Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  Rosenwald’s generosity had been especially salutary for the South. Over the years, this son of Russian Jewish immigrants had poured more than $20 million into programs to build hundreds of rural schools for the poor, black and white; to pay for textbooks and teacher training; and to provide fellowships for more than fifteen hundred creative people of promise, two-thirds of them black and by far the most of them Southern.

  The list of fellowship recipients included dozens of people who went on to make notable contributions to education, journalism, scholarship, the arts, and public service in the South: Ralph McGill, Arna Bontemps, Clark Foreman, Sterling Brown, James Dombrowski, Horace Mann Bond, Lillian Smith, James Weldon Johnson, H. C. Nixon, Zora Neale Hurston, John Henry Faulk, John Hope Franklin, C. Vann Woodward, Pauli Murray, Josephine Wilkins, Rayford W. Logan, Tarleton Collier, Ira De A. Reid, Thomas Sancton, Margaret Walker, and on and on—a hundred times this many.

  “It was a coveted prize,” John Griffin recalled. “The stipend was about $2,500—a lot of money at that time. I was very proud to have been chosen as a recipient. Then, because I happened to be nearby at the time, I got to go to that very special event in Chicago. The program that day included speeches, panel discussions, poetry readings, and performances of music and dance. It was an impressive lineup, to say the least—W. E. B. Du Bois, Gunnar Myrdal, Langston Hughes, and many others. Also, I remember that there was a real outpouring of appreciation and affection from the audience for the three men who had been so instrumental in putting the Rosenwald fortune to work in the South—Edwin Embree, Charles Johnson, and Will Alexander.”

  They had been addressing Southern issues as a team for two decades, and as individuals for a lot longer than that; together they had posted almost a hundred years of public service. The Rosenwald endowment had given Embree, as president of the fund, enough resources to make a real impact in the public arena, particularly in an impoverished region like the South. He met Alexander and Johnson in the mid-1920S, and the three men went on to turn the potent combination of money and good ideas into a long list of impressive achievements. In 1948, Embree and Alexander, in their mid-sixties, were about to retire; Johnson, who was a decade younger, had just been inaugurated as the first black president in the eighty-year history of Fisk University.

  The loss of this major source of funding for programs of social and cultural uplift in the South would be felt acutely in a variety of institutions that had come to depend upon that support—such as the Southern Regional Council. As a member of its board, John Griffin knew how hard it was to marshal people and resources even for the most moderate and cautious attempts at social betterment. Three years after the end of the war, the spirit of unity and optimism that had momentarily flickered throughout the country was now dissipating rapidly in the South. In its place, an old and familiar mood was rising, a conservative, backward-looking, tradition-bound mood of defensiveness and defiance. Once more, the South was falling back into the same old problem, the same dilemma, the same trap: the bugaboo of race—white against black, segregation and discrimination and white supremacy against the ideal and promise of liberty, justice, and equality for all.

  Whenever he ventured outside the South, Griffin could see and feel this rock of judgment weighing upon his homeland, and upon him as a person. He was aware of it in Chicago, as he listened to the telling and incisive poetic lines of Langston Hughes, and to the commentary of eighty-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois. A few years earlier, when Griffin was teaching at Georgia Tech and hosting a public-affairs discussion program on a local radio station, he had invited Du Bois from Atlanta University to take part. Now, such an invitation would be much harder—perhaps impossible—to extend. The aged scholar was embroiled in controversy—pursued by red-baiting investigators, and soon to be separated yet again from the NAACP and its temperamental director, Walter White, whose tolerance for Du Bois’s blunt and stinging criticism was by then almost completely exhausted.

  Earlier, on a trip to New York, Griffin had gone to a fund-raising rally for Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party at Madison Square Garden. The continuing scourge of racial violence in the South was brought up by Wallace, who blasted in particular the brazen murders of four young blacks in Walton County, Georgia. When the money buckets were passed around, Griffin put in a ten-dollar bill folded with a note of support from “a white native of Walton County”—not so much because he was wild about Wallace, but because he was angered by the willingness of far too many Southern whites to tolerate and excuse criminal atrocities in their midst.

  It was when he got back home from these Northern forays that John Griffin realized how long and difficult the road to reform would be. Henry Wallace clearly didn’t have a ghost of a chance to win, and Harry Truman was in serious trouble too. The Dixiecrat movement was in full cry, and anticommunism was blending and merging with the militant philosophy of states’ rights. The mood of the white South was changing in 1948, growing more fixed and intransigent—but among black Southerners and elsewhere in the country, nothing seemed likely to extinguish the determination to secure the rights of citizenship. No matter who won the election, big changes were probably coming to the South and the nation—whether for better or worse, no one could say. In the interim, a feeling of uncertainty prevailed. The watchword was caution.

  In times past, Griffin had felt at liberty to take a modest stand with others against racial and social injustice in Atlanta and across the South. He and a colleague who taught at Georgia Tech, Glenn Rainey, were active in the Committee for Georgia, the state-based affiliate of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. They had taken part in protest demonstrations against the poll tax, and written letters to the local papers criticizing the reactionary behavior of Senator George and Governor Talmadge. They had worked for Governor Arnall’s reform agenda, and made friends with social critics like Lillian Smith, and joined with others in urging Ralph McGill to favor more of the racial and social adjustments that the South so desperately needed. In the Southern Regional Council’s ongoing internal debate over segregation, they sided with the anti-Jim Crow faction of blacks and white liberals.

  But Griffin’s boss at Emory, President Goodrich White—himself a former Rosenwald Fellow—had joined with other dissenting members of the Truman Commission on Higher Education in the fall of 1947 to record his opposition to desegregation of Southern colleges and universities. Griffin didn’t have to be told to be less critical, less visible, less liberal; the danger in not doing so was all too obvious. “White didn’t warn me,” he recalled, “but others did. In spite of some positive signs here and there, I knew—everybody knew—that the side favoring segregation was getting stronger.”

  All across the South before the election of 1948, events pointed to the unmistakable rise of race relations as a primary and continuing social issue. Before that, going all the way back to the early thirties and beyond, it was a subject more often treated by indirection, if not outright denial. But from this point on, it was to become the single most urgent and unyielding public issue—certainly for the South, and eventually for the nation. Before 1948, it was possible for Southerners, white and black, to operate on both sides of the question, or to avoid it altogether; after 1948, people were compelled more and more to take a stand on one side or the other, or else to abdicate their duty as citizens. Before, the South had looked backward, all the way to the antebellum era, for its moorings and its sense of direction; hereafter, it would have to look forward, toward a new and different future.

  From a most unlikely source came a positive account of the progress that had been made in the previous three decades. “There can be no question but that the relations between American Negroes and the balance of the population in the United States have improved during the last generation,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois in Phylon, Atlanta University’s social science journal. He went on to catalog some of the evidence, with particular reference to the South: the emergence of biracial groups such as the SRC and SCHW; the help of n
ational foundations, religious bodies, labor unions, and organizations like the NAACP; the decline of lynching; the hiring of blacks as police officers in more than fifty Southern cities (Atlanta finally joined that list in 1948); a sharp increase in black voter participation following court rulings against white primaries; an increase in the number of black elected officials (including an NAACP lawyer, Oliver W. Hill, to the city council of Richmond from a majority-white district); and some improvement in schooling, health, housing, and employment.

  “All this gives us hope and courage,” Du Bois wrote. “Yet we know quite well that the race problem in the United States is not settled.” Indeed it was not. After Judge J. Waties Waring’s decision outlawing the white primary in South Carolina had been upheld by the appeals court and allowed to stand without further review by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, two of that state’s congressmen, L. Mendel Rivers and William Jennings Bryan Dorn, introduced a resolution calling for Waring’s impeachment. In a speech on the House floor, Rivers reached a level of unbalanced and uncontrolled hatred that had become all too common among Southern members of Congress. The judge, he shouted, was “as cold as a dead Eskimo in an abandoned igloo. … He should be removed by the force of a boot … he is a disgrace to the Federal judiciary of South Carolina. … Every lawyer in South Carolina lives in mortal fear of this monster. … Unless he is removed there will be bloodshed.”

  Slanderous abuse in this same extreme style was also being heaped upon Frank Porter Graham. Back in the presidents chair at the University of North Carolina after the issuance of the civil rights committee report, he faced a barrage of mail for months concerning his service on the committee. Some of the letters expressed “heartfelt appreciation” or “abiding thanks” for his contribution, but the vast majority were critical, and many were mean. A few newspapers, including the Winston-Salem Journal & Sentinel and the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, were supportive of him; others were more in line with the Wilmington News, which advised Graham to “stop playing God.” He dutifully and patiently responded to almost all of his mail, including a letter that said, “You are not worthy to live in the South. You have precipitated and agitated more assault, more rape and more bloodshed than the South has ever seen.”

  When his old friend Gerald W. Johnson of the Baltimore Sun wrote to complain that “the advocates of social equality are using political means to deal with an ethical problem” when they should be appealing to conscience rather than the courts, Graham gave him a thoughtful and incisive two-page reply. He found himself “in the midst of a crossfire” between “dogmatists on each side.” He expressed admiration and support for President Truman for his stand on civil rights, federal aid to schools, and other issues. And, to the point of the racial issue itself, Frank Graham wrote:

  Our Negro fellow citizens are taking seriously the propaganda and preachments of two world wars: self-determination of peoples to make the world safe for democracy, and the war against Nazism and the preconceptions of a master race. With advancing education, the ideas of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address … and the four freedoms of Franklin D. Roosevelt are bearing fruit in the minds and aspirations of the present generation, white and colored. The young people in the churches are asking direct questions about the teachings of Jesus concerning all men as brothers and sons of God. The majority of students in a large number of Southern colleges and universities are quite ready for the admission of Negroes in the colleges, especially in the graduate and professional schools in those fields for which no provision is made by the State for Negro students. However, boards of trustees [including his own] are just now more adamant in their resistance to such attitudes. This more stubborn resistance was precipitated by the storm and fury of the civil rights discussions and misrepresentations.

  Some think that when the present furor subsides that the old ways will continue to prevail. This is a mistaken view. There is, of course, always an ebb and flow in human movements, but the democratic currents … move eventually onward to the larger sea.

  Frank Graham saw the whole canvas—the spirit of liberty and the spirit of defiance. Both his heart and his head told him what few other Southern white leaders were ready to acknowledge: that nothing could keep the black minority from rising with the flow of the democratic current.

  The opening of state university graduate and professional schools to black applicants was proceeding slowly across the Southern and border states as a direct consequence of federal court orders. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1948 compelled the state of Oklahoma to provide Ada Sipuel, a black plaintiff, with a chance to get a law education, and other cases were pending in Texas, Oklahoma, and Delaware. Then, in Arkansas, the first step toward voluntary change was taken with surprising ease.

  President Lewis W. Jones of the University of Arkansas, reading the legal handwriting on the wall, persuaded his board of trustees to admit three black applicants in 1948—Silas Hunt and Jack Shropshire to the law school and Edith Mae Irby to the medical school. (The previous year, Jones had defended segregation when he signed the minority report of the Truman higher education commission.) Irby, a recent graduate of Knoxville College, decided on her own to apply for medical school in her home state. The school’s dean, H. Clay Chenault, noted that she was from Hot Springs (that was his hometown too), and he convinced Jones that it would be better to lower the barriers for her than to wait for a court order. Governor Ben Laney bitterly resented the university decision—“They pushed a white boy aside for this Negro,” he fumed—but Jones and Chenault had anticipated his complaint and increased the size of the entering class from ninety to ninety-one students. Segregation laws compelled Irby to find lodging and meals apart from her classmates (Little Rock black-newspaper publisher Daisy Bates helped her in that), but her classroom and laboratory experiences were free of discrimination, and she graduated in 1952 in the upper half of her class.

  Harry Ashmore had been in Little Rock only a few months when the university-desegregation vote was taken. The decision was duly noted on the front page of the Arkansas Gazette, and Ashmore expressed approval in a low-key editorial. “I was convinced that desegregation was inevitable,” he wrote later, “and I saw the Gazettes mission as alerting the community” to prepare for what was certain to be a difficult adjustment.

  In North Carolina, Jonathan Daniels was coming to the same conclusion. Back from Washington to run the Raleigh News & Observer after the death of his father, he was a Harry Truman partisan, as would be expected of the President’s former press secretary. Daniels was also serving on a United Nations subcommission on human rights, and that experience added further to his growing belief that white prejudice, not any real or imagined condition of black inferiority, was the root cause of discrimination. He backed into a qualified defense of the civil rights committee report and Truman’s proposals based on it. He attacked the Dixiecrats as “bush league secessionists,” and warned the South that the nation “cannot wait forever for local action to end violence, inequality and disenfranchisement.” Even so, Daniels stopped short of calling for the dismemberment or death of Jim Crow, insisting instead that simple justice and fair play were the objectives. Like most other Southern white liberals of the time, he separated political and economic rights from social rights. The latter were not defined or specified; he simply dismissed them as an irrelevant false alarm in the present debate.

  Across the line in South Carolina, the most compelling journalistic voice would have been John Henry McCray’s, had there been enough people to hear him. The few thousand subscribers to his Lighthouse & Informer were treated to a weekly education in the nefarious ways of white politicians. The paper was also a primer for blacks who wanted to take the political (as opposed to religious or litigious or conciliatory or revolutionary) route to equality. With his fellow instigator Osceola McKaine no longer on the scene, McCray threw himself into the newspaper, the NAACP, and the Progressive Democratic Party of South Carolina with obsessiv
e abandon. Those three causes were so closely intertwined as to be one and the same to McCray. After the white primary was outlawed once and for all, he and the NAACP and the PDP got 30,000 of the 35,000 registered black voters in the state to go to the polls in the August primary in 1948.

  Predictably, the Virginians were more restrained and dispassionate. But even as Virginius Dabney was receiving a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials in 1948, he had grown so disenchanted with all four major presidential candidates that it was hard to tell whether he would mark his own ballot for any of them. Truman, Dewey, and Wallace had all moved so far to Dabney’s left—or he to their right—that he and the Times-Dispatch could offer little except negative commentary. And, since Thurmond had not succeeded in luring Harry Byrd out of the Democratic tent, the Richmond papers weren’t about to venture out either. The News Leader, in the twilight of Douglas Southall Freeman’s long tenure, gave over most of its editorial columns to the subject of civil rights as the fall election campaign was drawing to a close. The paper’s conclusion: Segregation will continue in most dimensions of Southern life, whether it’s fair or not; that may be too bad, but that’s how it is. And in the campaign, no endorsement: “The choice is between evils, known and unknown.”

  Over in Norfolk, Louis I. Jaffé of the Virginian-Pilot seemed much less bothered by Truman and the civil rights issue, but found little to attract him to the President overall—and anyway, he wrote, Dewey was “certain to be elected President by a large popular majority,” with Truman and Thurmond dividing the scraps. (As it turned out, Truman carried the state by a comfortable margin, with Thurmond a distant third.)