by John Egerton
The Southern Regional Council was also moving gradually—as it had since its beginning in 1944—to weave a safe path to equality through the tortured thickets of Never, Later, and Now. From 1948 on, as the larger society was inching closer to desegregation reforms, the factions within SRC seemed to be drifting ever further apart. Gordon B. Hancock, the convenor of the Durham conference that led to the council’s founding, finally lost patience with the ever-cautious Virginius Dabney, accusing the editor of foot-dragging and of making “a strategic retreat” from his earlier liberal positions—and that was before Dabney chose to resign from SRC rather than move along with it toward an eventual resolution of the segregation question. Old New Dealer Aubrey Williams resigned for the opposite reason in 1949, saying the council simply hadn’t moved far enough fast enough against discrimination.
The blacks most active in the organization—Hancock, Benjamin Mays, Rufus Clement, Forrester Washington, Grace Towns Hamilton, A. W. Dent, Charles S. Johnson, and others—continued to push for a forthright policy of desegregation and full equality. Realistically speaking, though, the Southern Regional Council was in debt, losing members, and barely holding body and soul together; it simply lacked the energy, the means, or the will to forge ahead. Its executive director, George S. Mitchell, was borrowing money on his life insurance policy to pay some of the council’s operating expenses. At the annual meeting in November 1950, only a few dozen members were present.
One positive highlight in an otherwise discouraging period for the SRC came in the fall of 1949, when it co-sponsored, with an interdenominational panel of churchwomen, an Atlanta conference at which Eleanor Roosevelt appeared, making her first visit to Georgia since the death of her husband. She spoke warmly of the South, the churchwomen, the SRC, and the cause of social reform, all to the delight of the sponsors, central among whom was Dorothy R. Tilly—field secretary of the council, a leader of the churchwomen, and a member in 1947 of President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights.
Press coverage of the church conference was extensive. One reporter who attended was John N. Popham, then two years into his assignment as the regional correspondent of the New York Times. His frequent trips to Atlanta had brought him into close association with Ralph McGill, and over time he would also develop a bond with others there, including the council’s director of information, Harold Fleming, and SRC board members John A. Griffin and Benjamin Mays. Thereafter, reports on the council appeared often in the pages of the Times.
Popham gave new meaning to the term “roving reporter.” A tireless extrovert, he covered great distances by car, showing up at so many church, farm, university, and political party gatherings that he rivaled the legendary Kilroy. While covering the Dixiecrats in 1948, he went to a meeting at a black church in Jackson, Mississippi, and was picked up and taken to jail by white plainclothes officers on a stakeout there. A black newspaperman phoned word of the arrest to a white reporter, who called Governor Fielding Wright, who called the police chief and forcefully suggested Popham’s release. From such exploits were the tales of Johnny Popham spun—stories that originated in all manner of Southern locales and situations, from dormitory bull sessions at Fisk University’s summer Race Relations Institute to political shoptalk in the smoky back rooms at Brennan’s Restaurant in New Orleans.
A sense of humor was a saving grace in those increasingly intemperate times. Popham was so blessed, and he gravitated to others who shared the gift, among them Harold Fleming, Harry Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette, and Bill Baggs of the Miami News. McGill and Hodding Carter were also prized friends and trusted companions, but more serious or tormented or combative. Carter was a “liberal spokesman” in Mississippi, the most reactionary state in the Union—which made him a conservative in New York or Chicago. But the Greenville editor never ducked a fight, whether with demagogic Southern Dixiecrats or self-righteous Yankee liberals.
One of the latter, a white Pittsburgh reporter named Ray Sprigle, had written an exposé of the South after spending four weeks there “disguised as a Negro.” A popular ABC network radio series called “Town Meeting”—given added exposure by the new medium of television—invited Carter and Ashmore to debate the segregation issue with Sprigle and the NAACP’s Walter White. Ashmore would long remember with high humor what happened before the broadcast: The pink-cheeked, white-haired White, who was black, “seemed the most conspicuous Aryan among us, while the swarthy Carter’s skin was dark enough to prompt a Mississippi theater usher to direct him to the balcony. The makeup man was instructed to darken down Walter and lighten up Hodding.” Both sides held their ground in the inconclusive debate, but afterward, White put to Ashmore and Carter the one question they couldn’t answer: “You know that segregation is morally indefensible and has to go. Why don’t you admit it? What are you afraid of?” Said Ashmore years later, “He knew that I knew that he had earned the right to ask the question.”
By 1950, when he wrote Southern Legacy, Hodding Carter had come to feel that the primary responsibility for the South’s racial problems rested on the shoulders of racist whites. Discrimination, he wrote, “has infected the white South with a moral sickness.” He would never refer to himself as an integrationist, or like others to call him that, but by Mississippi standards he clearly was a liberal—and he grew more so as the South’s crisis worsened.
Ralph McGill didn’t like those labels, either; he thought of himself as a moderate, but he was without a doubt the number-one house liberal of the Atlanta newspapers, and like Carter, he kept moving left. All through his tenure at the Constitution, he had worked for Clark Howell, the owner, but in 1949 the conservative Howell sold most of his holdings to former Democratic presidential candidate James M. Cox of Ohio, who had owned the Atlanta Journal for a decade, and Cox gave McGill full authority to say whatever he wanted in the paper—and in a front-page column at that. A new general manager, George C. Biggers, was sent in by Cox to oversee operations of both papers. Biggers and McGill developed a mutual dislike and fear of each other, but each had his own turf to protect, and for the most part they avoided direct conflict.
By the late forties, McGill had taken up rather consistently the theme that the South’s continued refusal to obey its own laws (for separate-but-equal schools, against lynching, and so forth) would eventually cause the states to face hard new realities imposed by judicial command. He wasn’t yet ready to declare for federal legislation himself, but he was coming closer.
Another of McGill and Carter’s shared opinions was a hard-nosed anticommunism; both of them were prone to shoot from the hip at radical white Southerners who stepped outside the traditional conventions of politics or race or religion. Don West and Myles Horton had suffered McGill’s wrath in the 1930s, when they were organizing the Highlander Folk School and aiding the labor movement; the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and most (but not all) of its principals had been similarly criticized, and Senator Claude Pepper of Florida would take a heavy hit from McGill when he was running for reelection in 1950.
The national paranoia over communism had reached epidemic proportions by the summer of 1950. In the South, the manifestations of that pathology bordered on the absurd, and would have been laughable had they not been so dangerously destructive. No honest critic could name a time when there had ever been a Communist threat to the peace and safety of the South—and yet, as the tiny cell shrank to microscopic proportions, the hue and cry against it grew louder, and the emboldened witch-hunters, sensing how utterly safe they were, imagined themselves slaying red dragons at every turn. When the last little handful of radicals in the Southern Negro Youth Congress convened one final time in Birmingham in 1948, the red-hunting police force under Bull Connor arrested the whites in attendance (James Dombrowski and Progressive Party vice-presidential candidate Glen Taylor among them) for violating the segregation ordinance. Another local law, called the Communist Control Act, gave Connor a license to harass “subversives”—the ones responsible, he asserted, for the
Klan-like bombings and other terrorist acts that plagued blacks in the city.
Not just the South was caught up in this madness. An outburst of violence against “niggers, kikes, and commies” marred two consecutive weekends at a Peekskill mountain resort in upstate New York in the summer of 1949, with Paul Robeson the primary object of hostility. Since the war, Robeson had been cast down from the pinnacle of celebrity to the pit of scorn for his criticism of American racism and his support of Russia. Black and red proved to be a deadly color combination for him and W. E. B. Du Bois and Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., the three most prominent African-Americans associated with communism. Davis went to prison for his beliefs, and both Robeson and Du Bois were hounded by the government and driven into exile. Of the three, only Davis was a true party loyalist; the other two showed themselves to be more committed to liberty and equality than to party—or to race.
Their troubles in this country had little if anything to do with the South, though—a fact that underscores both the “Northern” tenor of anticommunism and the national sweep of racism. The South’s red-hunters showed repeatedly that their primary target was not Marxist ideology but race-mixing. It was the presence of black students at the Highlander Folk School, more than any sign of doctrinaire communism, that brought press attacks, FBI surveillance, and congressional committee investigators down on the Tennessee institution. The same was true of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and its spin-off group, the Southern Conference Educational Fund.
Highlander had been closely associated with the labor movement since its founding in the early thirties, but the Congress of Industrial Organizations, having troubles of its own with red-hunting government investigators, was trying to back off to a safe distance from the school. Even though several Southerners with close ties to labor, including Lucy Randolph Mason, Paul Christopher, George S. Mitchell, and Aubrey Williams, would maintain an intimate relationship with Highlander, the formal link between the school and the CIO was about to be broken, and it wouldn’t be repaired.
The two Southern Conference factions, already weakened to the point of exhaustion by assaults from the outside, were seriously divided internally by 1948, with the Clark Foreman-Human Welfare faction putting all its energies into the Henry Wallace campaign and the Jim Dombrowski-Educational Fund wing shifting its focus to a reformist push against racial segregation and discrimination. Wallace’s crushing defeat signaled the final collapse of SCHW. On November 21, 1948—exactly ten years after the first conference in Birmingham—a remnant of the charter delegates, including Dombrowski, Foreman, Aubrey Williams, Virginia Durr, Myles Horton, and Alva Taylor, met in Richmond to pull the plug and draw a sheet over the corpse. They left a few belongings to the surviving Southern Conference Educational Fund.
This “death and transfiguration,” as historian Thomas A. Krueger called it, had been preceded a day earlier by a symbolic gathering at Monticello, the Virginia home of everybody’s favorite civil libertarian, Thomas Jefferson. There the SCEF leaders, principally Dombrowski and Williams, and about fifty more Southern progressives of both races, acting “as Americans deeply committed to our form of government and our way of life,” gathered to read aloud and sign a pledge—“A Declaration of Civil Rights”—calling for the total abolition of segregation. With its ranks now thinned to a faithful few, the SCEF turned its eyes toward the fifties.
But the climb to the mountaintop at Monticello was far easier than the uphill marches that lay ahead. The soaring hopes of Southern reformers in the wake of Harry Truman’s 1948 upset had turned to despair as Congress gridlocked, the red panic spread, and Korea exploded. The home front was almost as dangerous a battleground as the war zone. An ominous sign of the vicious infighting ahead was posted in early May of 1950 when a suave and handsome young Florida congressman, George A. Smathers, turned on his benefactor, Senator Claude Pepper, in a slashing, smearing, McCarthyesque attack aimed at unseating the liberal senator. “Red Pepper” was pictured with Paul Robeson and Joseph Stalin; he was anonymously branded a “nigger lover” and a subversive. (Even Ralph McGill called him a “spell-binding pinko.”) Character assassination worked: Smathers won by 64,000 votes. The smear tactic worked again in November for California senatorial candidate Richard M. Nixon against his opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas. And, most devastatingly of all, it claimed another Southern victim in North Carolina: the best-known and most widely respected liberal in the region, Frank Porter Graham.
Only three months after W. Kerr Scott became North Carolina’s governor in 1949, he surprised just about everyone except his wife and his friend Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, by appointing Frank Graham to an interim vacancy in the U.S. Senate. Scott, a dairy farmer of moderately liberal leanings, and Daniels, back home from his White House service to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, both saw the longtime University of North Carolina president as the ideal choice for the Senate seat, but it took them more than a week of intensive effort to persuade Graham that he had to accept the appointment. The sixty-two-year-old educator had spent all of his adult life at the university in an ever-expanding mission of service to the state, the South, and the nation. Along the way, he had built an enormous reservoir of goodwill. He had enemies on the right, but not all conservatives opposed him by any means; friend and foe alike acknowledged that he was an exceedingly popular public figure and a good and decent man.
A year after his appointment, Graham had to run for the remaining years of his predecessor’s unfinished term. He drew early opposition in the Democratic primary from an involuntarily retired former senator and booster of fascism, Fascist-leaning Robert R. Reynolds, but serious Graham foes wanted a more stable candidate, and they got blue-chip Raleigh attorney Willis Smith, a former president of the American Bar Association, to enter the race. With the help of several arch-conservative advisers and staff assistants—including a twenty-eight-year-old radio newsman, Jesse Helms, who wrote press releases and advertising copy—Smith went after Graham bare-fisted, hammering on the theme that he was soft on communism.
In the May 27 primary, Graham got more than 300,000 votes to Smith’s 250,000, with another 58,000 going to Reynolds. By a whisker—some 5,000 votes—the incumbent fell short of a majority. Smith then waited until the last minute before exercising his perogative to ask for a runoff.
The second round of campaigning was marked by a shift in the challenger’s attack; the “Communist fellow traveler” charge became a scurrilous racial offensive. A doctored photograph showing Graham’s wife dancing with a black man was passed around with whispered innuendoes. UNC was labeled, in a phrase credited to Helms, as the “University of Negroes and Communists.” Fliers and newspaper ads warned whites to WAKE UP BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE, asking, “Do you want Negroes working beside you and your wife and daughters … eating beside you … sleeping in the same hotels … teaching and disciplining your children in school … occupying the same hospital rooms … using your toilet facilities?”
Here was the raw nub of Southern demagoguery, the essence of its deceit and venality, summed up in a few words. The message: “Race-mixing, with all the worst sexual and social and economic consequences, is a Communist plot masterminded in Moscow and carried out through the seemingly innocent offices of sympathizers and dupes and traitors like Frank Porter Graham; for the sake of the sovereign South and its traditional way of life, these demons must be cast out and destroyed.”
Frank Graham was too soft-spoken and self-effacing, too gentlemanly, too repelled by the coarse tactics of hand-to-hand combat in the political trenches; he couldn’t bring himself to get down in the mud and slug it out. He turned the other cheek, and went on trying to appeal to the better judgment of North Carolina’s voters.
In the runoff on June 24, Graham fell almost twenty thousand votes short. At 9:45 p.m., he left his sixth-floor suite at the Sir Walter Hotel in Raleigh and went downstairs to the ballroom to congratulate Willis Smith on his victory. A little while later, one of the se
nator’s assistants, Bill Friday, drove Frank and Marian Graham home. They rode in silence. There was nothing left to say. Not with self-pity or bitterness or tears but with a certain innocence, a bewilderment, a painful disbelief, Frank Porter Graham held his wife’s hand and stared out the window into the summer darkness. The first major defeat of his life would also be the worst. It would be a long time—if ever—before he got over it.
IV
1950–1954:
Days of Grace
So the governors went forth to help pull down their own temple—refusing to face the problem they themselves counted as paramount, and worse still, trying to convince the world that it didn’t exist. … And the great irony is that [the positions of both national political parties on civil rights] were irrevocably shaped by the South—by inaction in the days of grace, and by blind defiance when time began to run out.
—HARRY S. ASHMORE,
An Epitaph for Dixie
1. Coming to a Choice
It’s hard for me to think of the fifties as a fearful time of silence. My own coming of age (I turned fifteen in the summer of 1950) still plays back in my memory as a carefree time, unclouded by strife or deprivation. The fact that there was a war going on, and that a paranoid search for Communists had the nation’s adult population in an uproar, made no deep and indelible impression on me. My native South’s impending racial crucible was still an indistinct shadow in the public consciousness, and I was only vaguely and superficially aware of it.
But my circle of exposure was gradually enlarging, and while I was passing through high school I had a succession of experiences that introduced me to the world beyond the confines of Cadiz and Trigg County, Kentucky. By car, truck, bus, and train, I ventured out into the first ring of cities around us—Nashville, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Louisville, Evansville, Memphis—and even got a fleeting glimpse at others more distant, from St. Louis and Chicago to Atlanta and New Orleans. There was a thrilling sense of great expectations that went along with climbing aboard a passenger train and starting off on a long journey. I never grew tired of watching the passing landscape slip away into the evening shadows at sunset, or listening to the mournful notes the engineer played intermittently on his horn. Even now, the plaintive sound of a train whistle fills me with wistfulness and wanderlust.