don West, a native Georgian, and Fred Maxey of Leeds, Alabama.

  Two other Birmingham-based organizations of the early 1940s kept strong ties to the Communist Party: the League of Young Southerners, a mostly white group of youthful radicals spun off from SCHW, and the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an offshoot of the National Negro Congress. The LYS was first called the Council of Young Southerners when it was organized at the founding assembly of SCHW in Birmingham in 1938. Helen Fuller of Alabama and Howard Lee of Arkansas headed it in the beginning, and Lee continued his close association with it.

  The Southern Negro Youth Congress was larger than LYS, and it lasted longer. Beginning in 1937 with a two-day conference in Richmond, the SNYC met once a year until the war started—each time in a different city—and then erratically after that, until it folded a year after its eighth conference in Birmingham in 1948. In a little over a decade, SNYC nurtured leadership qualities in dozens of young black Southerners, including Ed Strong, James E. Jackson, Jr., and Esther Cooper, all Virginians, and Alabamians Ethel Lee Goodman, Herman Long, and Sallye Davis. (Two decades later, notoriety would follow Davis’s daughter, militant Communist Angela Davis.)

  For as long as they existed, LYS and SNYC tried hard to work together across racial lines, and they succeeded to a degree, even though the laws and customs of segregation made that exceedingly difficult. Not all of their members were Communists, and in many ways the two organizations showed refreshing flashes of independence from orthodoxy of any stripe— but still, the party connections were there, as Robin D. G. Kelley showed in Hammer and Hoe, his revealing history of communism in Alabama. (Kelley asserted, incidentally, that Gelders, Lee, and Don West were Communists, though all three of them steadfastly denied the affiliation throughout their careers.)

  Many of the young Southern activists of this period, white and black, found the primary outlet for their idealism in either the League of Young Southerners or the Southern Negro Youth Congress. However much they may have had in common with some of the aims and purposes of communism, most of them were something other than deep-dyed, ideologically devoted Communist Party loyalists. They were interracialists, democratic Socialists, progressive reformers—and, in their own way, devoted Southerners too. More than they wanted to destroy the South or turn it over to outsiders, they wanted to make it a place that met the needs of all its native people.

  Of course, most mainstream Southerners didn’t see them in that way at all; they saw them as dangerous troublemakers, and treated them as such. The young activists were red-baited with increasing vehemence during and after World War II. The League of Young Southerners folded before the war was over. The Southern Negro Youth Congress held on until 1949, by which time even its former allies in the labor movement, the university, the church, and the NAACP had distanced themselves from the organization.

  The “invisible army” of Alabama Communists—including several labor union locals—could never have called itself large or powerful or even united. Its ranks thinned rapidly after 1945. By the time the reactionary forces of anticommunism were ready to smoke out all of Alabama’s subversives in the late forties and early fifties, there was no one left for them to attack.

  The South—out of step, as usual, with the national march of events— generally experienced less Communist subversive activity than the other regions of the country. As for anticommunist reaction, it found a warm and inviting climate when it swept in like a winter wind out of the North. Southern politicians were adept at damning Yankees and the feds with one breath, and demanding government support (for agriculture, military bases, protective tariffs) with the next. In the name of Americanism, these same right-wing lawmakers now insisted that the national government they loved to hate should go to any extreme, including suspension of civil liberties, in order to subdue and vanquish the encroaching red enemy.

  Significantly, for the first time on a major issue, the Southerners were joined in their anticommunist extremism by a large and growing reactionary force of arch-conservative Republicans from all over the country. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the Rebels joined the Yankees. The national epidemic of postwar anticommunism was essentially a made-in-the-North pathology engineered by right-wing Republicans; whether or not they also shared the anti-integrationist feelings of their Dixie brethren, they certainly gave them a conveniently sheltered platform from which to mount their attacks. Thus protected by outside interests, the segregationist Southern Democrats proceeded to dine freely on red herring for the next generation.

  8. Striving for Equilibrium

  “When I went to North Carolina to become editorial-page editor of the Charlotte News in September 1945,” said Harry Ashmore, remembering back almost fifty years, “there was a little hint
of change in the wind. Nothing powerful—just a feeling, really, that it might be a good time for some fresh thinking. North Carolina wasn’t the most backward Southern state by any means; it had abolished the poll tax years before, and it had one of the best state universities in the country. The News was a fairly progressive paper—W. J. Cash was on the editorial staff there before the war. I felt I could get establishment support on any plea for fair treatment of blacks—if it stopped short of what they called the social question. In other words, equal was negotiable, or at least open for discussion—but separate was not.”

  Two years later, when Ashmore moved out to Little Rock to edit the Arkansas Gazette, that faint stirring of liberalism was beginning to die down. The report of President Truman’s civil rights committee came out that fall, and a few months later the Dixiecrats bolted out of the Democratic Party over the civil rights issue. The Cold War had started, too, and communism was getting the blame for almost every deviation from the political or social status quo. From then on, social reform of any kind was a hard sell. The time for quietly making little changes was past—if there ever really had been such a time.

  The experiences of war had given Harry Ashmore a new perspective on his country and his native region, and in that he was not unlike thousands of others returning to take up their lives “down home.” But most Southerners—young ex-GIs in particular—weren’t temperamentally inclined toward passive introspection and soul-searching. They didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about the South’s readiness and capacity for social or economic or spiritual renewal; the region’s problems didn’t yield to such reflective analysis. Instead, a twenty-nine-year-old journalist like Ashmore, having a daily page to fill and an audience waiting, was much more likely to focus on the issues of the moment from a middle-ground perspective. In the postwar South, that meant moderate progressivism: not harking back to the romantic myths of the Old Confederacy, but also studiously avoiding, as much as possible, the sacrosanct totems of segregation and white supremacy.

  To anyone then active in the field of daily journalism, it must have felt like a great time to be living and working in the South. Newspapers had a virtual lock on the communications business, and local papers enjoyed an influence that far exceeded their size. The chains had not yet penetrated to all corners of the region; except for a couple or three Hearst and Scripps-Howard papers, almost every operation was locally owned. The television networks were just then forming in New York, and they wouldn’t break into the Southern city markets until the end of the decade. Radio was doing a little news and information programming, but not much. Some papers, like the Courier-Journal in Louisville and the Arkansas Gazette, to which Ashmore gravitated, blanketed their states with both news coverage and circulation; they were indispensable to anyone who tried to keep up with what was going on.

  Personalities dominated the papers. Owners, publishers, editors, and even some lower-echelon writers were widely recognized as influential and important people. Readers all over Georgia and even beyond the state knew who Ralph McGill was and what he was saying in the Constitution; likewise, Virginians followed Virginius Dabney, and North Carolinians knew Jonathan Daniels. The Birmingham columnist John Temple Graves had a following that extended well beyond the circulation area of his paper. And, quiet little man that he was, even publisher J. N. Heiskell of the Gazette was no stranger to his Arkansas subscribers.

  When conservative and liberal owners locked horns, as did Jimmy Stahlman of the Nashville Banner and Silliman Evans of the Tennessean, readers in their area followed the fight avidly. When reactionary rivals competed daily, as Thomas M. Hederman of the Clarion-Ledger and Frederick Sullens of the Daily News did in Jackson (even though Hederman owned both papers), an entire state could be affected. Against that dominating influence, Hodding Carter and his smaller, more isolated Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville gave Mississippians an offsetting moderate voice, magnified by Carter’s 1946 Pulitzer Prize and by the regional and national recognition his magazine articles and books received. (In The New Republic that fall, fellow Southerner Thomas Sancton called Carter “a new and extremely articulate ‘Southern liberal’—with more genuine claim to the label than a number of others who have borne it.”)

  Young Turks like Harry Ashmore represented at once a continuation of certain Southern traditions and a departure from them. The papers he worked for in both Charlotte and Little Rock were family-owned companies that regarded racial issues with a certain benevolent inattention. Theirs was not a philosophy of dehumanization; they were intellectually but passively accepting of the basic rights undeniably due to black citizens. They wanted to be tolerant, enlightened, and fair on the subject— but not crusading. They were not fight-to-the-death defenders of a rigid and inflexible segregationist orthodoxy, but they weren’t destroyers of it either; more accurately, they were resigned to it as a reality that they felt would not soon change.

  “You couldn’t have stayed at home and had any influence at all if you openly opposed segregation,” Ashmore observed. Looking around at his contemporaries back then, he concluded that a majority of editors in the region tended to see things in more or less that way. There was a broad mainstream of acceptable opinion—moderate, reasonable, informed, but carefully circumscribed—and he fit comfortably within it.

  The seasoned old hands of Southern newspapering were the dominant figures—McGill, Dabney, and Carter, still restrained by a defensive allegiance to the South’s traditions, and Daniels, whose loyalty to the Democratic Party, by virtue of his White House service to Roosevelt and Truman, was perhaps stronger than his faithfulness to the South.

  Beyond them, Ashmore could look up to a variety of experienced and talented editors and publishers, including the Courier-Journal’s progressive team headed by Barry Bingham, Mark Ethridge, and Tarleton Collier; Louis I. Jaffé and Lenoir Chambers of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot; Coleman Harwell of the Tennessean, Alfred Mynders of the Chattanooga Times, and others. With McGill and his fellow deans and mentors in the craft, these men represented a tradition of political moderation and public-spirited service that had long been a part of the Southern press.

  Nearer to Ashmore in age were Pete McKnight, who would succeed him as editor of the Charlotte News; Reed Sarratt, another News staffer who would later become editor of the Winston-Salem Journal; Don Shoemaker, a University of North Carolina graduate who edited the Asheville Citizen for publisher Hiden Ramsey; Nelson Poynter, successor to his father as editor of the St. Petersburg Times; George Chaplin, editor of the New Orleans Item; and William C. Baggs, a Georgian and McGill protégé who would become editor of the Miami News—and, like McGill, write a daily column. In Ashmore’s native South Carolina, a few forthright moderates led by George Buchanan of the Columbia Record and John M. O’Dowd of the Florence Morning News sometimes wrote in vigorous dissent against the dominant voices of reaction.

  At a number of the smaller dailies throughout the region, there were editors and publishers whose moderation and tolerance were an inseparable part of their sense of duty as public servants. Buford Boone in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Earl B. Braswell in Athens, Georgia, and George McLean in Tupelo, Mississippi, were representative of many others in every Southern state.

  There were weekly editors with a nontraditional perspective, too. Neil O. Davis, a Nieman Fellow with Harry Ashmore and Thomas Sancton at Harvard in 1941, returned from the service to edit the Lee County Bulletin in Alabama, and throughout his long career there, his paper was a model of professional responsibility. J. W. Norwood, publisher-editor of the Lowndes County News in Georgia, fought fearlessly when he got mad—as, for example, when he squared off with the Talmadge “white primary” advocates in 1947. In a scorching editorial, he condemned the behavior of the state Democratic Party leadership: “Given a choice between crooked, scheming politicians and voting with the Negroes, I choose the latter, and to paraphrase those famous words of Patrick Henry, ‘If that be treason then make the most of it.’ ”

  T
hese, collectively, were representative echoes of the majority voice of the Southern press in the first two or three years after World War II. Though they weren’t exactly editorializing in close harmony, they did tend to follow the middle path of pragmatic progressivism, on which there was a high degree of consensus. They were Southerners bonded by choice to a region with which they closely identified; they were editors who seemed ready to face realistically the South’s problems and needs; they were white men (and a very few women) who thought they were as well qualified as anyone, and better than most, to offer enlightened leadership in the eternal Southern challenge of race. Time magazine, writing in 1947 about the “realistic and readable” Harry Ashmore (“neither a Yankee-lover nor a deep-dyed Southerner”), described him as an editor who “tempers his enthusiasm for reform with consideration of the facts of Southern life.” No one had to be told that foremost among those facts was segregation.

  The editors were no anvil chorus of Jim Crow-busting reformers; no one in daily journalism in the South was on that mission in the forties—and, for that matter, neither were very many Northerners. Only the black papers and a handful of regional writers outside the mainstream press dared to confront segregation in print from within the region. Lillian Smiths articles exhorting the South to reform its racist ways were widely published in other journals, but her own South Today, which she and Paula Snelling had edited in north Georgia, was discontinued in 1945. Alabamians Aubrey Williams and Gould Beech enjoyed a period of success in Montgomery with the Southern Farmer, their populist and racially inclusive monthly tabloid for families who worked the land, and they got in some good licks against segregation—but again, it was not daily journalism, and it lasted for barely a decade.